Spitting Image to return on BritBox

Considering it's Britbox who have commissioned the series and invested their money into the project (Britbox is 90% ITV) and an original series for their platform, it isn't a surprise that they're not letting them go on a FTA channel, even if it's ITV.

The point of this well known commission is to drive up subs which it has appeared to have achieved, which is why Spitting Image has already been granted a second series.

In any case, it isn't like the late 90s when Sky got the pay-tv rights for The X Files from the BBC which meant you either paid to have a dish on the side of your house (or a cable install) to watch slightly quicker in the UK or wait longer for the terrestrial premiere, you can either download the app and pay £5.99 or not.

I've seen so.many complaints saying ' I don't want to have another subscription that I have to pay. I already have to pay Netflix, Amazon Prime and Sky. Why is the BBC forcing us to pay more for shows we've already paid for"

It's such a stupid argument.

The whole reason it's on BritBox in the first place is because ITV wouldn't be able to make it pay with advertising. BritBox has an original productions budget, and they've opted to spend it on Spitting Image. It's a BritBox commission, and who owns Britbox, or who used to air the programme is irrelevant.

As London Lite says, the world has moved on from pay tv shows having a terrestrial premier six months later. That sense of entitlement should really be in the past, and I suspect it is for most people that use streaming services as their main source of programming.

The only logic to Spitting Image airing on ITV is to promote it being on BritBox - therefore unless they were going to show the premiere episode in order to promote the rest of the series there isn't much point.

Nobody has to pay for anything. You don't have to pay for Netflix, you don't have to pay for Amazon and you don't have to pay for Sky. These are all optional extras you can choose to pay for if you wish. The only required payment for watching TV as broadcast is the licence fee and a TV with Freeview built in (or a box). Beyond that, any other payments are entirely optional.

Anyway people have always had more content available to them that they've been able to watch. That started when your ITV company came along in the 1950s and 60s, and got worse when BBC Two launched in 1964. Home video recorders at an affordable price weren't a thing until the 1970s so unless you were rich enough to have multiple TVs (or have access to early VHS technology at some insane price), you were practically forced to cherry-pick by default.

Today? More content than you can shake a stick at across the various services. Nobody's going to be able to watch it all. Pointless even trying, unless you've literally nothing else to do with your life...

That’s not comparing like with like. Netflix Originals (the true version) are available virtually in any country in the world except China and North Korea. Britbox is only available in the UK, US, and Canada. So unless a linear broadcaster picks it up, can’t watch it at all - the “No Export for You” scenario I mentioned earlier. It is unfortunately unlikely to be the sort of thing an Irish broadcaster will be interested in, so a UK linear airing would be the best hope for those of us on this side of the Irish Sea.

They're putting a handful of sketches on their YouTube page which seems like a fair trade off. Give audiences a taster on whether they should subscribe to BritBox to watch the full series.

Personally I feel Netflix content is stuff you can "binge" for an entire evening. A weekly topical satire show is built more for linear television than a streaming service IMO, especially when the jokes can do quickly become out of date.

Yet Netflix have also drip fed Netflix Originals in a similar vein to linear tv scheduling. Britbox aren't doing anything radical here.

Although some of those so called "Netflix Originals" are actually US cable shows being released as they are aired in the states. There has been a bit of a move away though from releasing everything in one go in the last year or so, but that's probably more Amazon than Netflix.

This isn't that trope. No Export For You means it doesn't air in your country at all.

And it doesn’t! Britbox isn’t available here.

(Yes, I understand it is slightly a bit early to say that there will be no overseas sales of this show. I just find it unlikely due to its subject material that either RTÉ or VMTV will pick it up, and so an airing by a linear U.K. broadcaster would be the best outcome).