23 November 2015
The British government has announced that it proposes to provide a grant of £34m [US$51.42m] between 2016 and 17, and £85m a year from 2017-18 for the expansion of BBC World Service.
In its National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review, the government says:
The BBC currently reaches 308 million people worldwide, and its goal is to reach 500 million people by 2022. The BBC World Service reaches into some of the most remote places in the world, providing a link to the UK for individuals and societies who would otherwise not have this opportunity. We will invest £85 million each year by 2017/18 in the BBC’s digital, TV and radio services around the world to build the global reach of the World Service and increase access to news and information.
BBC Director-General Tony Hall commented on the news: “I warmly welcome today’s announcement. It’s fantastic news.
“This new funding is the single biggest increase in the World Service budget ever committed by any government.
“The millions announced today will help the BBC deliver on our commitment to uphold global democracy through accurate, impartial and independent news reporting.
“The World Service is one of the UK’s most important cultural exports and one of our best sources of global influence. We can now further build on that. The funding will also help speed us on to our target of reaching half a billion people globally.”
The new funding will allow the BBC to develop a range of services, including:
- Enhanced TV services for Africa
- New radio services for audiences in North Korea; radio and digital services for Ethiopia and Eritrea
- Additional language offers via digital and TV in India and Nigeria
- More regionalised content to better serve audiences to the BBC Arabic Service
- Dedicated TV output for Somalia and a fully digital service for Thailand
- Enhanced digital and TV services for Russian speakers, both in Russia and surrounding communities
- A video-led digital transformation of Languages services
- To expand the impact and future-proof World Service English
The BBC took over the funding of BBC World Service – including all radio services and foreign language television services, but not BBC World News – in April 2014. It had previously been funded by a “grant-in-aid” from the British Foreign Office [Ministry].
4 November 2015
The winners of the 2015 AIBs were announced on the 4th November at a gala dinner at LSO St Luke’s in London. These annual international broadcasting awards are now in their eleventh year and celebrate the best in radio, TV and online – journalism, programmes and talent. The AIBs are judged by an independent and international panel of distinguished media professionals representing broadcasting across the world and they ensure that the awards are judged independently from commercial influence. The chosen winners demonstrate the best in engaging, powerful, moving and innovative reporting and investigation from entries which are submitted by countries in every continent of the world.
Simon Spanswick, AIB CEO said: ”The entries in 2015 demonstrated the continuing dedication of programme makers and journalists to uncover important and challenging stories, to take risks, both personally and professionally and to work expertly to investigate and explain complex subjects. The entries educate, entertain and engage their audience using the latest technologies at their disposal. We have seen important and sometimes harrowing stories brought to light, the power of the voice to captivate as well as exciting and engrossing coverage of sporting events. Once again the judges have had the hard but rewarding search for the best out of a very strong set of entries.”
This year’s awards were hosted by CNN’s Hala Gorani. Hala is based in London and anchors The World Right Now, with Hala Gorani, which airs every weekday evening. As an accomplished international journalist, Hala frequently goes into the field to report on major breaking news stories. Most recently, she’s been covering the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East.
The AIBs 2015 | Winners and highly commended finalists are:
TV Journalism
The winner is CNN for its coverage of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.
Highly commended
Al Jazeera English for Nepal in Ruins
Euronews for Fighting Boko Haram
Domestic current affairs
The winner is Channel 4 for My Last Summer, a programme that gathered together five terminally ill patients to share their experiences of coping with the last months of their lives and the effect on their families and friends.
Highly commended
Antena 3 for The Thing with Rom-Mania
Verve Productions for Filming My Father: In Life and Death
International Current Affairs
The winner is Al Jazeera Media Network for Al Jazeera Investigates – Broken Dreams: The Boeing 787. This was a disturbing tale of corporate greed as the world’s major aircraft manufacturer put profit ahead of safety.
