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Top1. Introduction
Mobile phone services offer a wide range of purposes from business to entertainment and a mobile phone has become a ubiquitous tool in technologically developed or developing places all around the world. There are nearly 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide (The International Telecommunication Union). In Japan, there were 111 million mobile subscribers, 92.5 million of them use mobile data services – that’s 83 percent of the subscriber base, or 72 percent of the population (Telecommunications Carriers Association Japan, 2014).
There are significant business opportunities in relation with mobile entertainment service all over the world. Even there is little room for growth in developed countries; the sales of MES by global internet companies such as DeNA and GREE are expanding the market of mobile services, with a focus on social games, e-commerce, and web services for mobile devices (Kondo and Ishida, 2014). Especially, the market value of mobile entertainment service is increasing markedly, and the number of users is growing rapidly. For the first time since the launch of the iPhone back in 2007, Japan is the top grossing country for iPhone’s most popular content: games.
Japan has a history of spending billions on mobile games before the arrival of smartphones and tablets, is taking to the app stores of Google and Apple big time. It has estimated that 160 billion apps will be downloaded in 2017, gaming being one of the fastest growing segments for Japan. According to ComScore's excellent 2010 Mobile Year in Review (February 2011), 16.3 percent of Japanese customers are playing games and 12.9 percent are listening to music via mobile. It seems that the mobile entertainment market is rapidly expanding in Japan. With the growing importance of MES, it is important to identify the factors relating to user intention for current and future service development.
User’s perception regarding the use of MES has been identified by exploring their behavioral intention in past researches. Quan et. al., (2010) researched a category of mobile transaction services in China using a TAM-TPB (explained in section 2) approach. They found that a combined TAM-TPB model is suitable for evaluating the potential “intention to use” specific mobile commerce services. Nysveen et al., (2005) developed and tested a modified TAM-TPB in order to explain consumers’ “intention to use” four types of mobile services. Even though research in mobile service behavioral intention has used the TAM-TPB extensively, the literature contains little regarding its applicability to MES market. So, here we apply the novel approach to assess the potential adoption of MES through a cross-temporal analysis based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB).
Here we examine whether there are differences within the antecedents of “intention to use” when the services used differ, focusing on multiple mobile information services. Adoption of entertainment-oriented technology such as mobile entertainment service has hardly been addressed. As indicated in the study by Hsu et al., (2004), the factors influencing the adoption of entertainment-oriented technology are different from the factors influencing the adoption of task-oriented technology. This provides a need for undertaking this study. We do a cross-temporal analysis between two time periods for Japan, so that we are able to generalize the results and observe any differences. To understand mobile entertainment service acceptance, the TAM-TPB is suitable as it is suggested by Kondo and Ishida, 2014. We ground our research framework in TAM-TPB model of Kondo and Ishida (2014) with their factors of perceived value (PV), perceived behavioral control (PBC), attitude (ATT) and subjective norm (SN) on mobile entertainment service intention behavior (BI) of young people. More details of the model will be provided later.
The rest of the article is organized as follows. The next sections describe the cross-temporal study of MES, overview of mobile services in Japan, the TAM-TPB model and the background for this study and the hypotheses. These are followed by sections on methodology and statistical results. The last sections present a summary of the findings, conclusions, and directions for future research.