BritBox UK

» see britbox.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

BritBox launched in the UK on 7 November 2019, a joint venture in which ITV held 90 percent and the BBC held 10. It cost £5.99 a month and it existed because two broadcasters had watched their back catalogs become other people's licensing revenue and wanted the archive back under one roof before Netflix finished the job.

What it actually was, from the subscriber's side, was British television in bulk. ITV and BBC archives were the spine of it, with Channel 4 and Channel 5 material layered on top, and a small amount of new commissioning to give the press something to write about. It reached 2.6 million UK subscribers by July 2022, which is a real number for a service selling mostly things people had already seen.

From Turkey the whole proposition was academic. British archive television has always arrived here through whatever route was available rather than through a subscription, and BritBox UK would not have taken my money if I had offered it. The only version of BritBox reachable from outside was the international one, which is the half of the story that survives.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

The argument in 2019 was preservation with a price tag on it. British broadcasters had been selling old series into global catalogs for years, and the effect was that a show paid for by British households could end up easier to find in Los Angeles than in Leeds. BritBox was the counter-move: keep the archive addressable at home, charge for it, and stop the drift.

The problem showed up immediately in the shape of the audience. People who wanted deep British archive were mostly already paying for something, and people who wanted new drama went where the new drama was. Two and a half million subscribers is respectable and it is nowhere near what a joint venture between two national broadcasters is supposed to justify.

~ the merge ~

In March 2022 ITV bought the BBC's remaining stake and became sole owner of the UK service. That was the announcement to read. ITV had ITVX coming, a free ad-supported platform with a paid tier attached, and once you own both, running a separate £5.99 app with its own billing and its own apps is a cost with no story behind it.

ITVX launched in December 2022 and BritBox UK stopped taking new sign-ups shortly after, which left it in the state products go into before somebody schedules the funeral: still charging existing customers, no longer sold to anybody else. ITV set the date on 9 February 2024 and closed it on 30 April. Subscribers were moved onto ITVX Premium at exactly the same price, with the BritBox library ad-free inside it, so almost nobody had to do anything. That is the tidiest shutdown this site has covered in a while.

~ the half that lived ~

On 29 February 2024, two months before the UK service went dark, BBC Studios paid ITV £255 million for its shares in BritBox International. The brand that BritBox UK was created to protect at home is now wholly a BBC export business, sold in every market except the country it is named after, past four million subscribers.

So the name is alive and the market it was named after cannot buy it. Anyone in Britain who wants the archive now goes to ITVX, and anyone abroad who wants it still pays BritBox, which is roughly where things stood before 2019 with an extra £255 million of paperwork in the middle.

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