Highly commended
Mongoose Pictures/Quicksilver Media for Outbreak: The Truth about Ebola
True Vision Productions for Kids in Camps
Domestic investigative
The winner is VRT for The Price of Cheap Food. This documentary looked at the never ending price war between supermarkets to lure consumers in with the cheapest possible food, asking who pays for this cheap food and whether a Pandora’s box has been opened in which food producers – principally farmers – have become the first victims.
Highly commended
BBC Northern Ireland for Spotlight: A Woman Alone with the IRA
Channel 4 for The Paedophile Hunter
International Investigative
The winner is Flying Cloud Productions for Human Harvest, a programme that investigated claims that first emerged from China in 2006 that state-run hospitals were killing prisoners of conscience to sell their organs.
Highly commended
Al Jazeera Media Network for Al Jazeera Investigates – Inside Kenya’s Death Squads
Sky News Arabia for Death Boats
Children’s Factual
The winner is Strix Television (part of the Nice Group) that produced The Museum for SVT. The Museum is a competition show in which knowledge, excitement, history and the present day are woven together in a children’s programme that is just as much fun for adults.
Highly commended
BBC for Being Me – A Newsround Special
deMENSEN for The Blacklist – Getting Married
Science programme
The winner is Channel 4 for Drugs Live: Cannabis on Trial which was a ground-breaking scientific trial looking at the effects on the brain of two different forms of cannabis – ‘skunk’ and ‘hash’.
Highly commended
Flimmer Film for Death – A Series about Life
True Vision Productions for Curing Cancer
Short news report
The winner is VICE News for Russian Roulette, Dispatch Fifty Seven in which Simon Ostrovsky spoke to residents in Eastern Ukraine which are innocently caught up in the middle of a bloody campaign – and who are dying as a result.
Highly commended
CNN for Ebola Battle through Nurse’s Eyes
TVC News for Customised Coffins in Ghana
Short feature
The winner is Blue Chalk Media for Burned Girl. Ragini is one of millions of children who are suffering from severe burn injuries. Blue Chalk Media travelled to India to document Ragini’s story through video and still photographs.
Highly commended
BBC World Service for Hooked
ITN for On Assignment: Heroin on the East Coast
Specialist programme
The winner is by TBI Media with Snappin’ Turtle Productions for D-Day 70 Years On. The BBC brought the UK together in a tour de force production to mark the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings – the programme was broadcast on TV and radio, and screened in cinemas across the country.
Highly commended
LOOKS Film & TV Produktionen & ARTE for 14 – Diaries of the Great War
Kansai Telecasting for Bunraku – Soul of the Art
Online factual
The winner is Bayerischer Rundfunk for Do Not Track which explored how information about you is collected and used as you browse the web.
Highly commended
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for My Ukraine
Radio journalism
The winner is BBC World Service for its Ebola Coverage, one of the biggest stories the international broadcaster covered during 2014.
Radio current affairs
The winner is RTE Radio One for Voices which, over 12 episodes, explored issues like suicide, abortion, addiction, and raised questions about who we are and how we live.
Highly commended
ABC for Indigenous Soldiers Who Hid their Identity to Serve – the Untold Story
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for Tradition of the Blade
Radio investigative documentary
The winner is BBC World Service for The Lost Children of the Holocaust. At the end of the Second World War, the BBC began a series of special radio appeals on behalf of a group of children who had survived the Holocaust but were now stranded in post-war Europe. 70 yearson, Alex Last tries to find out what happened to the children named in the recording.
Radio creative feature
The winner is BFBS for Children of Belsen, a compelling anniversary story that deserved to be told and to reach a wider audience.
Highly commended
RTHK for Bipolar Express
Television personality
The winner is Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent and anchor of the
network’s award-winning, flagship global affairs programme Amanpour.
Radio personality
The winner is Kathryn Ryan of Radio New Zealand, where she anchors the daily Nine to Noon, a
three-hour live news and current affairs programme which runs each weekday.
