New Media

beeb.com's Comedy Zone site.

beeb.com webzines build BBC brands online: Holiday, Good Homes and Good Food launched in 1998.

beeb.com, BBC Worldwide's commercial web service, launched in 1997, has continued to increase its traffic, revenue and content rapidly, as the Internet becomes a mainstream consumer medium. beeb.com is funded through an alliance between BBC Worldwide and ICL.

beeb.com's traffic has more than doubled since March 1998. The ABC audit in March 1999 indicated 8.7m page impressions from over 400,000 individuals ('unique users'). This ranks it in the top five UK entertainment websites. The business itself generated five times more income (through advertising and transactions). Major deals were struck with online shopping sites, such as Amazon and Waterstone's for books, and Expedia for travel. beeb.com also signed its first content redistribution deal with a major portal site, MSN.co.uk. These are the first steps towards establishing beeb.com as a site guiding people's online purchases.

We are now planning our transition to new platforms including Sony Playstation, Nintendo Gameboy and DVD-ROM (Digital Versatile Disk).

beeb.com has also been participating in BT's ADSL^* broadband trials and Microsoft's WebTV trials. Top of the Pops and Top Gear sites are being used.

Offline publishing

Our CD-ROM business published nine new titles, increasing sales by 36% over 1997/98. We had particular success in children's 'edutainment', most notably with our Play with the Teletubbies CD-ROM; this made it to number one in the US educational CD-ROM chart and allowed us to break into the American market. We launched our first lifestyle and leisure title with Gardeners' World and our first curriculum-based education title with Bitesize Maths, a revision CD-ROM for school children.

*(Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line)