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BritBox would be, in essence, a Netflix hosting the huge backlog accumulated by British television, otherwise unavailable or expensive. Both broadcasters have libraries with a depth of 50 years, including dramas, documentaries and revolutionary comedies. Much of the material is not available online (legally), and only part of it is available on DVD or available in rebroadcast on satellite TV.
Since BritBox already exists in the United States, it is likely that a large part of the model, including the $ 7 monthly subscription fee, will remain in place. The pair already has licenses for most of its own content, and BritBox in the US is the exclusive home of Classic Doctor Who. The price in the UK has not yet been disclosed, but it should be "competitive" and probably not exceed £ 7 a month.
BritBox will not only host the content of the archives, but will also have its own original series, even though it is likely that these productions will be co-productions with the BBC and ITV. BritBox in the United States already does this, for example by contributing a small amount of money to the production of (ITV and CityTV) The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco.
Of course, British broadcasters will rightly feel that it is only now that they are even able to offer BritBox. In 2007, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, the three main broadcasters in the country, proposed a Netflix type service. The project, dubbed "Project Kangaroo", would have hosted 10 000 hours of free videos on demand, grouped from the previous catalog of three bodies.
The launch of the service was scheduled for October 2009, until the regulators of the UK Office of Fair Trading intervene. The project was referred to the UK Competition Commission, which considered that this operation could become a monopoly on the internal market. "After intensive lobbying on the part of his commercial rivals, including Sky," wrote BBC News& # 39; Amol Rajan, the regulators killed the project.
Meanwhile, British broadcasters have had their idea replicated by Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, among others. The BBC and ITV have decided to maintain some form of partnership and in early 2017 they launched, with AMC, BritBox, a lighter version of Kangaroo, in the United States and Canada. Since then, the BBC has announced that the service now has more than half a million subscribers, each paying $ 6.99 per month.
Back in the UK, the regulators of Ofcom, the communications watchdog of the UK, acknowledged that the media landscape had changed. And that part of his role would be to allow more collaboration, like the kind of thing the Kangaroo Project proposed a decade ago. If BritBox continues, what the BBC and ITV will do with their existing co-production agreements with services such as Amazon is not clear.
I would like someone to gently explain the concept of royalties to anyone who thinks they personally own the entire BBC catalog because they pay their license fees. #britbox
– Paul Lang (@rudemrlang) February 27, 2019
Some users may feel aggrieved by the fact that they essentially have to pay twice to watch the content of the BBC because the BBC is funded by an annual tax of $ 200 per year on households. It is however a misnomer, as the body is already giving up much of its programming via its on-demand platform, iPlayer. And he has always sold copies of his content, whether through his commercial arm or his online store (now dead).
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