It has become nearly axiomatic that emergent media technologies are dramatically impacting the fundamental temporalities of television. Often cloaked in the hype-friendly language of the gadget industries — time shifting, webisodes, place shifting, mobisodes — the general tendencey of such pronouncements is to emphasize the control viewers gain over when and where programming (and if and how sponsorship) is consumed. The public face of this transformation is embodied by high-profile companies like TiVo, which emphasize viewers’ ability to record, pause, or skip television programming, and YouTube, which promises viewers the chance to avoid television altogether, but these are merely the best known among a host of technologies and services that challenge the decades-old practice of watching television programming in broadcaster-scheduled half-hour and hour-long blocks of time. While the ability to watch an hour of prime time television in forty-two minutes, at four in the morning, in a plane, on a mobile phone, is certainly a break from an earlier era of television, celebrations of temporal mutability have overshadowed the importance of a related phenomenon, temporal conspicuity.

FlowTV > Daniel Chamberlain > Watching Time on Television