Factors affecting the usage of payment services through digital television in Italy

This is an exploratory study about factors affecting the usage of T-government services for payments through Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT). The widely known predicting model of ICT user acceptance UTAUT (Unified Theory of acceptance and Use of Technology) was applied to recognize those factors affecting usage, exploiting a pre-existing dataset coming from the Italian T-government project named "Services for citizens via DTT". The key moderators of the model (i.e. age, gender, experience, voluntariness of use) were not included in this analysis. The dataset came from a semi-structured questionnaire administered to 189 users. The results suggest that perceived security of payment, considered as a comprehensive sense of security of the user, can be a significant variable in determining the behavioral intention in payments through DTT. Moreover the qualitative results of this exploratory study indicate that the "idea" of bill payment through DTT is appreciated by users, but the actual procedure for service use can be still cumbersome, in comparison to the other channels used for payments (e.g. the post office or the Internet).