‘Recommended for you’: A distant reading of BBC iPlayer

Video-on-demand interfaces have become a ubiquitous feature of contemporary screen culture. But despite their prevalence and the significant amount of time we spend in these liminal spaces, these interfaces are -- within the field of TV studies at least -- relatively under-theorized and rarely the subject of focused critical interrogation. Indeed, it has been noted that there are simply “no established methodologies in TV studies for studying interfaces” (Johnson, 2017:124). In addressing this methodological gap, this article develops and demonstrates an empirical and quantitative approach to the analysis of television interfaces that takes its cue from “distant reading” (Moretti, 2013).