One in the pouch is worth three on the web?

The Guardian wrote an article this week on the new media phenomenon "Kangaroo", the commercial iPlayer which will group all the content from the BBC iPlayer, the channel 4 40D service and content from itv.com. This service will offer all content at reasonable prices to the consumer, and as far as is made clear, will hold thousands of hours of content for a longer period of time than the current mediums.

The clear issue with this new idea is that of the BBC licence payers perspective, which is simply this, why would the British television watching public choose to pay again for that which they are paying for already? The arguement then immediatley arises that they are simply being offered another service seperate to that which is paid for. While this essentialy is true it must surley be within the preogative of the BBC to supply the fee payer with a better service, and would the BBC iPlayer not be classed as this?

Furthermore the content which will be hosted by Kangaroo will clearly contain programmes which advertise external products, directly conflicting with the nature of the BBC. Allbeit that the advertisement may not appear on the BBC content, or even the front page of the sit perhaps, however surley the fact that such advertisment funded content is on the same site as BBC content would cause arguement enough to undermine the foundtations of the idea.

From what I can tell Kangaroo is an underesearched and certainly under publicisied system which will have inherent problems from the outset. I eagerly await the arrival of the system to view its progress and asses its impacts on the current methods of delivering online content.