AIB Founders Award – Mike Wooldridge
The AIB Founders’ Award is in recognition of Mike Wooldridge’s lifetime work as an outstanding correspondent.
AIB Lifetime Achievement Award – Larry King
The inaugural AIB Lifetime Achievement Award is in recognition of Larry King’s remarkable career on radio and television, and his extraordinary impact on the news industry.
3 November 2015
In a unique collaboration – the first of its kind for the BBC outside the UK – a prototype media player, designed and built by digital innovators from Africa, is now live online. BBC Minute CatchUP – can sit within any online page and will let users hear and share the latest edition of BBC Minute. Specially created to work well on smartphones, BBC Minute CatchUP was designed in Cape Town, and comes from one of the development studios (aka ‘hackathons’) held earlier this year by the BBC World Service and BBC digital innovations team, Connected Studio. Teams of African tech experts were invited to think of new ways to reach young Africans through social and digital media and this selected idea can now be tried and rated by the potential audience themselves here.
Dmitry Shishkin, Digital Development Editor for the World Service, says: “African audiences have become ‘mobile-first’ before the term has become mainstream for western media, and World Service has a very impressive record of growing mobile and social segments of our digital reach. While planning these hackathons our task was to find new ways of reaching digital audiences in Africa – to offer them a huge array of great content, relevant to them. It is extremely important for us that we are taking selected pilots from ideas into live products, developed from scratch by the audience – for the audience. It is exciting that the BBC can be at the forefront of these developments in Africa, and we hope the ideas can be used in other regions of the world. The team can now see their idea performing in real life and we hope the audience enjoys trying it out”.
And coming soon – a further pilot from the Connected Studio project in Africa – BBC Drop which was designed in Nairobi and will launch online in the coming weeks.
These pilots continue the BBC’s initiative to invest in digital innovation across Africa. This year has already seen the launch of the Africa edition of the bbc.com website and the Africa live page on the BBC News website. Both of these have provided African internet users on the continent and in diaspora communities with dedicated digital spaces where they can find more African news stories and features. In addition, the BBC continues to focus on Africa’s massive online audience via many social media outlets, creating clickable and shareable content delivered by the BBC’s reporters across Africa.
BBC Minute CatchUP
What is it? A simple media player designed to sit within any online page that will let users hear and share the latest version of BBC Minute. Specially-designed to work well on Android smartphones.
What is BBC Minute? A fresh way of staying up to date with news from all over the world– a one minute bulletin that gets updated every 30 mins, everyday. Made by the BBC and utilising our high-quality journalism to curate the best stories.
What makes BBC Minute CatchUP good for young audiences? It allows anyone to hear short clips of current BBC news audio at the click of a button. Users will access the news headlines their way and on any type of internet enabled device – whenever they want.
Who made it? A social enterprise hub called RLabs from Cape Town in South Africa.
Technical stuff – The pilot will be available for 3 months via BBC Taster (bbc.co.uk/taster) and works well on all screens and devices. Users can add the link – bbc.com/minute to their mobile home screen and the player can be launched by simply tapping on the logo.
What is BBC Taster? Taster is the home of new ideas from the BBC – an experimental area where the latest innovative and collaborative ideas are available for the audience to test and rate.
Coming soon – BBC Drop
What is it? A responsive website that shows users BBC news content specifically tailored to them. BBC Drop asks the user for a few favourite topics, or social media preferences, and then continues to learn what they like and dislike from what they swipe on screen. There is also the option of an even more personal news feed which incorporates the user’s own social feeds.
What makes BBC Drop good for young audiences? A vibrant easy-to-use design, successfully user-tested in several African countries, and the ability to swipe away anything you want to ignore makes it the perfect way to access BBC news for the smart-phone generation.
Who made it? A Kenyan start-up called Ongair who develop products that make it easier for companies to engage their audiences on instant messaging platforms.
