Why digital?
The digital media revolution is progressing at a rapid pace,
impacting on traditional media sectors. Digital is becoming
increasingly important to our industry's future and is where our
consumers, platforms, and devices are heading. BBC Worldwide has
long understood this and sees digital platforms as an opportunity
both to bring new audiences to our content and to produce new and
unique forms of content and entertainment.
How are we doing it?
With consumers' increasing wish for content anytime and
anywhere, we are meeting their needs by pursuing multiple
distribution opportunities and business models. Our focus is to
gain competitive advantage through driving digital reach and
revenue growth across multiple platforms - websites, apps,
connected TV, social networks and consumer electronics like games
consoles.
As new operators emerge, BBC Worldwide has been at the forefront
of the industry, experimenting with our content on new platforms to
ensure that BBC-branded programmes reach the widest possible
audience.
We do this through a combination of building our own direct to
consumer propositions like the pilot of the Global BBC iPlayer and
BBC.com, which enhance our existing multiplatform offer, as well as
making our content available to audiences on third-party platforms
like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and Hulu. We are also developing new
digital entertainment propositions. For example, we have developed
11 games titles in the last 12 months and increased the global
reach of BBC.com to 58.5m unique visitors in 2011/12.
Since its launch in 2007, we have worked hard to build BBC.com
into a profitable business and in the year ahead, as directed by
the BBC Executive Board in January 2012, we will pass ownership of
the news areas of the site over to Global News, enabling it to
reinvest profits from the news areas of BBC.com into its core news
journalism functions. We expect to continue to own and operate the
other areas of BBC.com and we will work closely with Global News to
help to continue to drive BBC.com's performance forward as an
important part of the BBC Worldwide digital portfolio.
Progress against targets
We are pleased with the results so far. Four years ago, BBC
Worldwide's digital revenue was 2.7% of the total. This year it is
12.8%, having experienced a 63% Compound Annual Growth Rate over
that term. This growth has come from new opportunities for our
business. We are expecting to deliver 15% of our revenue from
digital businesses by 2015. Further progress against the objectives
laid out in last year's annual review is set out over the
page.
Very strong growth in sales to subscription video-on-demand
services (SVOD) has been driven by licensing our content to a host
of platforms including Netflix and LOVEFiLM for their UK market
debuts. We have also signed video-on-demand (VOD) deals with
Rostelcom and Tvigle.ru in Russia, Spiegel in Germany, FetchTV
and Quickflix in Australia, Hulu in Japan and Youzee in Spain among
others. In the download-to-own market, our programming continues to
be attractive to a global audience. In 2011, Doctor Who Series
6 was the most downloaded series on US iTunes
and Sherlock Series 1 has reached the number one position
in Australia, France, Germany and Canada, a great validation of the
international appeal of our content.
BBC.com launched three new editions, for Asia, India and
Australia/New Zealand, in November 2011, to keep advancing our
strategy of a more localised BBC.com experience and to
maintain its position as the number one international news site in
Asia Pacific. Other content enhancements included the refresh of
the Sport section of the website ahead of an exciting summer
including the Olympics and UEFA Euro 2012. Future - the second
specialist vertical following the travel section the year before -
was launched in February, offering users in-depth analysis on the
latest trends in the worlds of science, technology, health and the
environment. We also launched our first award-winning Connected TV
app exclusively with Samsung allowing users to access news video
and text on demand through televisions and Blu-ray players.
In Asia, to drive the appeal of our content, BBC Worldwide
entered into a partnership with a crowdsourcing and subtitling
service, Viki.com, in October 2011. Viki.com crowdsources
subtitles, enabling BBC Worldwide to break down language and
distribution barriers, opening up new markets faster and more
efficiently.
Our digital properties continue to go from strength to
strength with bbcgoodfood.com's unique visitors up strongly by
58.5%. On topgear.com, 74.7% of the page views for the website are
now from outside the UK and the international appeal of the brand
continues to grow.
Over 700,000 people are now registered to lonelyplanet.com. The
website received over half a billion page views in 2011/12 and now
reaches a monthly average of 11.3m unique users (up 35.8% on last
year). Overall downloads of Lonely Planet iPhone apps have now
reached 10m. Lonely Planet eBooks have also been a big growth area,
with more than 260 titles available and revenue up over 200% year
on year.
As the mobile and tablet market has grown so too has the demand
for all our apps. BBC Worldwide has seen considerable growth in
paid for, freemium and advertising supported apps with over 25m
apps downloaded to date and 12.5m apps downloaded in 2011/12.
Our specialist games business has been at the forefront of this
growth with Top Gear's Stunt School app launched for the iPhone and
iPad this year, which has now been downloaded 2.4m times.
Games have seen growth beyond mobile online. We have now
launched a Top Gear games portal which features 87 games. Our first
massively multiplayer online social game, Doctor Who: Worlds In
Time, entered beta phase in March. A new Doctor Who game, The
Eternity Clock for the Sony PlayStation3 and its new handheld Vita
platform is currently in development. Also in development this year
was the first ever Dancing with the Stars free-to-play casual
multiplayer online game where fans can pair up virtually with
professional dancers from the show and choreograph routines.
As consumers increasingly use the internet to watch programmes, we
decided to launch a pilot of a global on-demand service in July
2011. The Global BBC iPlayer is a subscription app, piloted on a
number of Apple platforms and provides a selection of contemporary
and classic British television with a unique focus on editorial
curation to guide users through almost 2,000 hours of content. For
more information please visit the Performance Review.
Digital technologies underpin the work we are doing to get closer
to customers, particularly our investment in electronic Customer
Relationship Management (eCRM) and social media, and our
digital and marketing teams partner closely across this space.