UK anti-monopoly body stops BBC - ITV - Channel 4 online joint venture Project Kangaroo

05 February 2009

The UK Competition Commission has decided that Project Kangaroo, the collaboration between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to provide a single destination for video on demand in the UK, would be bad for the consumer and blocked its development to protests anguish from the tech and media press.

The beleaguered venture, which late last year lost chief executive Ashley Highfield barely four months into the job, has been deemed too much of a threat to competition in the nascent UK video-on-demand market. Up to 50 jobs will be lost following the decision, against which it is thought the project's backers are unlikely to appeal.

The Competition Commission, which in an interim report in December looked at remedies including stopping the partners joint selling prime catch-up TV content, ruled that none of its prospective remedies went far enough.

"After detailed and careful consideration, we have decided that this joint venture would be too much of a threat to competition in this developing market and has to be stopped," said Peter Freeman, the chairman of the Competition Commission, in its final report on Project Kangaroo.

The commission said the case surrounding Kangaroo was about the control of valuable UK-originated TV content.

"BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 together control the vast majority of this material, which puts them in a very strong position as wholesalers of TV content to restrict competition from other current and future providers of video-on-demand services to UK viewers," said Freeman.