BritBox isn’t a Netflix competitor. And that’s a good thing

The BBC and ITV have teamed up to launch a streaming platform specialising in UK shows. But streaming isn't a winner-takes-all market – and talk of BritBox being a Netflix rival is just plain wrong
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For the past two years, ITV and the BBC have been running an experimental streaming platform in the US. BritBox is a TV time warp, which launched in March 2017 with a mix of quaint British comedies – Blackadder, Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous, long-running soap operas and a modest smattering of fresher shows.

Its lineup is evocative of a very particular kind of Britain. One of bumbling neighbours, family disputes and village murders. BritBox is – in other words – about as far away as you can get from the kind of slick, visual-effects-laden five-season epics that dominates much of US programming. And it seems to be finding an audience in North America where the service now has half a million subscribers paying $6.99 (£5.25) a month to fill up on episodes of Doctor Who and Gavin & Stacey.

News of BritBox’s UK launch – slated to take place in the latter half of 2019 – brought with it the inevitable onslaught of Netflix comparisons. The logic is simple and the narrative seductive. BritBox is a streaming platform and, as such, it must be a Netflix rival. Can a quaint British programming defeat the incumbent tech giant?

In short: no. It can’t. But that’s not the point. BritBox isn’t a Netflix rival – it’s an attempt to prove that online streaming doesn’t have to be a winner-takes-all market. And if it is successful, it will be because of Netflix, not in spite of it.

When Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007, it made an audacious bet. It wasn’t wagering that online video was going to be the next big media format – the meteoric rise of YouTube already confirmed what had been obvious for years. No. Netflix was wagering that people who already paid for TV subscriptions would be willing to shell out a little more for content that they couldn’t get elsewhere.

Rather than taking another slice of the existing film and TV industry pie, Netflix figured it could make that pie a little bigger, and take that extra crust for itself. It worked. According to a 2018 poll by CNBC the largest category of TV viewers – making up 36 per cent of people – are those who pay for cable or satellite and a streaming service. In the UK, the rampant rise of Netflix – from its launch in 2012 to 9.78 million subscribers in 2018 – has not been mirrored by an equally dramatic decline in Sky and BT subscribers.

Make no mistake, Netflix has put the squeeze on existing TV firms. Sky and BT have both reported small declines in viewer figures, and there are a remaining 20 per cent of consumers in the US that only watch streaming services. But the point is that – despite the breathless headlines – Netflix hasn’t brought anything approaching a total collapse of more traditional TV formats.

Why not? Because although Netflix has a vast store of all kinds of content, there are huge areas of programming where it has no presence at all: sports, news and live content. That’s one of the reasons why Amazon has tried to make its own streaming platform stand out by adding 20 live Premier League games a season in the UK from 2019-2020 as well as the US Open and, in the US, select NFL fixtures.

BritBox occupies a niche of its own. Less distinct than sports or news, for sure, but the BBC and ITV are betting that there are enough people who value the uniqueness of British content that they will be willing to pay extra for it. That’s why – to British audiences – the lineup of content might seem esoteric. It’s deliberately meant to provide something that isn’t catered for elsewhere.

You can make a similar case for Disney, which is gearing up to launch its own streaming service, Disney+, in 2019. Disney+, which will host the firm’s raft of family-friendly fare, is often labelled a “Netflix rival,” but, as with BritBox, Disney+ is hoping it can occupy the position of an add-on rather than an outright alternative.

The difference between Disney+ and BritBox and an outright Netflix competitor, such as Amazon Prime Video is simple. It comes down to intellectual property. BritBox will host a style of content that you genuinely can’t find elsewhere on the internet – and one that its creators will hope that people are willing to pay for.

Of course, Netflix invests a vast amount on original programming – $12.04 billion (£9.038 billion) in 2018 alone – but its content is aimed at a very different kind of consumer. By producing a vast amount of broad-appeal programming in a range of different languages, Netflix is trying to appeal to a mass middle ground of subscribers – people who want to watch more quality TV. It isn’t appealing to the kind of viewers who want a very specific type of content – which is exactly the niche that BritBox is aiming at.

Strategically-speaking, Netflix and BritBox are hardly competitors at all. As Ben Thompson – the business analyst behind the tech blog Stratechery – points out, Netflix didn’t even bother to flag Disney+ as a competitor in its letter to shareholders in January 2019. To borrow one of Thompson’s most useful terms, Netflix is an aggregator – it takes a load of content from lots of different places and lumps it together in one place for a broad consumer base to find.

Disney+ and BritBox are perhaps more accurately termed “digital channels” – they funnel a narrow range of content to a specific audience. In the case of BritBox, English-speaking people with a penchant for the shows of yesteryear. The method of delivery – streaming – is the same, but the aims and stakes are totally different. If BritBox fails it won’t be because of Netflix, but because the audience it is aiming for doesn’t exist. Likewise, if it succeeds, it will hardly matter a jot to Netflix.

In fact, BritBox might owe its very existence to Netflix. The resounding success of The Crown – which cost Netflix £100 million to produce – has helped carve out an even bigger international market for distinctly British content. If BritBox is to succeed it may have to think about how to move beyond nostalgic content, and instead capitalise on the international success of shows such as Killing Eve and Bodyguard.

The great irony is that the idea for BritBox was floated way back in 2007 – five years before Netflix launched in the UK. Then called Project Kangaroo, a plan for a joint streaming venture between ITV, Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide was blocked in 2009 by the Competition Commission after it was declared a threat to the UK video-on-demand market. A decade later, the UK’s video-on-demand offerings are fractured, under-funded and light-years behind their US competitors. Now the best it can hope for is not to be a Netflix competitor, but a kind of streaming-mushroom, growing in the shadow of the US giant and feeding off the remnants of its vast success.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK