BBC Store

» see store.bbc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

BBC Store checked where you were before it would take your money. It sold to UK residents and to nobody else, so the question of whether i wanted anything in that archive never got as far as a checkout page. What can be read from outside is the shape of the bet, and the bet is the part worth keeping.

It launched on 5 November 2015, run and funded through BBC Worldwide, the corporation's commercial arm. The BBC Trust had signed the plan off in 2014. Around 6,000 hours of recent programs sat next to 4,000 hours pulled out of the archive, and some episodes went on sale the same night they aired. You paid for an episode and downloaded it, and the file was yours. iPlayer carried on separately and stayed free for license payers, thirty days of catch-up and then nothing.

The pitch was ownership, and the BBC took it seriously enough to shut its own gift shop over it. BBC Shop, the UK operation selling DVDs and boxed sets, closed on 29 March 2016 because the download service was supposed to have replaced it. That is a real commitment to a strategy. It survived the strategy by nineteen months.

By 2015 the habit of paying to own a video file had mostly gone, and not only in the places the store refused to serve. Netflix had spent five years teaching people that access on a monthly bill beats a folder of files you have to look after. The BBC arrived at the download-to-own market at the point where its main competitor was no longer another store.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually sold ~

The archive language did a lot of work in the press release. Of the 4,000 archive hours, 3,000 were titles already on commercial sale somewhere, so the genuinely new material came out of the remaining 1,000, chosen editorially. The plan was to add another 500 to 1,000 archive hours a year after that. Opening the BBC archive turned out to mean opening a curated slice of it at a per-episode price.

The store began on its own website with dedicated apps, then got folded into the iPlayer interface, which put the free thing and the paid thing on the same screen. Both were locked to UK addresses. A viewer in Ankara or in Toronto could not have handed the BBC money for a legal download of its own programs even by asking.

~ the day it died ~

The Telegraph reported on 20 May 2017 that the store was closing, and the BBC confirmed it five days later, on 25 May. The closing date was set for 1 November, with purchases watchable right up to it. Everyone who had bought anything was entitled to their money back. Those who preferred could take an Amazon Video voucher instead, and the voucher was worth more than the cash refund, which tells you how much the BBC wanted this cleared off the books.

Tony Hall, the director-general, described it in November 2017 as an experiment entered into when the market looked like it would work, and said they had got out of it quick. There is no dishonesty in that and no drama either. A subsidiary tried a paid product and the numbers did not arrive, so the subsidiary paid everybody back.

~ what got buried with it ~

The real casualty is the BBC Shop. It was closed to clear the ground for a service that then lasted less than two years, and it never came back in the UK. The North American online shop kept trading throughout, so the corporation would still sell you a DVD as long as you did not live in the country that pays for the programs.

The refund is worth marking, because that is not how these usually go. Selling somebody a permanent copy and then withdrawing it is normally where the argument starts. UltraViolet closed in 2019 and pointed its users at whichever retailer still had a record of them. BBC Store simply wrote the checks and turned the lights off, which is a small and unusual thing to be able to say about the death of a digital storefront.

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