App / Streaming Service Review | BritBox in the UK

The world is changing – and it’s not all necessarily for the worse. When I was a child, my parents used to pay a hefty monthly fee for their advertisement-strewn Sky TV subscription, and on top of that they also had to provide me with a seemingly never-ending supply of blank VHS tapes so that I could capture my favourite shows in all their 625-line standard-definition glory, “sparklies” and all whenever it rained. I’d get up at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning or stay up into the early hours on Monday nights in my quest to cut the adverts out of every UK Gold Doctor Who omnibus, try to make sense of out-of-sequence Only Fools and Horses repeats, and even waste a disproportionate amount of time in a futile attempt to catch the episode of Bottom (I still remember the one - “Gas”) that I’d repeatedly missed due to bizarre scheduling. Today though, on-demand streaming services have become the new satellite TV. Whereas twenty years ago there might have been a single Sky multi-channel package entertaining a household, nowadays you’re just as likely to find a collection of sundry digital video subscription services mounting to broadly the same cost, but offering a much wider array of content that can be enjoyed on demand (i.e. without the need to produce seven planet-killing ounces of plastic and magnetic tape to capture every hundred and eighty minutes of it).

The latest entry into the UK streaming market is BritBox, an extraordinary co-venture between BBC Studios and ITV plc that collects together many of the finest British television programmes ever made along with a Film4-curated British film library. I’m currently around a fortnight into my thirty-day free trial and, even though I have my own fairly comprehensive collection of digital media, I’ve still been impressed by the quality of the service. 

Unlike some of the more awkward platforms like NOW TV and the accursed Amazon Prime, BritBox has clearly styled its apps on Netflix’s friendly and familiar interface. This will be particularly helpful for those would-be subscribers with limited experience of streaming as everything is big, clear and simple – the threat of accidental purchases and false-positive search results of the type that plague the Prime apps are nowhere to be found in BritBox. You just pay your £5.99 per month (to put it in perspective, about half the current TV licence fee), and receive access to what is justifiably billed as “the biggest box of British Boxsets”.

At the moment, the service is selling itself on the strength of its Doctor Who catalogue – the series even has its own tab on the app’s landing page. It’s a risky ploy, given that Netflix currently has the rights to stream ten of the last twelve seasons, but one likely to pay dividends in the long run when rights for the 2005-2017 episodes revert back to the Beeb and the service can host every surviving episode of the thirty-eight-season-strong series. In the meantime, though, even the offer of vintage Who is a great gimmick as in the past the cost of delving into the classic serials might have been off-putting to newcomers and/or casual viewers – I shudder to think how much money I spent building up my DVD collection over two decades, only to find myself starting again with the recent Blu-rays – but now they can watch any surviving episode broadcast between 1963 and 1996 (along with all the lost episodes that have been animated using off-air soundtracks, and one or two other fun little surprises) for what’s essentially just a nominal fee. BritBox even sweetens the deal with the complete fiftieth anniversary talking heads series The Doctors Revisited and Mark Gatiss’s exquisite docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time, both of which are difficult to find in HD in the UK. In some ways, then, BritBox’s current Who slate is more of a selling point than NuWho would have been – after all, in a clear attempt to undermine Netflix’s claim to the programme, every single episode of NuWho (all 160 of ’em at the time of writing) is already available on iPlayer and has been for over a year now.

Like a lot of Doctor Who fans, I already own everything Who-related that’s on BritBox, but it’s all on shiny discs. For some reason classic Who has never received a comprehensive or even half-decent digital release – the smattering of downloadable iTunes and Amazon offerings have been pitiful – and so the ease of having it all at your fingertips is fresh and incredibly alluring. Better still, every single episode appears to have been upscaled into high-definition, and although the quality doesn’t quite match that seen on the recent Doctor Who Collection Blu-rays, it does slightly improve upon the DVDs that many of us Who fans still cling to. Even on a massive contemporary TV, the original 1963/64 Dalek serial looks pretty good.

BritBox’s Who library is far from perfect, mind. The 1996 TV movie is inexplicably missing its pre-title sequence, and most – but not all - serials are represented by generic stock photos rather than attractive DVD-style covers. Furthermore, I’m sad to say that there’s still not a streaming service out there that has worked out how to do what MediaPortal was doing effortlessly a decade ago - displaying ‘specials’ in their proper place in a programme’s running order. Who fares better than most shows on the platform, though; a lot of classic comedies have had their specials uploaded as different shows altogether. Browse Only Fools and Horses and you’ll just see seven seasons, but search for “To Hull and Back” and a separate programme entitled Only Fools and Horses: To Hull and Back pops up. It’s far from slick, but sadly in keeping with video subscription services’ lazy standards. You’ll probably need Wikipedia open on your phone if you plan to watch anything from start to finish in the right order. 

