Television Interfaces

This article considers television interfaces, the screens of menus and metadata that must be engaged, as part of emergent television viewing practices. Found on devices and services such as TiVo, Hulu, YouTube, and Apple's iTunes suite, television interfaces are productive spaces that reframe the programming we watch, introduce new metadata-based aesthetics, alter the rhythms of the time we spend with television, and reveal the struggles between media corporations both established and emergent. After a brief overview of television interfaces, this article interrogates the specific role that television interfaces play as explicitly interactive sites where the emergent media ontologies of customization, navigation, and control are invested and contested.