Britbox: ‘Too little, too late?’

When Britbox, the UK streaming service planned by the BBC and ITV, launches in the late autumn it will certainly address a gap in the market.

While British television is admired around the world there has never been a UK streaming service dedicated to the best of British programming.

It is a burgeoning sector of the media market already dominated by Netflix and now increasingly overshadowed by the California tech giants.

Is the late arrival of Britbox the result of British insularity, sluggishness or the unwillingness of old broadcasting rivals to work together?

Hardly. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 were pioneers when they tried to launch a joint on-demand service nearly a decade ago, Project Kangaroo, only to see it killed off by Competition regulators.

The chairman of the Competition commission Peter Freeman decided at the time that the joint venture “would be…