BBC Look to Open UK iPlayer TV Streaming Platform to More Broadcasters
A few days ago, the BBC published their 118-page response to the UK Government’s Green Paper on its future. But while much of the coverage around that was on issues of funding and TV licence fees, buried deep within its pages the corporation also set out a new vision for their iPlayer streaming service, which could open it up to other Public Service Broadcasters (PSB).
Just to recap. The Government is currently reevaluating the BBC, its content and licence fees, which stems from the fact that there has been a radical shift in how the majority of us access and view TV content over the past decade or so. A change that is steadily redefining the landscape, often faster than the industry can adapt.
Such TV content is now increasingly being viewed online using broadband connections, via services like iPlayer, Netflix, Amazon (Prime Video), NOW TV, Sky Stream, Virgin Media (Stream Box), YouTube and so forth. Due to this, there has been a decline in those using traditional Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) signals and content.
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Nevertheless, the Government has so far committed to the future of DTT until 2034, which is in keeping with how some broadcasters have warned that existing DTT infrastructure is “unlikely to be commercially attractive after the mid-2030s“ (here); this is because they can’t afford to distribute their content both online and via traditional infrastructures like DTT with costs rising (i.e. the less time people spend on DTT, the less cost-effective per viewer it is).
Suffice to say, at some point in the future we may all end up getting our TV and video content via broadband connections, which has its pros and cons (here and here). But the government is still in the process of deciding upon what this will mean for the future of the BBC, its funding, licence fees and other PSBs.
The new ‘A BBC for All‘ (PDF) document sets out the BBC’s position on all this and more. But for the purpose of this article, some of the most interesting parts can be found buried down around page p48 onwards, where the corporation discusses how its popular iPlayer streaming service might need to evolve in order to adapt to the new landscape.
The key bit is where the BBC proposes that iPlayer could be “opened to other PSBs (and their commercial services), with support for their business models (i.e. advertising or subscription), whilst keeping BBC public service content advertising-free“. So, in theory, the likes of Channel 4 and ITV could find more of their content being placed on iPlayer (it’s unclear how reciprocal this could be). But they won’t stop there.
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Extract from ‘A BBC for All’
It is increasingly clear that in the new world of global streaming, only a few destinations will be successful in retaining audience scale, and that there is a real danger that none of those destinations are UK-owned. Content creation is becoming increasingly democratised. At the same time, the race for scale has resulted in inflation in the cost of professionally produced content. Content distribution continues to shift to online, where UK PSBs compete directly with global technology-led, media companies; where algorithm and product strength are key success factors, rather than human-led creativity and curation.
In the BBC, we have built one of the few scaled, domestically-owned media platforms in a global landscape dominated by major technology companies. It is trusted and universally accessible. It is essential that we safeguard this critical piece of UK digital infrastructure by enabling it to leverage its scale and position to continue to support a healthy media ecology in the UK. This will help ensure that UK content and journalism remain visible and easily discoverable at scale.
We are proposing that iPlayer could be opened to other PSBs (and their commercial services), with support for their business models (i.e. advertising or subscription), whilst keeping BBC public service content advertising-free. This could help ensure the UK retains a streaming platform that competes with global services and remains a first choice for audiences. We will also explore opening up BBC Sounds to UK third parties and creators. We will do this while making sure it is clear what content audiences get from the BBC and from elsewhere, including the funding models used to support the production of that content. We will also need the right Charter conditions, such as increased regulatory flexibility, to fulfil these ambitions.
We also want to open up the underlying technology and engineering capabilities that power BBC services, creating a genuinely collaborative backbone for the UK’s media sector. By sharing core systems, tools and resources with other PSBs and trusted partners, we can reduce duplicated effort, lower costs across the industry and strengthen the overall competitiveness of UK media against global streaming giants. This is about building a shared digital foundation that helps all of us innovate faster and operate more efficiently. It ensures that British stories, journalism and educational content remain visible and discoverable at scale, and that the economic value created stays in the UK – with data, distribution power and audience relationships retained domestically.
The BBC also goes on to talk about how much of its own UKTV content archive is available on other services through commercial arrangements. In particular, the corporation suggests pulling this back somewhat and integrating into the BBC’s iPlayer service. This of course increasingly goes beyond iPlayer’s primary function as a service for limited catch-up style TV content viewing and sounds more akin to something like BritBox.
