Default Viewing: Reconceptualising Choice and Habit in Television Audience Research

When choosing what to watch, television audiences habitually default to particular channels, shows and apps as part of their everyday routines. Additionally, streaming platforms and devices also default to particular content, services or ads as determined by their software settings. In other words, television viewing is commonly shaped by both behavioural and technological defaults. How can television audience research account for these two distinct, yet related, phenomena? What does defaulting mean for our understanding of media choice in the streaming age? Drawing on the authors’ recent empirical work, this article develops a conceptual framework for understanding the role of defaults in contemporary television viewing. Our analysis synthesises ideas from fields of knowledge that are rarely considered together – television audience studies, platform studies, and the sociology of habit – to revise longstanding debates about defaults, and to update them for the present context of streaming television.