Shall IoT User Interfaces Start Recommending Multimedia Devices as well?

Recommendation of media objects, such as audio and video clips, has been there for a while. Most user interfaces include a list of favourites or most popular media objects. On the other hand, recommendation of multimedia devices is limited to shopping websites. With the evolution of IoT, however, users these days are surrounded by many interconnected devices that can be used to accomplish the same task at any given time. For example, while at home, a user can choose to play a media file on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, TV, or home theatre. In this article we investigate the question of whether or not users are ready to accept automatic recommendation of physical things with a case study of media playback devices. We further investigate various factors that affect user's choice of media playback device with a user study. The analysis shows that users like device recommendation in general. In addition, many users even prefer the playback to be automatically transferred directly to the most appropriate device, while other users just want a notification. We also found that user's gender, profession, age, and the duration of media file affect the choice of playback device.