Streaming is now a global playing field, dominated by a handful of enormously powerful contenders all desperate to topple their rivals in a bid for ever greater influence. In other words, it’s a scary place for the little guy. Kudos to the homegrown BFI Player, then, for daring to shun such world-conquering tendencies, and instead carving out a niche as a decidedly domestic streaming alternative.
Though the platform is divided into a potentially confusing set of tiers and subcategories, each aspect of the BFI Player is an attempt to underscore the organisation’s longstanding role in British film culture. A transactional store mimics the high-end Curzon Home Cinema platform in prioritising UK indie films over glossier US fare, while also acknowledging the BFI’s part in their creation. Elsewhere, an impressive selection of titles from the BFI archive are available to stream for free, many as part of a time-sucking app that allows you to index a century of British cinema by postcode. And then there’s BFI Player Plus, a new subscription offering priced at £4.99 a month.
Despite the service boasting a relatively tiny catalogue of some 300 titles, most are specialist offerings unlikely to found on any competing platform, perhaps because Netflix’s coldly mercenary algorithms would implode at the very notion of licensing Shane Meadows’s meandering debut feature Small Time, which serves as a fascinating primer for the director’s illustrious career but drags like an 11-year-old’s feet on school induction day. Such rarities abound on the service, many of them the product of the BFI’s world-leading restoration work (next week, the platform will add a number of titles from the organisation’s ongoing Alan Clarke retrospective).
A personal touch is evident across the BFI Player, from its welcoming user interface to its insightful plot synopses, which favour thoughtful assessments of a film’s historical and artistic significance over the mixed-metaphor word jumbles of the Netflix catalogue (“His taste for revenge is a one-way ticket to adventure”, etc)
That said, the platform’s modest scale does have its downsides, especially when it comes to tech. Small Time, for instance, is presented in a frustrating windowbox format presumably carried over from an earlier DVD release – something the aspect ratio sticklers at Netflix would undoubtedly have corrected – while the film’s listless plotting is rendered all the more gruelling by the platform’s habitual crashes.
