Industrial discourses surrounding subscription video on demand (SVOD) services are deeply embedded in the rhetoric of viewer choice and control. However, these discourses are often misleading, with viewers given only nominal amounts of agency in their viewing experience, most often circumscribed by the limited affordances of the service’s interface. This article takes online TV interfaces as its object of study and interrogates to what ends SVODs use them. In particular, it examines how the interface can operate as a part of an SVOD’s larger branding campaign. Using Netflix as a case study, the article argues that the interface is discursively positioned as empowering viewers to easily find what they want to watch, yet the actual operation and affordances of the interface significantly delimit viewer agency. Instead, the interface works to guide viewers to Netflix original content to strengthen the core brand values of abundance, personalization, and exclusivity.

Television as a medium is in transition. From DVRs, to Netflix, to HBO Now, consumers have never before had such control over how they consume televisual content. The rapid changes to the medium have led to rhetoric heralding the impending "post-TV era." Looking at the ways that legacy television companies have adapted to new technologies and cultural practices suggests that rather than traditional television going the way of radio, television as a medium is actually not terribly different, at least not enough to conclude that we have entered a new era. Press releases, discursive practices by the news media, corporate structures and investments, and audience research all point to the rhetoric of post-TV as being overblown. By thinking about contemporary television as being in transition, greater emphasis and attention can be placed on the role that major media conglomerates play in developing, funding, and legitimizing new forms of television distribution, in addition to co-opting disruptive technologies and business models while hindering others.

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Rosenbaum describes his experience defending Citizen Kane (1942) as an important cinematic work while a film student at New York University in the early 1960s, noting the pushback he received from a professor (xi). Today, most film programs touch on the historical and artistic importance of Citizen Kane at some point in introductory or film history courses. However, as Rosenbaum's anecdote indicates, which media texts are valued as "important" is highly fluid, and oftentimes works previously judged as unremarkable will be rediscovered and reevaluated by contemporary audiences (e.g., many science fiction B-films of the 1950s). Moreover, Rosenbaum remembers how film criticism publications were much more "consequential" (xii) in cultivating his taste in film than were his courses within the academy. Rosenbaum writes about film canons in order to counteract the marketing campaigns of film studios, which he believes set the agenda for which films are considered "canonical" in contemporary culture (xvii). Writing in 2010, Rosenbaum's perspective comes from a time when streaming services like Netflix and Hulu were in their infancies and neither had begun creating original content. For Rosenbaum, media canonization was dominated by traditional marketing campaigns from studios and the writings of film and television critics. Lucas Hilderbrand nuances this view, suggesting video-ondemand (VOD) services, each of which is supported by a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD), are central components of distribution strategies for major and independent film studios, as

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