The Attitude of Audiences Towards the Digitization of Iran's TV Networks

Promoting positive attitude towards an innovation and having it accepted by people is the goal of any innovator. In the recent years Iranian national TV has tried to attract more audience in competition with other media by digitizing its channels and improving the quality of its programs. This research aims to explore the attitude of the people of Nurabad in the province of Lorestan towards digitization of Iranian TV channels and the increase in their number. Regarding the innovational improvement of Iranian TV we tried to answer the following questions: do the benefits coming with an innovation explain people’s attitude toward that innovation? Is this attitude affected by their personal traits? We used survey research as the methodology and using Cochran’s method we found 384 people as a representative sample of all adults living in the city who are over 15 years old. Our sampling method was integrative and synthetic and the sample was chosen by quota multistage sampling. For data gathering we used a questionnaire made by the researcher. A number of professors and scholars confirmed the validity of the questionnaire and its reliability was confirmed by Cronbach's (alpha) which resulted 0.74. Descriptive results of the research show that 67.8 percent of the audiences had a positive attitude towards digitization of the network and their increased number. Analytical results of the research indicate that there were significant relations between the attitude of the audiences toward an innovation and their level of religiousness, their liking of the Islamic Republic, credibility of the Iranian national TV in their minds, the success of the local TV programs, their level of knowledge, advantageousness of the innovation, the experience of previous use of the innovation, the visibility of the results of using the innovation. There were no significant relations between factors such as age, gender, level of education, and socio-economic class of the respondent and also their access to the satellite channels. Regression analysis showed that 46 percent of the changes of the dependent variable can be explained by the independent variables.