ITV and BBC to launch yet another streaming service

The streaming segment is already looking pretty crowded, but ITV and the BBC have decided to pair up to add another premium option into the mix with BritBox.

Priced at £5.99 a month, the service will launch in the final quarter of 2019, undercutting digital rivals who have been making life so difficult for the traditional players these last few years.

“We have a world beating TV industry with outstanding content,” said BBC Director General, Tony Hall. “The BBC and ITV are at the centre of that. Together, we have been responsible for delivering the majority of ‘must see’ moments on British TV over the last decade. That ‘must see’ content will now be on BritBox.”

“The agreement to launch BritBox is a milestone moment. Subscription video on demand is increasingly popular with consumers who love being able to watch what they want when they want to watch it,” said Carolyn McCall, CEO of ITV. “They are also happy to pay for this ease of access to quality content and so BritBox is tapping into this, and a new revenue stream for UK public service broadcasters.”

Although negotiations did seem to be on rocky ground occasionally, the BBC did appear to be showing a preference to its own iPlayer service, it might attract interest from various different segments of the UK population. The BBC has attracted plaudits for its programming over the last few years, especially around multi-series boxsets, where this service will focus.

BritBox will now become the home for all BBC and ITV programming once they fall off the streaming services which are already in place. Although ITV is free to put its programming on the ITV Hub for as long as it wants, it is believed Ofcom will force the BBC to make its programming available for a year on the iPlayer.

Bearing in mind both of these organizations already have streaming services for free, some might question what the point of this new service actually is, though there is an opportunity to combine forces and drive original programming exclusively for BritBox. Details are relatively thin on the ground, but the team will take the same approach as Netflix and Amazon, creating exclusive original content to attract subscribers.