Red Bee Media

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Red Bee Media Limited

Type	Private limited company
Founded	2005, see article for history
Headquarters	London, UK
Industry	Media
Employees	Approximately 1,400 (Q3 2007)
Website	www.redbeemedia.com

Red Bee Media Limited is a media company which operates a playout centre in west London in the United Kingdom for television and radio broadcasters such as the BBC, UKTV, Virgin Media Television, ESPN, Community Channel, Setanta Sports News and soon (following an announcement^[1] in November 2007) Channel 4. The company also provides backup facilities for Five. The playout department handles more than 60 TV and radio channel streams, among them all the domestic BBC channels (except for BBC Parliament, the production and playout of which is handled by Millbank Studios), as well as international channels such as BBC World, BBC Prime and BBC Food.

In addition to the playout, Red Bee Media provides "creative services", such as creation of advertisements, promotions and trailers for radio, television and interactive television, and "access services", such as subtitling, signing and audio description for the BBC, Channel 4 and Five programming. Red Bee Media also provides media management, design and support services, like encoding and editing video for mobile phone operators and VOD and IPTV operators such as the BBC, Orange ^[2] and UK cable company Virgin Media.

Red Bee Media operates interactive television for the BBC, UKTV and others, and provides webmaster services for bbc.co.uk and other web sites. It markets complex design systems for television such as its sports analysis tool called Piero, which is a 3D sport graphic system designed to analyse sports on TV.

Through its BDS subsidiary, Red Bee also provides programme listings services.

In 2006, Red Bee Media launched its Digital Hive product, which allows content owners and rights holders to have their media assets enhanced and re-purposed. Customers include Endemol, Camelot, SWISS TXT and the BBC.

The BBC Broadcast logo

Red Bee Media was formerly BBC Broadcast Limited. BBC Broadcast was created by the BBC in 2002, by placing a range of BBC channel creation and channel management services under one roof. It was part of an agreement with the British Government to create a commercial division that could supplement the BBC's income from the television licence, thus keeping the licence fee increases down in the future. The other entities within the commercial division were BBC Worldwide, BBC Resources and BBC Technology.

On 1 August 2005, BBC Broadcast, together with its subsidiaries, was sold for GBP 166 million to Creative Broadcast Services Limited, a company specifically set up for the purchase which is jointly owned by Australian-based Macquarie Capital Alliance Group and Macquarie Bank Limited. As a consequence of the sale, the company was renamed "Red Bee Media" on 27 October 2005. Shortly before their sale, BBC Broadcast bought Broadcasting Dataservices ("BDS") from BBC Worldwide thus strengthening their EPG and programme metadata offering.

As BBC Technology was sold to Siemens Business Services already in 2004, this leaves only BBC Worldwide and BBC Resources in the BBC commercial division.

Most of the Red Bee Media activities are located in the Broadcast Centre in the BBC Media Village, part of the BBC White City campus, although part of the subtitling operation is located in Glasgow and other subtitlers and compliance staff are located around the UK.

Red Bee Media also opened a subtitling division in Paris, France in January 2007 where they subtitle for the French TV channel M6.

At the end of 2005, Red Bee Media acquired the Australian Caption Centre, an Australian subtitling company, for AUD 7.5 million (GBP 3.2 million).

Red Bee Media announced the launch of subsidiary Red Bee Media Australia on 6 March 2007.^[3] At the same time, it announced that the publicly-owned Special Broadcasting Service would be the first Australian broadcaster to outsource its media management and playout operations.^[4]

On 29 February 2008, SBS announced that the proposal to outsource elements of its television broadcast system to Red Bee Media will not proceed. Both parties have negotiated in good faith since the announcement in March 2007 that Red Bee Media had been selected as preferred supplier to provide outsourced television broadcast services to SBS. However, Red Bee Media and SBS were unable to come to an agreement that was satisfactory to both parties. As a result, a decision to end contract negotiations has been taken. SBS will continue to examine other available options to update its television broadcast system.