Extract from ‘A BBC for All’
As for archive, it is important to note that, through the wholly-owned UKTV portfolio, BBC Commercial already operates an advertising-supported service in the UK, which is a key commercial route to market for BBC archive content. This is a successful line of business for BBC Commercial, though it could be more effective if UKTV was integrated into the BBC’s iPlayer service (though still clearly distinguished from BBC-branded content and services). This would make it easier and more convenient for audiences to access UKTV content, with a higher revenue upside, and with brand separation as a way to mitigate the risk of audience confusion. We will explore this idea further with DCMS in the coming months.
The BBC also touches on the proposed idea of the BBC publishing licence fee funded content on third-party platforms such as YouTube, and monetising the viewing through adverts. This is in addition to the commercial activity already conducted by BBC Commercial on the platform – something that was recently extended a few months ago via a new partnership with YouTube.
However, while the corporation says they do see a “significant opportunity to serve audiences and deliver public value” through such an approach, they also warned that they “do not envisage a major commercial upside due to the limited revenues on offer from video sharing platforms“.
Even if they were to distribute a greater proportion of their catalogue this way, the BBC says “YouTube’s economics are challenging for broadcasters to make a positive return on premium content – advertising pricing is significantly lower than linear and Broadcaster-Video-On-Demand (BVOD), fewer adverts are served, and the platform takes a large share of the revenue“.
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Suffice to say that iPlayer could become a very different service in the future, although clearly not everything proposed by the Government, as a solution for the wider challenges, will have legs. The BBC’s current Royal Charter comes to an end on 31st December 2027, so decisions will need to be made soon. The Government’s related consultation closes on 10th March 2026.
However, it’s worth noting that past attempts to do some of the things being proposed above (e.g. BritBox and Project Kangaroo [SeeSaw]) weren’t terribly successful, but then today’s market has changed a lot.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Their biggest issue is still the hated license fee & the fact you have pay for the BBC if you watch any live TV regardless of whether it’s BBC or not. If we are going to have a state broadcast service then they are going have to find another way of funding it (without it coming under undue political interference). I have now managed to get hold of a Manhattan Aero and I have to say it’s pretty good even though we’re talking about early firmware and judging by the way Amazon sell out of their allocations as soon as they get them the demand seems to be there (even more so seeing Samsung & LG still not supporting Freely with the latter citing problems integrating it with their TV webOS see here:- https://www.t3.com/tech/tvs/waiting-for-freely-on-your-lg-tv-unfortunately-its-not-good-news)
One of the funniest ones is how TV licensing say you need a licence to watch YouTube livestreams.
Literally unenforceable.
While I hate the BBC and want it to die. Iplayer is an excellent app while ITVX is utterly dreadful unusable one. 4OD is only slightly better than ITVx. Having everything on Iplayer would be much better and then we don’t need to worry about Freely too.
…in the hope they can get mainstream to move to them and thus make it required to have a TV license for more people perhaps?
I don’t have a TV licence. At present, I can watch content on-demand from ITV, Channel 4, and various streamers without any issue. I can’t watch BBC iPlayer content, but because I can watch all this other stuff, I’m never short of things to watch. This seems like a way for them to try and stop people just opting out of the licence fee by choosing not to watch BBC iPlayer and watching other broadcasters instead.
the iplayer carries on-demand programming from S4C and as far as I know you do not need a license fee to watch those.
Whilst I would rather not have to pay the licence fee it is a small price to pay to avoid the likes of ‘news’ sources such as G-Beebies and TalkBilge Radio, or Dave on facebook. Are the BBC perfect, no, are we better having them, without doubt…
57 million licence fees will cover the payout for the Trump lawsuit.
In many ways the BBC is worse. At least the likes of GB News don’t hide their editorial bias. The BBC pretends to be impartial but consciously or not takes a biased editorial stance on many issues. You will, for example, find no coverage whatsoever of opposition to online ‘safety’ laws from the perspective of digital privacy and the highly effective alternatives available to parents – they just toe the government line and wheel out outraged charity spokespeople in every article. The BBC is not the only news outlet that pretends to impartiality you have ITN, Channel 4 News and Sky News as well all with very similar output to the BBC.
