Early talks have already taken place between the BBC and Channel 4.
In 1852, Marx wrote that historical events play out twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Sadly, he failed to countenance that some organizations need a third or fourth go around. Apropos of which, the Financial Times is reporting that, once again, the BBC has engaged in talks with Channel 4 with the aim of building a British alternative to Netflix. This “sovereign platform,” would pool content from the UK’s two major public service broadcasters on a single outlet. Of course, given that we’ve already seen aborted attempts to do this back in 2007 and 2017, history’s now repeating itself for a third time.
New BBC boss Matt Brittin told the government the BBC has “had a discussion with Channel 4” about some sort of streaming merger. Or, at the very least, bringing some Channel 4 content over to be shown on BBC iPlayer. Talks are at an early stage and there are an “array of commercial, audience, public service and technical issues” which would need to be addressed.” But Brittin stressed the need for the UK’s media players to team up to avoid being swept away by their larger American counterparts. He said Netflix, TikTok and YouTube have shown the importance of being big enough to survive. It’s one of the big reasons Sky is buying ITV to help grow its footprint to help lure viewers who would otherwise be lured away by the temptations of the infinite scroll.
Of course, this sort of thing seems to happen once a decade, and may likely continue until the heat death of the universe. Back in 2007, the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV developed Project Kangaroo, a Netflix-like service showing 10,000 hours of on-demand content from the trio’s vast back catalogs. Unfortunately, regulators stepped in to shut the project down, fearful that it would elbow out other names in the market. Then, in 2017, the BBC and ITV tried again, launching BritBox (initially overseas), only for ITV’s eternal turmoil to kill of the brand and pull its own content under the ITVX banner in 2024. If this third attempt doesn’t somehow wind up equally bungled, then we’ll see you all back here in 2036 or so for the fourth.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
