After YouTube Deal, Channel 4 Searches For More Distribution Partners

Channel 4 is in talks with UK content aggregators and could repeat its long-form TV archive deal with YouTube with other content aggregators and is in active talks to sign more distribution deals.

The broadcaster’s director of future media and technology Jon Gisby told the C21Media FutureMedia conference at Bafta in London on Friday that the collapse of Project Kangaroo — the commercial VOD portal of which Channel 4 was a shareholder — prompted C4 to find new partners, hence October’s YouTube deal. But that doesn’t mean there are no more deals to come…

And here’s a first look at an advert to market C4’s section on YouTube — both this and the YouTube content are going live “soon”…

Gisby spoke just after YouTube’s head of partnerships for EMEA Patrick Walker and the two men agree: the discussions behind the 3,000-hour archive deal were long, difficult and complex. But both stressed that the deal is non-exclusive — so will we see Channel 4 content on SeeSaw, Hulu and the rest? “Clearly I’m not going to comment on that specifically” was Gisby’s no-nonsense response to that, but he did say: “We remain in discussion with other players in the market about products they might launch and how that might fit with our content… absolutely we’ll do more deals with people.”

The BBC, ITV (LSE: ITV), Five and BT (NYSE: BT) have put their money and faith into the Project Canvas open IPTV platform — The BBC’s Erik Huggers gave a glimpse of what the platform might be capable of earlier in the day. But does C4 fancy getting involved after its fingers were burned on Kangaroo’s failure?

Again, no clear statement either way from Gisby — “it’s something we’ll assess” — but he sought to dispel some myths about C4’s precarious funding situation: it might not be flush with revenue, but it does have money to buy into the Canvas consortium if it wants. “There’s a lot of misunderstanding about Channel 4’s financial position — we’ve got substantial cash in the bank to reinvest. From an investment point of view, that’s not a problem,” he said.

Comments have been disabled for this post