Technical stuff – The pilot is coming soon (also to BBC Taster) and will be available for 3 months. It works well on all screens and devices. The site collects news content from across the BBC. The aggregation and tagging is made possible using BBC Juicer, a tool created by BBC News Labs, which takes in news sources from across the globe and automatically tags specific topics.
1 June 2015
Intelsat S.A. (NYSE: I), the world’s leading provider of satellite services, and BT Group (NYSE: BT) today confirmed that BT has renewed and expanded services on three Intelsat satellites, spanning the Asia-Pacific, Africa and Latin America regions.
Under the new multi-year, multi-transponder agreement, BT will leverage capacity from three of Intelsat’s leading satellite neighborhoods to distribute programming for BBC World Service, a premier provider of global news and content. BT will have access to Intelsat’s teleport facility in Napa, California along with the company’s terrestrial network, IntelsatOne®.
The three satellite video neighborhoods, Intelsat 10-02 located at 1°W, Intelsat 805 at 55.5°W and Intelsat 19 at 166.0°E, combined with BT’s service offerings, will allow BBC World Service to increase its channel line-up and continue access to millions of listeners and viewers throughout Asia Pacific, Africa and the Americas.
“Intelsat and BT have a long and proven track record of leveraging each other’s technical strengths to help advance our customers’ business and growth objectives,” said Mark Wilson-Dunn, Vice President BT Media & Broadcast. “The high quality, resiliency and flexibility of Intelsat’s global satellite solutions, combined with the power of its regional video neighborhoods, make Intelsat the ideal partner to support BBC World Service’s global programming needs.”
Nigel Fry, Head of Distribution, BBC World Service, added, “In today’s information age, our viewers want fast-breaking, high quality and reliable content at all times regardless of location. By partnering with BT and Intelsat, we know that we will receive a seamless, integrated solution and distribution platforms that enable us to reliably reach our audience around the world.”
“BBC World Service has very specific requirements as it relates to its global programming needs, including optimizing its distribution and overall operational efficiency. By combining our distribution network with BT’s service offerings, we created a solution that provides BBC World Service with international distribution that serves its global audience, and supports its growth objectives,” said Kurt Riegelman, Intelsat’s Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing. “BBC World Service premier content contributes to the nearly 5,500 SD and HD channels distributed across our fleet and can be accessed by tens of millions of viewers across Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America through our media neighborhoods.”
Intelsat is at CommunicAsia 2015 from June 2 through June 5 at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, Stand 1S3-01.
Resources
(Source : Intelsat press release)
21 January 2015
Text content from the BBC Ukrainian website bbc.ua is now available on Zik.ua, the online portal of the Ukrainian news agency and TV channel, Zik. Thanks to a syndication agreement between BBC World Service and Zik.ua portal, visitors to Zik.ua now see news stories in Ukrainian and Russian from the BBC Ukrainian website.
Users of Zik.ua will be able to view a wide range of the BBC Ukrainian news coverage: from international and regional news reporting relevant to Ukrainian audiences, to entertainment, sport, economics and art. The BBC stories are accompanied by three links leading directly to the core BBC Ukrainian online offer.
BBC Ukrainian Editor, Nina Kuryata says: “We are keen to extend the reach of our content in Ukraine and provide audiences there with the best of the BBC’s international reporting and analysis. This collaboration with Zik.ua is an excellent development for bbc.ua.”
Editor-in-Chief of Zik.ua, Taras Smakula, adds: “For us, the cooperation with an authoritative, highly professional organisation such as BBC Ukrainian is an excellent opportunity to deliver, through our site, to Ukrainian users more high-quality information, broadening the understanding of the events that make up today’s world.”
Frederick Durman, Business Development Manager, BBC World Service, comments: “We are delighted to be expanding the availability of the BBC news content on Ukrainian media thanks to this collaboration with Zik.ua. It will allow even more news seekers across Ukraine to benefit from our Ukrainian- and Russian-language offer.”
BBC Ukrainian is part of BBC World Service.
