Box sets on the set-top box: The promotion of on demand television in Britain

Abstract

In Britain, the rise of online video on-demand (VOD) has been complicated by the increasing tendency for television service providers to present their web-connected offerings precisely as ‘box sets’. This chapter asks what industrial purpose is served by this apparently nostalgic appropriation of the physical commodity form as a promotional frame of reference for the virtual. I argue that it functions to mine and repurpose the discourses of value that scholars have observed in the objectification and isolation of television texts on DVD, while positioning VOD as continuous with rather than interruptive of older technologies of viewing, specifically with reference to the case study of Sky.