Quote:
Originally Posted by denphone
Project Kangaroo was certainly a great hit was it not?
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Kangaroo never got off the drawing board, because for some inexplicable reason Ofcom refused regulatory permission for the BBC to be involved.
Had it gone ahead we might by now have had a standardised, high-quality iPlayer offering full on-demand functionality for all the UK’s public service broadcasters, plus a viable home-grown platform to compete with the extremely well-funded American operations like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
As it did not, we have hardware being sold with a random assortment of on-demand services built in and the ability of end users to add or remove them from those devices varies enormously (Channel 4, for example, is still withholding All4 from Freesat devices due to an ongoing dispute over carriage fees - the service was automatically removed from boxes about 2 months ago. This behaviour, arguably, should be forbidden as part of C4’s public service obligations but that’s another discussion entirely).