ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 focuses on the role of interfaces in constructing viewing experiences within online TV services. Building on earlier arguments about the centrality of frames for shaping our experience of watching online TV this chapter focuses on the frame of the interface. The chapter demonstrates the importance of the interface in shaping our access to television programmes and framing our experiences of watching television. Through user-experience design, interfaces facilitate certain forms of user behaviour and discourage others. Challenging the dominant position that understands on-demand services as new forms of nonlinear television, the chapter goes on to examine how online TV services interpolate aspects of linear flow within the interface itself, creating an online TV world that draws simultaneously on elements of the linear and nonlinear. By unpacking the ways in which online TV interfaces construct user experiences, this chapter argues that interfaces create an illusion of content abundance and user agency that belies the ways in which online TV services offer highly structured viewing experiences for users.
