Mobile Entertainment

Can you explain the difference between BBC Worldwide and the public service side of the BBC?

Worldwide is a commercial organisation wholly-owned by the BBC. It was set up to exploit BBC properties – and independent content rights that we’ve acquired for the BBC – both domestically and internationally. Worldwide takes care of TV sales, magazines and merchandising.

So how does mobile fit in?

Mobile is now a subset of Worldwide’s activities. Again, it’s entirely separate from the mobile initiatives at the public side of the BBC. We are involved in two main areas: ringtones, wallpapers and games are really just the mobile equivalent of a Tellytubby soft toy – my job is to sort through the rights we’ve got, decide how best to exploit them in mobile and then talk to distribution partners around the world. The second opportunity is TV and video, from which we have built a suite of products.

We already have content deals in place with Orange UK, 3 UK, 3 Ireland and others as far afield as South Korea and New Zealand. There are various ways we have commercialised our video content, whether that’s clips, mobile channels and even licensing full programmes using a traditional TV sales model, like we did for TU Media’s broadcast mobile TV service in Korea.

What are your priorities right now?

The top priority is building up a roadmap of content. We also need to secure more operator deals in core markets. Then there is D2C, either through aggregator partners or WAP sites of our own. Ultimately that’s the way the market is going.

How do you decide what to exploit first?

There are obviously issues relating to rights, so one way is to ask ‘can we actually get this content cleared for mobile?’. We also have to address what the customer wants. It’s still early days for mobile content and people are generally offering stuff that appeals to young males. It’s usually comedy. So far we’ve mobilised IP like The Office, Little Britain and The Mighty Boosh, which all appeal to that core market.

Games is an area we’re looking to grow. We have a very successful deal with I-play who developed The Weakest Link game and sold it for us globally. We are due to launch the third game in that franchise imminently. We want to take that model to other game developers and publishers for our other IPs.

I guess the third thing is identifying new products. So I’ve been speaking to colleagues at the BBC Motion Gallery to source iconic nature footage and we’re delving deeper and deeper into our general entertainment catalogues for Top Gear, Robin Hood and EastEnders content.

How do you take BBC brands overseas?

Fortunately BBC Worldwide has a longstanding TV sales business with offices in New York, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Mumbai. These teams are helping Worldwide expand its digital media presence overseas and they can help us build relationships with local partners.

Content that works in the UK won’t necessarily work in the same way overseas. A good example of that would be Doctor Who, which has a massive following among younger viewers in the domestically, but in the US and Canada it’s very much an older audience.

And third party IP?

As the largest TV distributor in Europe we work with the production community all the time, essentially as an aggregator. That works in mobile too. So we’ve done a deal with The Mighty Boosh producer Baby Cow to distribute content to operators around the world.

Have you considered ad-funded mobile content?

We have a YouTube channel here in the UK and were advertising around it, so the concept has been accepted and we’re looking for partners to see how we can experiment in mobile.

What is the biggest challenge faced by broadcasters in mobile?

We have to bring the rights community with us. New platforms are giving us the opportunity to speak to people we would have never dreamed about two years ago.

But because the business models aren’t yet shored up, the rights holders – with some justification – ask why they should bother with mobile. We need to convince them.