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Clubbing Together: Why Are The BBC and Itv Creating Britbox?

The BBC and ITV are creating BritBox to address two trends in the TV business: the exponential growth of streaming and decline of scheduled TV, and the consolidation of content providers seeking scale. BritBox will allow the BBC and ITV to provide a better direct-to-consumer service than they could alone by offering more content as other media giants launch their own services. The partnership reconciles the BBC's public funding with ITV's advertising model and will not negatively impact their existing streaming platforms, iPlayer and ITV Player.

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18 views

Clubbing Together: Why Are The BBC and Itv Creating Britbox?

The BBC and ITV are creating BritBox to address two trends in the TV business: the exponential growth of streaming and decline of scheduled TV, and the consolidation of content providers seeking scale. BritBox will allow the BBC and ITV to provide a better direct-to-consumer service than they could alone by offering more content as other media giants launch their own services. The partnership reconciles the BBC's public funding with ITV's advertising model and will not negatively impact their existing streaming platforms, iPlayer and ITV Player.

Uploaded by

thx1138ga
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Why are the BBC and ITV creating BritBox?

Source: BBC. February 2019

Two inescapable trends are driving the TV business around the world today - one in
consumer behaviour, the other in business strategy.

The first is exponential growth in streaming, with an accompanied decline in scheduled TV.

The second is consolidation among content providers who are desperately seeking scale. BritBox
is a marriage of the two.

For the BBC, the iPlayer is still a small part of overall viewing, but the key growth area, especially
among the younger audiences who much prefer other digital platforms, particularly YouTube.

BritBox will sit alongside the BBC's iPlayer growth strategy. This makes sense, because digital
delivery of content is not a zero-sum game: BritBox growth will not be at the cost of iPlayer
growth, and vice versa.

ITV faces a hugely different set of challenges. It is a mostly ad-funded, linear channel - the
opposite of Netflix, a subscriber-driven, streaming service. Carolyn McCall, its CEO, says TV
advertising is holding up reasonably, despite the uncertainty caused by Brexit.

Clubbing together
It is an imperative for her, and ITV, that the broadcaster develops a digital offering that reduces
reliance on advertising and gathers data on the viewing habits of consumers. ITV Player has
done a bit of this. BritBox will supercharge it.

Clubbing together to offer the maximum amount of content allows the BBC and ITV to provide a
better service than they could alone, at a time when other media giants, such as Disney, are
pulling out of Netflix to launch their own direct-to-consumer offerings.

The sticking point in negotiations until now has always been how to build technology that
reconciles the commercial imperatives of ad-funded ITV with the licence fee-funded BBC - and
how the BBC's vast ambitions for the iPlayer sit alongside this new venture.

Given the urgency of the BBC and ITV's need to capture the eyeballs of a distracted generation,
BritBox is a small but significant new entrant to the video-on-demand business.

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