The app’s search facility needs a lot of work too. I searched for “Gavin & Stacey”, which is not only the programme’s proper name but also how it’s stylised on all of its posters and promotion material, and yet nothing came up. Yet when I searched for “Gavin and Stacey”, without the ampersand, it brought the series up straightaway. You see, BritBox has it listed as “Gavin and Stacey” and the app isn’t yet sophisticated enough to realise that “&” and “and” mean exactly the same (and in this case, the & is actually more accurate).

In terms of content, though, what’s on offer is astonishing, and the library will only grow when Channel 4’s “1000+” hours of content is thrown into the mix this Spring followed by Film4’s later in the year. I also expect to see BBC and ITV content pulled from other platforms as their streaming rights come up for renewal, just as Disney have been doing with their own content now that they have Disney+ to host it, but sadly this is unlikely include any co-ventures such as the recent Dracula. The future for the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime, and perhaps even for Sky’s NOW TV too, looks like it is going to be limited to American imports and originals.

My wife and I are likely to spend the next six months or so wading through two decades’ worth of Midsomer Murders (or as we like to think of it, Village Porn), which we’ve just discovered, and that’s but one of the many revered detective programmes to come out of ITV that you’ll find preserved here, all ad-free. Inspector Morse; Lewis; and Endeavour all have a permanent home on BritBox, the old Morses available in high definition (it was originally shot on film) for the first time, alongside fluffier and wackier efforts from the BBC such as Death in Paradise and Life on Mars / Ashes to Ashes. On top of this, you’ll find award-winning dramas such as Broadchurch and Downton Abbey, along with a veritable avalanche of classic comedies. Just about anything you can think of ever broadcast on the BBC or ITV is here, and what isn’t probably soon will be. From Porridge to BlackAdder, The Thick of It to Detectorists – it’s comedy heaven. There’s even a growing collection of Carry On films, again remastered in HD. I couldn’t resist guiltily revisiting Carry On Camping before I watched anything else. 

One slight disappointment with the service is its deference to iPlayer and ITV Hub, which I gather will remain the immediate home for each channel’s new programming for at least a short time after its broadcast. For instance, on Tuesday night we were hoping to watch the new series of Cold Feet without commercial breaks, as subscribers of ITV Hub+ can, but at the time of writing only the show’s first eight seasons are available to stream on BritBox. Don't be fooled by landing page’s “9 Series” claim - the eight earlier seasons are preceded by that troublesome pilot that finds itself the sole occupant of “Season 0”. The curse of the specials strikes again.

A greater weakness at present is the service’s lack of original content when compared with Amazon Prime and Netflix’s sprawling catalogue of originals (many of which really aren’t… “exclusives” would be a more truthful label). However, BritBox’s budget for original programming is reportedly in the tens of millions, so no doubt this will not be the case for long. 

Perhaps BritBox’s biggest problem when measured against its competitors, though, is its dearth of children’s programming – the slogan, “From costume to comedy, drama to detectives, we've got it all,” is really pushing it beyond the scope of acceptable hyperbole when, to most people, “it all” includes something for the kids. My eight-year-old daughter’s eyes might be turning square (well, 4:3) thanks to retro Doctor Who (and believe me, eight-year-old me would have died of Vitamin-D deficiency had he suddenly discovered twenty-six seasons of Who on tap), but my three-year-old wants to know what’s happened to Bananaman and Dogtanian - and frankly so do I.

Even as it stands though, BritBox’s ease of use and vast archive is more than enough to justify an outlay of £5.99 per month. For someone like my old mam, who loves nothing more than a classic comedy or Carry On film with her cuppa, it’s an absolute no-brainer, and even for me, with my exhaustive media collection, the numbers still stack up. Before subscribing, I priced up how much it would cost us to watch the complete run of Midsomer Murders on DVD, or download it from iTunes, and it worked out at more than we’d pay for a couple of years’ BritBox subscription. And that’s just for one show.

Those familiar with Netflix’s (recently-shelved) free trials will find signing up to BritBox a doddle – all you need is a name, an e-mail address and a payment method. It couldn’t be simpler. The more worrisome of punters can even cancel their subscription immediately and still enjoy the service until their thirty days are up, though I dare say that most who do so will be tempted to reactivate it once they’ve sampled some of the treasures on offer. Admittedly, it’s a system open to abuse, but so was Netflix’s, and if anything the many freeloaders only helped to make Netflix a household name.

BritBox has, however, eschewed Netflix’s multiple users on one account setup – here you only get one list, and so if you start sharing your login you’re quickly going to be swamped with other people’s half-watched shows and terrible tastes. All the same, there is no apparent limit on how many devices you can be signed in on – I’m presently logged in on my iPhone, iPad and two Apple TVs – but I’ve never tried to use them concurrently, and as it’s mainly just my wife and I watching BritBox together (sorry kids), I don’t foresee us ever needing to. If you live in a large household, though, you might want to check out the small print before signing up.

In the US, BritBox has been a popular niche service for a long time – over here, though, it feels more like bread and butter. So believe in Britain and take back that remote control, because if there’s anything out there that can heal the cracks in a divided nation, it’s this service. The BBC and ITV have finally got BritBox done. Enjoy.

Try it free for thirty days by clicking here.