The British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) international streaming service Britbox has over 3.75 million global subscribers and is profitable as a standalone business, a television executive confirmed this week.
Speaking to the website MediaWeek, the BBC’s Global Media and Streaming Chief Executive Rebecca Glashow affirmed the idea of Britbox was not to scale it so that it competes with giant services like Netflix and Prime Video, but to stay in a particular lane and cater to a specific audience.
“A lot is reported around large-scale streaming services and the cost for those businesses,” Glashow said in an interview. “BritBox plays in a very specific lane. We know our audience. They are very sticky and very committed. There is low churn because of the engagement we have with our subscribers.”
Glashow said Britbox works because “we have a distinct British proposition, and consumers know what they are getting.” To that effect, while the service might have less than 4 million subscribers, Britbox has a significantly low churn rate where it operates — including the United States and Canada — something Glashow attributed to understanding the service’s audience at a high level.
Britbox originally launched in late 2016 as a joint venture between the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Studios, and Britain’s main commercial broadcaster ITV. The service offers up general entertainment from both brands, and some licensed content that has a distinct British flavor.
Last month, the BBC said it was acquiring ITV’s 50 percent stake in the joint venture, making Britbox a wholly-owned subsidiary of BBC Studios. (A version of Britbox operating in the United Kingdom will be merged into ITV’s streaming service, ITVX.)
The acquisition comes at a time when the BBC is increasingly looking at ways to generate more revenue from commercial opportunities. Those opportunities primarily come from overseas, because the BBC is not allowed to sell commercial advertisements against programs aired on its television and radio channels in the United Kingdom.
Instead, the BBC’s domestic operations primarily rely on revenue generated from a tax imposed on British households that have television sets. The tax, called a TV license, has come under scrutiny from politicians over the past decade, who say the fee disproportionately affects poor citizens and is outdated in an era when the BBC must compete with foreign streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video and Disney Plus.
The BBC still earns most of its income from that mandatory TV tax — about 65 percent of the broadcaster’s revenue was earned from the license, according to figures cited by the BBC itself. But the long-term likelihood of the license fee is in doubt, with the government guaranteeing it will remain in place only through the end of 2027.
The BBC is not waiting until then. Last month, the BBC’s Director General Tim Davie laid out plans for the broadcaster to invest more in its original content production, with a specific focus on “connecting people to high-quality television consent sought the world over.”
To translate, Davie said the BBC needs to produce compelling British content that finds favor with audiences in the United Kingdom and other countries. He also affirmed the BBC’s need to rely less on the television tax as a long-term revenue source, and explore commercial opportunities where it can.
The BBC is already making some strides in this respect. Last year, it announced plans to relaunch its BBC News website in the United States in order to draw more American readers. It also struck a deal with AMC Networks, which licenses the BBC’s brand and content for channels in the U.S., to bring its BBC News channel to free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) platforms — a move that is timed to coincide with an uptick in interest in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Britbox is another part of the BBC’s commercialization and foreign growth strategy, though Glashow said the broadcaster is taking a measured approach in how the service functions.
To that end, Glashow said the BBC wasn’t looking to raise subscription prices on Britbox as other streamers have done, because the service is already profitable and churn rates are low. But Glashow didn’t rule it out over the long term, either, saying Britbox customers were “not price sensitive as of yet, and we feel there is still a lot of growth in the model we have.”
Britbox is also not going to try to cast a wide net by licensing non-British content from third parties, or veering too far outside the line of comedy and drama series.
“We are not trying to be all things to all people,” Glashow proclaimed. “We know what content brings people in and what content they continue to watch. We have a healthy supply of that content. Both via the BBC and a continued content relationship we have with ITV and other British producers.”
Glashow also said the BBC has no current plans to introduce ad-supported tiers within Britbox, something that peer services like AMC Plus have done over the past few years.
“Because we are profitable, we don’t have the urgency to do that,” Glasgow said. “Advertising is not a path we have to pursue at this point.”
