Abstract
The past 5 years have seen a rapid acceleration in the development of online television in the United Kingdom and beyond, with rise in ownership of Internet-connected television sets, smartphones and tablets, increased access to broadband and the growing penetration of transaction and subscription video-on-demand (VoD) services. This article asks how free-to-air terrestrial broadcasters are adapting to a media marketplace in which, according to Ofcom, on-demand television is becoming mass market, through an analysis of ITV Hub – the VoD player for the United Kingdom’s largest free-to-air advertiser-funded broadcaster. Focusing on the mature UK VoD market and the broadcaster whose business model is most threatened by online television, the article combines trade press and textual analysis to demonstrate how ITV has developed a VoD service highly structured by the logics of broadcasting. Centering its analysis on the interface for ITV Hub, the article argues that this increasingly quotidian form of television ephemera offers a vital site through which to understand the changing nature of television as a medium. The article concludes that with contemporary developments in VoD, the distinctions between linear/broadcast and non-linear/on-demand television (flow vs. file, passive viewer vs. interactive user) are breaking down in ways that challenge prevailing arguments that on-demand television can be understood as offering a distinctly different (and more empowered and interactive) experience for viewers.
Highlights
These broadcasters had been providing VoD since the mid-‐late 2000s, it is striking that they chose to re-‐launch their VoD players in such close succession.1 This was a moment of rapid change in the UK media market
Interfaces are the frames through which access to digital television is provided to viewers, and include the menus of personal video recorders (PVRs) and smart TVs, as well as the cultural interfaces of VoD players
The wire frame and graphical user interface (GUI) provide a relatively stable structure for the content provided through the VoD player, VoD interfaces can be understood as television ephemera in the transience of their content and their peripheral status (Grainge, 2011: 2)
Summary
These broadcasters had been providing VoD since the mid-‐late 2000s, it is striking that they chose to re-‐launch their VoD players in such close succession.1 This was a moment of rapid change in the UK media market. As we saw at the start of this article, the UK’s broadcaster VoD services in 2016 can be understood as far more than just catch-‐up players, offering access to programmes premiered or provided exclusively online, interactive content and live streams of broadcast channels.
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