Historically, one of the benefits of a licensepayer-funded national broadcaster in the BBC was that it served as a nexus for investment in media distribution in

Historically, one of the benefits of a licensepayer-funded national broadcaster in the BBC was that it served as a nexus for investment in media distribution infrastructure and standards. The BBC played a leading role in the definition of TV transmission standards, including advances like color, teletext, closed captioning, digital audio, and digital video; In the digital era they have helped to develop video compression and codec technology, in particular trying to ensure that there are unencumbered royalty-free options for video processing. In the light of that it would seem natural for the BBC to be involved in developing a standard, equal access streaming platform for content distribution in the internet era - in exactly the same way as their transmission investments helped to bootstrap independent broadcasting, BBC investment in streaming would have smoothed the road for independent content producers to follow. The particular tragedy is that, for its time, iPlayer was a phenomenally well engineered product - the BBC had done the work to deliver a scalable, user friendly streaming platform, before anybody else had really done so. Taking that platform that had been built with licensepayer money and using it to create a platform that let commercial players deliver content to UK consumers would have created a very different media market and set an alternative shape for how streaming services might work - and yes, it might have obviated the need for Netflix in the UK, but it would have opened up the UK media market to the likes of HBO, Disney, the NFL, and so on in ways that would have profoundly changed the media landscape.