The BBC was ready to take on Netflix at its own game but regulation got in the way. In recent years, the BBC has been accused of falling behind the times with some arguing that in spite of being funded by what many consider a tax, the service missed out on the early streaming wave. The broadcasting company sees things very differently.
The BBC recently came under direct attack when the British politician, Nicola Morgan, suggested it could go the way of Blockbuster Video if it does not become more like Netflix. The BBC responded by not only pointing out it was ready to launch “a Netflix service” when Netflix was “still sending DVDs in the post,” but also how it was regulators who got in the way and stopped it all from happening in the first place.
In a recent article by Wired, much of that journey has been detailed highlighting how close the BBC came to launching a true Netflix rival. The sum of what was then known as “Project Kangaroo,’’ consisted of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 (the three biggest channels in the UK at the time) joining forces on a combined video on demand platform. However, the Competition Commission (the UK’s equivalent to the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S.) brought an end to Project Kangaroo before it even got its first subscriber. The reasoning given was the new streaming platform would be “too much of a threat to competition.”
Netflix Not Bound By The Same Competition Concerns
What the reports on Project Kangaroo neatly highlight is one of the pivotal moments in the TV streaming industry. The ruling by the Commission came through in 2009 and by this time the BBC was already making moves with its online video software, iPlayer. While Netflix was already an established name (considering it launched in 1997), it was far from being the behemoth it is today. At the close of 2009, Netflix had a little over 12 million subscribers and this compares to the almost 170 million it has now. What’s more, less than half of those 2009 subscribers were consuming Netflix content via the internet.
This just goes to show how open the market was at the turn of the last decade and how if Project Kangaroo had been given the go-ahead, it too may have evolved along a similar path to Netflix. Whether it would have ended up being an actual ‘Netflix killer’ is something that will always remain an unknown now. However, the BBC, along with ITV and Channel 4, were ready to take the leap into streaming and offer an alternative to Netflix - something that’s been greatly missed up until now. For example, even by mid-2011 when Hulu was closing in on the one million subscriber mark, Netflix had already almost doubled its count to nearly 24 million subscribers. Since then, the subscription service has just continually accumulated customers, undaunted by the fear of direct competition. That might not have been the case if the Competition Commission had realized the BBC’s Project Kangaroo was not a threat to competition, but an answer to Netflix and its actual threat.
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Source: Wired
