How BritBox will compete with Netflix
BritBox will show season premieres of Cold Feet and Silent Witness
Following the news that the BBC and ITV are launching a new subscription-VOD service in the US, Carat’s Dan Calladine looks at what it will need to do to compete with the SVOD giants
BritBox sounds like a really interesting initiative. Research from GfK in July said that 25% of US households now go without a ‘traditional’ cable or satellite subscription, and compared with the satellite bundles, services like these often seem very good value.
Prices won’t be revealed until the new year, but I’d assume that it would be less than the current Netflix rate, which acts as an anchor for others to base themselves around.
Both the BBC and ITV are strong brands in the US, and both have lots of great content, including the Emmy-winning Downton Abbey, Doctor Who, Sherlock, The Missing, Line of Duty, and documentary programmes like The Big Life Fix, not to mention some iconic kids shows, and would work very well in the US.
It seems that there will be no sport in the deal, but there are lots of old shows, including 70s and 80s sitcoms, that may have a huge kitsch value and appeal to certain audiences.
Many of these shows already have fans around the world, brought together by forums and social media, who find local scheduling frustrating. Top Gear under Clarkson et al was always a massively pirated show, so much so that a site called Final Gear flourished by providing links to illegal streams of the shows (it was prevented from doing this in 2014).
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Just as lots of people in the UK used to pirate US shows like Lost, until Sky began to show episodes within 24 hours of original broadcast, lots in the US have illegally downloaded because they didn’t want to wait for programmes to be scheduled in their countries.
It’s also significant that it will be ad-free. The BBC has always been ad-free, although allowed ads when shown outside the UK, while ITV has always been ad supported. ITV will soon launch The Hub+ in the UK, a service where people can pay £3.99 a month to watch the regular ITV shows with no advertising interruptions, an interesting trade-off.
Netflix has trained people to be able to easily watch web TV on the biggest screen in the home, and also to accept a low (ish) monthly price for access to good quality, ad-free content. BritBox should benefit from both of these things, with the expected cost of subscription ($7 per month?) less than a night out.
ITV has recently been more focused on producing its own content, and has done a number of deals to sign up producers, including Mammoth, producer of Poldark, and Talpa Media, producer of The Voice. This gives them rights to lots of content that they can introduce to a new audience.
ITV and the BBC have also been producing lots of digital-only content, including the historical fiction output of ITV Encore, like The Frankenstein Chronicles, and Houdin & Doyle, both of which seem to be tailored for an international audience.
The BBC has a huge library of content, including films that it has invested in, plus its more youth-focused output on BBC3, like this year’s breakout hit Fleabag, which was co-produced with Amazon.
This brings us to quite a thorny issue – rights. We’d assume that the broadcasters have rights to show their own output, although this will not be the case if they already have deals signed for overseas sales to other US broadcasters, so it may be that some shows take a while to arrive on BritBox. Similarly, if there is a co-production it may be hard for the BBC and ITV to stream them in the US.
We’d expect BritBox to succeed, assuming that it can get the combination of price and content right. From a marketing point of view though it adds to the amount of ad-free content that is going to be seen – and makes it harder for advertisers to speak to consumers within popular TV shows.
Dan Calladine is head of media futures at Carat Global