Why young adults choose their video platforms

‍RESEARCH METHOD | Diary study and in-depth interviews (qualitative)

SECTOR | Social media and technology (digital video)

MARKETS | India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico

LEAD PARTNER | Mantaray Africa

The Scenario

A global social media and technology company needed to understand how young adults in India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico decide where to watch video online. In these markets, young audiences have abundant choice and switch platforms easily, so loyalty is fragile and hard to read from analytics alone. The company knew video quality played a role, but it could not see how much weight quality really carried against everything else people consider.

The business goals were clear. The company wanted to know what drives platform choice for video, which factors build or break loyalty (from personal habits and emotion through to technical quality, social influence, and app design), and how its own flagship video app performed against the platforms people actually reach for day to day.

The Approach

To capture decisions as they happened rather than as people later remembered them, Mantaray Africa designed a diary-led study across the four markets.

Thestudy ran in two phases:

- A 7 -day diary study with 30 participants per market (120 in total). Each day, participants logged what they watched, where, the platforms they chose, and how they judged the technical quality.

- An hour-long in-depth interview with 12 participants per market (48 in total), selected from the diary group, to probe the reasons behind the behaviour.

To make the comparison meaningful, the sample was balanced between users of the company's full app and users of its lightweight, data-saving version, giving a clear read on how each experience is judged on its own terms.

What Made This Project Work

The strength of the project came from local depth at global scale. Mantaray Africa ran the study with local moderators, translators, recruiters, and team leads in every market, which is what let the team surface cultural nuance that is almost impossible to reach from the outside. Through the UXalliance network, a single study could run consistently across four very different countries while staying grounded in real local context in each one.

"Mantaray Africa has rich experience and knowledge of the countries in the Global South and was able to provide rich contextual information for the interviews, which made my own studies and reports far more insightful. They have local research teams in each country, which makes for the best research experience and local contextual knowledge."

Lead researcher, client side

Key Findings

Platform choice is multifactorial. Video quality is only one piece. Users will happily accept lower replay quality when content feels locally relevant, emotionally resonant, or part of what is trending around them. Cultural connection often carries more weight than technical perfection.

Technical quality matters at the margins. Buffering, low resolution, and crashes all hurt the experience. A single glitch rarely moved loyalty on its own. Users switched only when a competing platform felt more dependable day after day.

The full app and the lite version are judged differently. People on the lightweight version were more forgiving of minor quality issues and valued accessibility and data savings. People on the full app, often using higher-end devices, expected more and had less patience for latency or graininess.

Daily routines shape perception. Quality is never assessed in a vacuum. It is weighed against where someone is, what they are doing, and how much time or data they have. Participants were more quality-conscious on a long commute than during a quick scroll at home.

A wider theme ran through all of it: video quality did more than affect satisfaction. It quietly built or eroded trust in the platform's wider brand.

The Outcome

The findings are already shaping strategic conversations around platform optimisation, feature prioritisation, and user education. The direction is a move away from video that is merely "good enough" toward experiences that feel trusted and genuinely enjoyable for young audiences worldwide.

More broadly, the project showed how closely video experiences are tied to cultural context and daily life across diverse markets. For a company at this scale, technical refinement stays essential, and so does staying emotionally relevant and fitting naturally into people's everyday routines.

Led by Mantaray Africa, the South African partner of the UXalliance. The UXalliance is a global network of independent UX research firms delivering globally consistent studies grounded in real local context.