SeeSaw

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

~ the last words ~

British television has always been the hardest thing on the internet to watch from anywhere else, and the reason has never been bandwidth. It is that a British show is sold country by country, and the British deal only covers Britain. Everything in this grave happened on the far side of that wall.

The story starts with something that never launched. Project Kangaroo was BBC Worldwide and Channel 4 putting their catch-up libraries into one place, with ITV as the third partner, and it was two years in when the Competition Commission blocked it in February 2009 on the grounds that the three of them together would control too much of the British video on demand market. That market did not meaningfully exist yet. A regulator killing a product before birth is rare enough to be worth stating slowly, and it is the single most important fact about SeeSaw.

Arqiva, which owns the transmitter network that carries British television over the air, bought Kangaroo's technology and assets for around eight million pounds in September 2009. It announced the SeeSaw name that November and opened on 17 February 2010 with more than three thousand hours of shows, free, funded by a sixty second advertisement before an episode and another in the middle. You could pay to turn the advertising off, and there was a separate pay-per-view shelf on top. BBC Worldwide supplied Doctor Who and Cranford. Channel 4 supplied Peep Show and Skins. Five, Shed Media, talkbackTHAMES, NBC Universal and MTV Networks filled in behind them.

Two million people a month used it at the peak, which is a real audience and nowhere near enough. Arqiva was trying to sell the business by January 2011 and told the trade press in May that it would close if nobody came. A consortium assembled as Criterion Media Group took 75 percent in July for a figure reported above ten million pounds, Arqiva kept the rest, and Michael Jackson, formerly of Channel 4, was brought in to run it. The money Criterion had agreed to put in never landed.

By late October the catalog had been hollowed out. Renegotiations with Channel 4 and Five had failed and what remained was BBC Worldwide archive. The service closed on 28 October 2011, twenty months and eleven days after it opened, with a line on the homepage thanking people for their support.

~ the record ~

~ what the regulator killed first ~

The Competition Commission's case against Kangaroo was that the broadcasters behind it held the great majority of British-made television between them, and that pooling it would let them set the terms for everybody else. The case was not wrong on its own terms. The problem is what moved into the space instead. Ten weeks after SeeSaw closed, Netflix launched in the United Kingdom, and YouTube was already the default for anyone under twenty five.

So a British joint venture was blocked for being too dominant in a British market, and the market it would have been dominant in was then taken by American companies that no British regulator has any real purchase over. Nobody at the Commission was asked to weigh that and it is not obvious they could have. It is still the outcome, and it is why Kangaroo gets argued about in the UK fifteen years later.

~ twenty months ~

The product was decent for 2010 and nobody has argued otherwise. It ran in a browser with nothing to install and the catalog was broad for its moment. Two advertisements per episode was a light load by the standards of the time. What it did not have was any reason to become a habit. The BBC had iPlayer and Channel 4 had 4oD, both free and both already sitting in the audience's head with a channel name attached to them. SeeSaw offered the same shows one click further away with no brand behind them.

Arqiva was also the wrong parent for it. That company owns masts and sells transmission capacity on contracts measured in decades. Running a consumer video service means buying content on two year deals against advertising revenue you cannot forecast, and losing money for a long time first. Arqiva looked at the second business and decided it was not in it. The decision was rational and it was also the end.

~ the legacy ~

YouView, the set-top platform the same broadcasters built afterwards under a structure the regulator would accept, launched in 2012 and is still running. That is the real descendant of Kangaroo, and getting it approved took a box in the living room rather than a website. The catch-up services stayed separate, which is why a British household in 2026 still keeps iPlayer and ITVX as two different apps with two different logins.

SeeSaw itself left close to nothing. Eight million pounds of salvaged code ran for twenty months and then the domain went quiet. The part worth remembering was never the site. It was the demonstration that a national television industry can be stopped from building the thing that would have defended it, and that the stopping is permanent while the threat it was aimed at is not.

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