Project Kangaroo

~ the obituary ~

Kangaroo is on this list without ever having been switched on. There is no launch to remember, no interface anyone outside the building saw, no account to close. It was announced, staffed, argued over for fourteen months and then forbidden, and the only reason it has a name at all is that the fight over it went public.

The announcement came on 27 November 2007. BBC Worldwide and ITV would build a single commercial video on demand service, with Channel 4 as the third partner bringing 4oD. Between them they had more than ten thousand hours of current and archive British programming to put behind one address. The BBC's own iPlayer was free because the license fee already paid for it, so Kangaroo was meant to be the other thing: a shop where you bought the back catalog nobody was streaming anywhere.

Ashley Highfield, who had run future media at the BBC and shipped iPlayer, took the chief executive job on 14 April 2008. He left in November of the same year for Microsoft, before the venture he had been hired to launch found out whether it was allowed to exist. That is the closest thing Kangaroo has to a founder story.

None of this was ever going to reach me. British catch-up television has been geoblocked at the postcode for as long as it has existed online, and from Ankara the whole argument reads as a foreign country deciding how to divide something I could not have watched either way. What makes it worth a grave is not the service. It is that a regulator killed a product before anyone could find out if it was any good, and then watched what filled the gap.

~ the case file ~

~ the case against it ~

The Office of Fair Trading referred the venture to the Competition Commission on 30 June 2008, worried that the platform could end up too powerful. An interim report on 3 December 2008 said it would hurt competition. The final report landed on 4 February 2009 and blocked it outright, on the reasoning that the partners between them controlled the vast majority of British content and would sit as wholesalers in a position to squeeze every other video on demand service in the country.

Peter Freeman, who chaired the Commission, said the joint venture was too much of a threat to competition in a developing market and had to be stopped. Michael Grade at ITV said he was surprised, and pointed out that Kangaroo would have been competing against dominant global brands in a crowded online world. Both of them were describing the same market and neither was wrong about it. The Commission was measuring the British content shelf. Grade was measuring who would end up owning the viewing.

~ what got built instead ~

The technology was put up for sale and Arqiva, the company that runs Britain's television transmitters, bought it for around eight million pounds on 23 July 2009. It came back as SeeSaw in February 2010 with a fraction of the content and none of the leverage, and closed in October 2011 when the money ran out. The successor projects took longer and aimed lower. Project Canvas became YouView in July 2012, and BritBox finally put the BBC and ITV catalogs in one UK subscription on 7 November 2019, ten years late.

By then Netflix had spent that decade taking the audience the Commission had been protecting. The competition that was preserved was competition among British companies for a market that had already been decided elsewhere. This is what regulators are for and it is also the risk of doing it early, because the shape of a market in 2009 was not the shape it took, and the ruling was correct about the shelf and wrong about the room.

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