BBC ANNOUNCE £25 MILLION INVESTMENT

BBC Director-General Greg Dyke has announced a £25 million investment in regional broadcasting and ground-breaking broadband digital TV and learning initiatives centred in Hull, the East Riding and Lincolnshire.
The BBC’s technological and programme-making expertise will combine to create innovative new kinds of learning, news and entertainment services. These will be trialled across Hull, delivered direct to homes and schools across the community, offering users unprecedented levels of interactivity through the unique broadband TV platform that Kingston Communications have constructed across the city.
Dyke said: “We are opening the door to a new era. New interactive technologies provide the BBC, as public service broadcasters, with a unique opportunity to get closer to our audience – and for them to get back more from the BBC.”
The new initiatives include: launching a new, dedicated TV region – broadcasting local news seven days a week for viewers across Hull, the East Riding and Lincolnshire; creating a new state-of-the-art broadcasting centre in the centre of Hull which will be home to BBC Radio Humberside; integrating a ‘drop in’ Open Centre for local people within the new building, providing free ICT, basic skills and multi media training. A mobile bus with built in studio and computers will offer the same accessibility to a wider community across the region; Pioneering BBC Hull Interactive across the city, enabling anyone on the Kingston Communications platform to access unprecedented levels of local and national information and interactive BBC TV content and which could become the test bed for the BBC’s broadband services of the future and Piloting a major new learning initiative, BBC Headstart, designed to deliver stimulating new learning packages for schools to encourage more adults to learn in the privacy of their new home.
The total investment by the BBC in Hull will be around £25 million over the next five years. In addition £1.12 million will be provided by the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward and Hull City Vision partnership, with a further £800,000 from local Learning Organisations.
A wide range of BBC content, from ‘Eastenders’ to the main news bulletins and from ‘Blue Planet’ to ‘The Tweenies’ will be specially packaged for the Hull trails. In terms of interactivity and viewer choice, these will go far beyond what is currently possible on either the internet or conventional narrowband digital TV.
Welcoming these initiatives, the Rt Hon John Prescott, Deputy PM and MP for Hull East, said: “The UK hopes to have the most extensive and competitive broadband market in the developed world by 2005. Hull is ahead of any other city in the country in its ability to receive broadband broadcast and I am delighted the BBC have recognised this and decided to invest in the city and region.” (CD)