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–Corporation Also Offering Broadband Wimbledon and World Cup Coverage

The BBC will once again offer a sophisticated red-button interactive TV service to accompany its coverage of the Wimbledon tennis championships (note: the service has consistently been one of the BBC’s most popular ITV offerings: last year, for example, it was accessed by 4.4 million viewers). By pressing the red button, digital satellite and digital cable viewers will be able to access live coverage from up to four different courts, as well as the live broadcast on BBC One or BBC Two: each feed will feature live commentary and a regularly updated scoreboard. Viewers will be able to switch between the service’s five video feeds by using the "up" and "down" keys on their remote. By pressing the blue button, they will be able to access a menu that will present them with the following options: News (all the latest news from the championships), Scores (live updated scores from all the courts), and Results (live updated results). Freeview viewers, meanwhile, will access the service by pressing the red button to enter the BBC’s BBCi interactive TV service; then, by pressing the blue button, they will be able to access a menu (containing the News, Scores and Results options) and choose between up to two extra live matches. This year, both the digital satellite/cable and the Freeview versions of the service will feature a scheduler application which shows which matches will be available next on the service.

The BBC has also announced plans to offer live broadband video coverage of play on five courts during the Wimbledon championships. The service, which will be available free-of-charge on BBC Sport’s dedicated Wimbledon Web site (www.bbc.co.uk/wimbledon), and viewing of which will be restricted to UK IP addresses, will offer both feeds from the BBC’s linear TV coverage of the championship, and from its live red-button coverage of the event. It will also offer daily three-minute highlight packages that will provide a summary of that day’s play and that can be viewed outside the UK.

In related news: the BBC has signed an exclusive deal with Infront Sports & Media, the company responsible for the worldwide marketing and sale of broadcast rights to the 2006 World Cup, that sees it offering all the games it has the rights to broadcast from the championship live online. The games, viewing of which is again restricted to UK residents, are available free of charge at bbc.co.uk/worldcup and at bbc.co.uk/sport. All the BBC’s group games are available on those sites (the online versions offer the same commentary as the linear broadcast versions), and, since the corporation has the exclusive rights to the England team’s second-round and quarter-final games (if the team reaches those stages), those games will also be available, should they actually take place. In addition to live broadband coverage of the games to which it has the broadcast rights, the BBC is offering four-minute broadband VOD clips from all 64 World Cup games. "Our audiences now expect to get BBC Sport on television, on radio and online–and the World Cup on broadband is our biggest commitment yet to bringing people major events where and when they want them," the BBC’s director of sport, Roger Mosey, said in a prepared statement. "You can watch the World Cup from the BBC at home on TV–or listen in the car on your radio–and now also see full live coverage on your PC. We know a lot of online viewing is done in the office, so we suspect this will allow people both to do their job and to keep up with the very latest action from Germany." This is not the first time that the BBC has offered live streaming coverage of a major sports event: last year, it offered live online coverage of the FIFA Club World Championship Toyota Cup Japan final between Liverpool and Sao Paulo, and in 2004 it broadcast online all the streams from its 2004 Olympics ITV application. (Note: for information on the red-button interactive TV application with which the BBC is accompanying its World Cup coverage, see [itvt] Issue 6.72 Part 3.)

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