Navigating OTT Choice Overload: Cognitive, Behavioural, and Emotional Effects

Abstract

The OTT service industry in India is expanding exponentially. As of August 2024, there are 547 million OTT users and 99.6 million active paid OTT subscriptions in India. OTT is considered convenient in many ways due to its widespread content availability in genres, content availability in different languages across the world, anytime access, affordability, and it has significantly transformed content consumption patterns, offering viewers an extensive range of choices. While this accessibility enhances the user experience, it also introduces the phenomenon of choice overload, where an overwhelming number of options complicates decision-making. This study explores how choice overload during the content selection process impacts the viewer experience. The study proposes that a viewer's intention to watch OTT content leads to a content selection process, which triggers choice overload. The study identifies three key outcome effects: (1) Cognitive effects, manifesting as decision paralysis; (2) Behavioural effects, including avoidance and binge-watching as coping mechanisms; and (3) Emotional effects, influencing satisfaction with the selected content. Using a quantitative research approach, the study assesses the choice overload experience, measuring indicators such as perceived choice complexity, preference uncertainty, and decision difficulty that affect the outcome. The findings will contribute to understanding digital consumption behaviours in high-choice environments and provide insights for OTT platforms to optimise content release and recommendation strategies, mitigating the negative consequences of choice overload. By addressing decision-making challenges on digital interfaces, the research offers insights to optimise user experience and engagement in complex, high-choice digital platform environments.