In the current media climate of growing complexity, the abundance of media products is accompanied by a variety of modes of consumption and engagement. The advancements in technology have allowed individuals to pick out the media content that interests them from a wide range of options and have also provided them with more control over the management of the media experiences they decide to pursue. This relatively rapid change in the habits and behaviors of media users is indicative of broader shifts in the relationship between producers and consumers, as well as a blurring of roles in which “an emphasis on multiplicity emerges as the norm in the creating and viewing of television” (Ross). Therefore, the study of audiences today emerges as a necessity for properly understanding the changes in people's consumption habits and behaviors, and how such transformations interact with the strategies and offers developed by media companies.

Throughout the years, audiences have been studied from diverse perspectives. In particular, studies starting from the 1980s focused more and more on the active role played by audience members in interpreting texts and on the relevance of the environment— especially the domestic environment— on the forms of media consumption. Scholars like David Morley (1980), Charlotte Brunsdon (1981), Dorothy Hobson (1982), Ien Ang (1985) and Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes (1986, 1993) investigated the process of text interpretation in relation to specific elements such as class, race, gender, culture and ideology. John Fiske (1987) approached the idea of television as a text that is “activated” through the meanings made of its content by active viewers, while in 1986 David Morley shifted his attention to the home as the central setting for an in-depth understanding of the relation between spectators and the medium of television. Along similar lines as Morley’s, Stewart M. Hoover, Lynn Schofield Clark and Diane F. Alters (2004) examined the mechanisms of identity construction within the household in relation to the consumption of media products. All these investigations have pointed out the active role played by audience members in the processes of meaning interpretation, as well as the influence of an array of elements on the modalities that define these procedures.