BBC Boss Hints Channel 4 TV Content May Come to iPlayer Streaming Service

The Director General of the BBC, Matt Brittin, has confirmed they’re exploring the possibility of creating a “sovereign streaming platform in the UK” and have already had “an approach and a discussion” with Channel 4 about bringing some of their content to the iPlayer service – a way of helping both players to stay competitive in today’s streaming-centric world.

The move would seem to be an attempt to build on last year’s agreement (here) between British TV broadcasters Channel 4 and UKTV (U platform), which is owned by the BBC’s commercial division. The deal represented a major new multi-year carriage agreement, which saw C4 gaining access to stream thousands of hours of additional free TV content and shows from the BBC via their online service (The Office, Red Dwarf etc.).

By comparison, Matt Brittin, who was speaking at last week’s meeting of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, appears to be proposing that C4’s TV content could now appear on the BBC’s iPlayer streaming service. This is not to be confused with a re-hash of the BritBox service, since that was a paid product and the BBC are talking about a free to air solution (although the TV Licence fee does leave plenty of room for debate around how we use the word “free” in this context).

Matt Brittin told the committee:

“There is an opportunity in the long run to have a sovereign streaming platform in the UK — I use that word carefully. Where do you go for quality UK content? The BBC is the biggest commissioner, but Sky-ITV remains an important commissioner, and others can too. The opportunity would be to build on the incredible reach and success of iPlayer. Nobody else around the world has anything like iPlayer’s scale and success. The other European broadcasters look at us with envy.

We have had an approach and a discussion with Channel 4. In the world of this ITV-Sky merger, Channel 4 looks very subscale. All these mergers are driven by the need to have scale, and Channel 4 looks very subscale. One opportunity for it would be to have content on iPlayer in partnership with the BBC but continue to be ad-funded. There is an array of commercial audience, public service and technical issues, but we will explore that as quickly as we are able to because that will be important for public service media.”

At this stage there’s no detail on whether this will actually happen or how much access iPlayer users might get to Channel 4’s content (i.e. will it mirror C4’s on-demand App content and include live programmes or be more restrictive), although anything that means we have one less than today’s gazillion different streaming Apps to install would perhaps be welcomed.