Exploring the Typology and Impacts of Audience Gratifications Gained from TV-Smartphone Multitasking

Using an additional device (i.e., smartphone) while viewing TV is becoming one of the most popular forms of media multitasking, and the motivations of the TV-smartphone multitasking are worthwhile to investigate. Extant studies on gratifications derived from media consumption mainly examined the consumption of a single medium and few studies evaluated gratifications from concurrent media combinations. But the gratifications of media multitasking vary greatly among different forms of multitasking. This study addresses the typology and impacts of gratifications in simultaneous TV-smartphone use through an online national survey in China in 2016 (N = 682), based on the affordance-based framework. The study identifies four kinds of gratifications in TV-smartphone multitasking: emotional, social, habitual, and contextual interaction gratifications. It also finds positive impacts of fear of missing out and social media use on all gratifications. The results finally show that habitual gratifications negatively predict the propensity that the audience select TV as the primary screen.