With a growing ageing population and the advent of interactive TV (iTV), understanding how older people use iTV services is a timely and important task. Working towards this end, this paper reports on in situ conversations of, and observations with, almost 400 older people, with different levels of educational attainment and experience with ICTs, while talking about and using online video portals and similar interactive systems in Spain, Brazil and Denmark. The results show more similarities than differences in their reasons for adopting online video portals and patterns of use. All our participants used these portals for keeping or remaining in touch with people they trusted. The results also show that privacy online was a common concern to all the participants. Differences in the acceptance of e-government services and the type of content that drove most of their interactions were also found. Implications for designing more accessible and meaningful iTV services are discussed.

This work has been partially funded by Life 2.0: Geographical positioning services to support independent living and social interaction of elderly people (CIP ICT PSP‐2009‐4‐270965), the WorthPlay project (funded by Fundación General CSIC and la Caixa Obra Social) and the EEE (TIN2011-28308-C03-03) project. The first versions of this paper were written when one of us was granted an Alliance 4 Universities Fellowship (A4U). We also acknowledge the support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (MAECAECID).