Anna Theodoulides
The Situated Negotiation of Platform-Viewing: An Empirical Approach to Understanding TV-Viewing in the Platformised Television Ecology
Supervisors: Professor Catherine Johnson and Dr Christopher Birchall School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds.
Project Summary
Watching television used to mean turning on a channel. Now it means working through an interface to find something to watch. Those interfaces are full of quiet design choices: which thumbnail you see, how programmes get labelled, what sits at the top of the homepage, what the search box decides to show you. All of it shapes what we end up watching, usually without us noticing.
My project gets inside that moment. I treat the act of choosing something to watch not as a simple click but as a situation: a knot of things happening at once, where a person’s habits, mood and household meet the design of the platform, its recommendations, its categories, and the way it pushes some programmes forward and lets others sink. To understand that moment, I bring together people’s own watch histories, the platforms’ sorting and categorisation systems, and close ethnographic observation of how people actually move through these interfaces. I’m especially interested in the viewers who are currently underrepresented in how we understand contemporary television and platformised culture more broadly.
Bio
I work on television and the ordinary, everyday activity of watching it, now that it reaches us through apps and interfaces rather than channels. What interests me is not only what people watch but how they encounter, navigate, and make sense of platformised culture when it comes to them this way, through an interface.
I studied Politics, Sociology and East European Studies at UCL, then took an MSc in Sociology at LSE.
Since 2024 I’ve worked across several television research projects at the University of Leeds, building tools to take apart how streaming platforms present and organise programmes, and looking at who gets to work in the industry and on what terms. Alongside this I’ve worked for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on the future of how television reaches us, and for the International Broadcasting Trust on how public service broadcasters cover international news from around the world across different platforms.