The BBC and ITV’s newly announced BritBox – a joint streamingservice – is a bizarre example of British broadcasters deciding “to work together in the national interest”, to borrow a phrase currently popular in Westminster.
Facing potentially ruinous competition from US streaming giants, led by Netflix and Amazon Prime, Britain’s oldest broadcasters are trying to claim a Blighty stake in the increasingly global, but largely American-financed, TV market. The venture submerges (if not necessarily suspending) decades of rivalry between the BBC and ITV so intense that both sides keep their schedules secret until the last minute to avoid giving the other any advantage.
Like an abandoned prototype from a decade ago, Project Kangaroo, BritBox will be subject to regulatory approval. Last time, to the delight of Rupert Murdoch, who then owned Sky, the Competition Commission ruled that a BBC-ITV collaboration would result in an unfair concentration of power.
But the TV landscape has changed so much that the older British broadcasters are almost powerless against the global box-setters. If the Competition and Markets Authority (which now scrutinises deals) and the media regulator Ofcom were to block BritBox, it would lead to incredulity and likely calls for judicial review. With Sky now owned by Comcast, it helps that Murdoch newspapers are unlikely to be much of a dog in the fight this time.
However, due to another TV trend – the rise of independent production companies – BritBox faces issues at least as problematic as the external pressures that barbecued Kangaroo.
A streaming service lives or dies by the content rights it owns, or can buy. But of the top 25 programmes in this newspaper’s best TV shows of 2018, only one, Doctor Who, was wholly owned by the BBC. Three huge BBC hits – Bodyguard, Killing Eve and Poldark – were made by independent producers World and Mammoth, and Sid Gentle.
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