TVCatchup

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

~ the eulogy ~

TVCatchup was British-only at the licensing layer, which is the polite way of saying it looked at my IP address and closed the door. That was not an oversight in the design. The door was the design. Everything the service was rested on a British statute about British broadcasts reaching British households, so a connection in Ankara was outside the argument before it was outside the country.

It launched in 2007 as a video recorder that lived in the cloud, then dropped that idea and became the thing people actually remember, a browser tab with around fifty live free-to-air channels in it. BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, no subscription and no set-top box, paid for by an advert that ran before the stream started. By October 2013 the company was claiming close to ten million active users, and two million of them watched England play Poland in a World Cup qualifier on 15 October that year, which was enough traffic to make ITV look slow at its own job.

The defense was one sentence of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Section 73 had been written to let cable operators carry broadcast channels without negotiating a separate license, on the theory that spreading cable infrastructure was worth the favor. TVCatchup's position was that the public internet was now cable. The commercial broadcasters disagreed in June 2010 and spent the following seven years proving it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the loophole ~

The strange thing is how long the argument stayed alive. In July 2011 the High Court accepted the section 73 defense for the terrestrial channels, which is a real win and not a technicality. In March 2013 the European Court of Justice ruled the other way on the underlying question, holding that retransmitting a broadcast over the internet is a fresh communication to the public and needs the broadcaster's permission. An October 2013 order then narrowed the service to WiFi only for the public service digital channels, which is the sort of remedy that tells you the court had run out of clean options.

Parliament closed it properly. Section 73 was repealed in June 2017, and a second European ruling that March had already stripped the cable reading out from under it. By then there was nothing to argue. TVCatchup Ltd had gone into administration on 4 June 2014 by order of the High Court, winding-up and liquidation orders followed in May 2015, and in August 2017 the Insolvency Service banned director Bruce Pilley for nine years for drawing down a loan without disclosing the winding-up order against the company.

~ the long tail ~

None of that stopped the streams. The service ran for another five years after its own company was liquidated, still serving roughly two million hits a day into March 2019, still fronted by apps on both phone stores whose publishers were shell entities in Nevada and the UK. Then it thinned out. The last reply to a customer on Twitter was 5 March 2019, the site started returning an error page in late April, and the channel links stopped resolving to anything. Nobody posted a goodbye, because by that point there was no one left whose job that was.

The American version of this story went to the Supreme Court and lost in 2014, and the British one never got a verdict that dramatic because it did not need one. A law got amended and the product evaporated. What TVCatchup proved along the way is that a very large number of people wanted live television in a browser window years before any broadcaster would sell it to them, and that the broadcasters knew, and that knowing was not the same as being ready.

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