Finding the Interactive Television Audience

The term 'convergence' increasingly dominates discussions of our media environment, yet due to the embryonic nature of the newer interactive media platforms it remains hard to predict patterns of use and meaning making among consumers. As the UK moves into the world of digital plenty leaving behind the comfortable world of analogue scarcity, television executives are increasingly looking to interactivity to woo the promiscuous audience. Reality media events stripped across nine discreet platforms, such as Big Brother, are on vanguard of these new initiatives. This article explores some of the implications for user control over content. It uses quantitative and qualitative data from a web-based questionnaire linked to Big Brother's UK Web site (August 2000, July 2001) in order to map expectations associated with different viewing platforms. It examines how these predominantly youth, fan viewers negotiate what I have called a ‘reality contract’ with the series while ‘surfing’ between platforms. This mobility I argue, (particularly appealing for ‘reality TV’ formats) allows the audience to customise their viewing, developing strategies for watching that cater to a sense of authorship and control over the content