BBC Expanding News Coverage With Interactive Video, Audio Articles, And New Verticals

BBC Global News plans to expand its coverage with interactive elements and audio versions of articles, the company revealed in its NewFronts presentation yesterday afternoon.

Presenter Katty Kay (host of BBC’s Beyond 100 Days) also revealed preliminary financial results showing 2018 was BBC’s most profitable year ever, with a 4% growth in both sales and distribution revenue.

Chief among BBC’s coverage expansion is an interactivity plan for the 1,000th episode of its tech guide series Click. That episode will feature a Bandersnatch-esque branching narrative where viewers can choose to navigate through various options, including one that adjusts the episode for users who have different levels of knowledge about the subject (which has not yet been revealed).

Next up, BBC announced Project Songbird, a text-to-audio initiative that’ll eventually see all BBC News articles automatically converted into listenable versions. The service is also intended to let users stroll around and simply listen to the news without having to actively browse and click on individual articles. More details about Songbird — including a launch date — are still to come.

BBC is also rolling out new verticals that’ll see it tackle three further areas of news coverage: The Future Sound of Music

, Future You, and Discovery. In addition, it’s producing new series The Future of the Past and The 20/20 Project, both from BBC Travel, and will be providing “extensive” coverage of women’s sports this year. It’s looking to push more advertising as well, with spots loaded into its branded podcasts and its upcoming coverage of the moon landing’s 60th anniversary.

“From voice to interactive digital storytelling, how we measure the effectiveness of what we do, and more, our teams all over the world go to work every day looking for new ways to utilize the latest technology,” Jim Egan, BBC Global News’ CEO, said in a statement. “Our announcements today demonstrate our ambition and drive to be the best news organization in the world.”

You can check out our interview with Krystal Bowden, director of the company’s content marketing division BBC Storyworks, above, and our talk with Tim Wastney, BBC’s SVP of sales, below:

And you can check out the rest of Tubefilter‘s interviews from our ‘Insights from the 2019 Digital Content NewFronts’ video series right here.