Five years ago this week… News broke in the UK that the BBC and its long-standing rival ITV would join together to form a steaming service called BritBox. Instead of the strike to Netflix’s jugular that pundits were claiming the service would be, the effort was rather an attempt to help the BBC and ITV survive, providing free-to-air content from TV networks into the SVoD format. Similar endeavors were popping up across Europe, where TV conglomerate RTL sought to push its 6Play and Now Plus offerings throughout the continent, and Vivendi-owned Canal+ tried the same by planning a relaunch of its shuttered CanalPlay. BritBox appeared in November 2019 in the UK, two years on from its first launch in the US in…