Get rid of them. I haven’t had a licence since 2009 and won’t ever.
Why doesn’t the BBC just ask how PBS.org run their systems – given that they don’t have federal funding.
Are they frightened that they will be overrun by commercial impetus – if so, why are they chasing commercial aims?
As for the broad notion of a TV lic for “live reception” – how much “real time” coverage does the BBC actually transmit given the costs of football, World Cup and other sports et al.
And, the other one that amuses, you can’t use iPlayer at all. Although you can use other non-real time streaming.
And, finally, if the current BBC content was considered valued – we wouldn’t be discussing it.
The only two services the BBC necessarily provide for public service broadcasting is the World Service and Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).
The World Service is paid for by the FCDO which can be out to tender to any other service. It need not be the BBC. I’m sure, Reuters, PA, AfP would do an equally good job with the World Service.
Likewise the biggest beneficiary of the LDRS grant from the BBC is Reach plc. But I’m sure Ofcom could handle the grant and it largely stays intact as is.
With these two services deprived from the BBC, it has no reason to provide news of any kind, and is left to its awesome back catalogue and standard programming. This can all easily be sustained by a subscription or advertising and become like Channel 4.
No reason therefore for the ridiculous licence fee. No one in their right mind reads BBC News let alone watches it.
I find it hard if not impossible to accept the majority of what they published on their website especially with prosecutions; because what the public sees in-reality isn’t reflected in that document.
It’s almost as if no lessons have been learned when Ian Doyle, who was a manager and a field agent himself and was found have fabricated evidence in one court case, was caught by an undercover Daily Mail journalist in 2017 that the aggression and clear malicious exploitation of the legal illiterate. “We will drive you … um … as hard as we can to get as much as we can out of you because we’re greedy.”
It’s a scandal of the same calibre to that of the Post Office’s; for them, BBC, Capita, it’s about maximising revenue, rather than ensuring those who DO need one have one. If they obeyed the law like us, they wouldn’t be as-deep in this predicament.
I stopped paying back in September of 2024, because changes to my lifestyle changes leaves me with so little time at home.
The BBC should continue to exist, but not with state powers; also it needs to downsize itself to something self-manageable and make compensate those it has wrongfully pursued in the name of the law.
Sure, concentrate and monopolise every platform of information and then dose it as ordered.
“where algorithm and product strength are key success factors, rather than human-led creativity and curation.”
Made me laugh. Another way to say this is that the ‘global media companies’ make great programmes (product strength) and their algorithms know what you like and are quite good at recommending other programmes you might like. As opposed to the BBC that makes stuff it likes and shows you stuff it likes. No wonder more and more people are switching off. If the BBC wants to survive it really needs to get back to basics and in touch with potential audiences before they are gone forever. BBC programming wasn’t always this bad I just watched a couple of episode of Blackadder on NOW TV – great TV!
This BBC proposal to turn iPlayer into a single national platform for the other PSBs (ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) looks confusing at first glance. Isn’t that exactly what Freely is supposed to do — provide a unified UK broadcaster interface? And given that the BBC is a major partner in Everyone TV, which manages Freely, why build a second “unifying” platform?
The answer is that Freely and iPlayer solve different problems. Freely unifies live TV with an EPG, IP fallback and app launching. But it doesn’t solve the problem the BBC is now focused on: the fact that fragmented PSB apps can’t compete with the giant streamers like YouTube, Prime Video and Netflix. If the PSBs want to compete in streaming, the BBC’s view is that they need to be in one place — and that place is iPlayer.
Freely does offer on‑demand integration, but its home page is built around live channels, with the apps sitting in a row at the bottom. For anyone under 40, the instinct is to open an app, not an EPG‑style interface. That’s the gap the BBC is trying to close.
If the BBC succeeds in getting the other PSBs on board — and that’s still a big “if” given ITV’s likely concerns over data and ad-revenue — the outcome is fairly clear. Freely’s home page stays the same and keeps its role as the UK’s live‑TV layer: live channels, the guide, IP fallback, and a launcher for iPlayer and the other apps. But its use will fall, because the centre of gravity for PSB streaming shifts to a single destination: iPlayer.