Joost, Time Out Take BBC Worldwide Concerns To OFT
By Robert Andrews - Sun 08 Jun 2008 11:57 PM PST
To commercial newspapers’ gripes the BBC is ”the 300lb gorilla on our garden”, add a collection of concerns on web TV and travel guides. The Sunday papers have rounded up new submissions over both BBC Worldwide’s Lonely Planet acquisition and the Kangaroo VOD JV of which it is the lead member…
- Lonely Planet: City guide group Time Out has written to the Office Of Fair Trading (OFT), urging it to investigate the purported £75 million acquisition of travel guide group Lonely Planet, of which it bought 75 percent in October. Sunday Times says the letter worries BBC Worldwide will be able to supply “an inexhaustible fund of factual, technical and editorial information and expertise quite beyond the resources of any privately funded organisation such as Time Out”. Time Out’s Tony Elliott: “BBC Worldwide, from a lot of people’s point of view, is out of control. Somebody needs to really have a close look at it and define what it really should be doing.” The BBC Trust cleared the acquisition in October, suggesting it fits with the BBC’s public purpose remit, so any OFT enquiry could undermine the BBC’s own regulator.
- Kangaroo: More intriguingly, the OFT’s preliminary probe in to Kangaroo (which we already knew about because BBCWW made the submission itself) has heard complaint from both Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED), BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) and Joost. Joost CEO Mike Volpi (via Telegraph): “We have asked many times (for BBCWW/ITV/C4 content). In the case of the commercial players, negotiations have broken down over price. In the case of the BBC it’s just been a flat-out no. When you have a situation where so much good content ends up being potentially exclusive through a single distribution channel, it makes it very difficult for any player outside of those three to be competitive in the UK market.”
Joost, struggling to gain real market share, could suffer at Kangaroo’s arrival, although both platforms offer a rather different content line-up. One advertising boss even calls Kangaroo, still to be green-lighted by the BBC’s own trust, “a monopoly”. That’s the kind of language that could trigger an OFT referral to the Competition Commission.
Posted in: Companies, BBC, BBC Worldwide, Joost, Kangaroo, Legal, Regulatory
Tags: lonely planet, kangaroo, joost,
