For more than a century, the BBC has stood as one of the most influential institutions in the history of global broadcasting. From pioneering early radio transmissions to defining modern television standards, the British public service broadcaster has continually evolved alongside technological breakthroughs. Behind this enduring reputation for technical and programming excellence is an internal research and development (R&D) team tasked with identifying emerging innovations and adapting them to meet public needs.
Whether developing more cost-efficient transmission methods or crafting entirely new products that transform how audiences experience media, the core mission remains unchanged: delivering exceptional value to the British public who fund the corporation through the universal licence fee.
"We’re really focused on how we use new technology and how it will impact audiences," says Eleni Sharp, head of product at BBC Research and Development, speaking with SportsPro. "We look at audience trends and behaviours as well, and we work with content brands across the BBC and beyond and really try and imagine and prototype and develop what could be next. That might be a new piece of technology. A few years ago, it was extended reality and now obviously it’s artificial intelligence (AI). We will investigate what these technologies mean for the BBC and how we can use them. We also obsess about audience behaviour and look at how audiences are using technology and what the behavioural trends are."
These strategic investments stretch far beyond the walls of the BBC’s iconic W1A headquarters in London. Over the decades, the corporation’s technological trials have raised industry-wide standards and inadvertently created lucrative new markets for commercial competitors to harvest. The BBC’s early, pioneering adoption of digital streaming and podcasting helped popularize both formats among British consumers, while its technical insights continue to be shared openly through international standards bodies, academic papers, and industry conferences.
While critics in the broader media landscape occasionally accuse the BBC of mission creep—arguing that guaranteed licence fee funding gives the institution an unfair competitive edge—supporters note that this capital actively stimulates the entire broadcasting ecosystem. Directly and indirectly, BBC-backed innovation fuels growth throughout the UK media market and across international borders.
"It’s a brilliant time to work in R&D"
Unsurprisingly, a central priority for Sharp and her development teams right now is artificial intelligence. The corporation is aggressively exploring how AI can help content creators attract and serve increasingly fragmented audiences in an era of unprecedented choice, while simultaneously driving operational efficiencies behind the scenes to maximize value for licence fee payers.
"Artificial intelligence is able to fast-track a lot of the things that we want to do," Sharp explains. "Editorial teams can re-version content very quickly. Transcription and translation previously took journalists and editorial teams a long time to do. It’s so quick that they can do other things as well and we can offer more services to audiences. From a creative perspective, it’s just been amazing—we can prototype and build quicker than ever, bringing something to market for trial. Obviously, when we then want to do it at scale, on multiple devices, for the BBC, that process will take longer. But we can actually test things out and validate them quicker than ever, which is brilliant. It’s a brilliant time to work in research and development."
This acceleration of the prototyping lifecycle allows the BBC to test concepts with real audiences long before committing to massive, enterprise-wide deployments. By validating ideas rapidly, the organization can discard unsuccessful paths quickly and double down on solutions that genuinely resonate with viewers.
Sending Signals
Within the modern sports industry, personalization is no longer just a luxury; it is viewed as an absolute necessity for rights holders and broadcasters striving to maximize fan engagement and secure long-term revenue streams. By leveraging sophisticated data architectures and intelligent algorithms, platforms can tailor the viewing experience to individual preferences, encouraging consumers to spend more time within a specific digital ecosystem rather than wandering away.
To address this challenge, the BBC developed "Signals," an advanced digital broadcasting platform. Signals allows broadcasters to seamlessly layer real-time data, artificial intelligence integrations, e-commerce opportunities, and gamification elements directly on top of a live video feed, effectively personalizing the viewing experience for every individual user. This fusion of rich personalization and direct interactivity cleverly bridges the gap between the first and second screen. Instead of looking down at a mobile application to check live scores or statistics, viewers find everything they need inside the primary video environment, keeping their attention firmly locked onto the broadcast.
This approach deepens fan relationships, significantly increases total watch time, and plugs persistent value leaks. By keeping audiences engaged within the official broadcast ecosystem, rights holders and content owners receive the full commercial and attention-based benefit of that engagement, rather than surrendering it to third-party social media platforms or independent mobile apps that made no financial investment in the underlying content.
For years, media engineers have experimented with object-based broadcasting, a modular approach where different video, audio, and graphic feeds are transmitted separately and dynamically reassembled on the end user’s device based on their personal preferences. While object-based broadcasting once lived strictly in the realm of academic theory, the rapid maturation of digital distribution networks and embedded device intelligence means this modular future is finally becoming a reality.
Centre Court showcase
The true potential of the Signals platform was put to the test during the summer tennis season, where it was deployed for every live BBC broadcast from Centre Court during the championships. Rather than forcing every viewer to watch the exact same television feed, the platform enriched the live video with a variety of data-driven graphic overlays. These included live player dominance meters, real-time serve speed tracking, dynamic animations celebrating record-breaking match moments, and two-way editorially generated quizzes designed to test viewer knowledge.
Sharp suggests that this unprecedented layer of interactivity could eventually influence journalism itself, potentially shaping the types of questions reporters ask athletes during post-match interviews and drawing fans closer to the action than ever before. A voice-activated AI assistant—trained specifically on historical tennis and tournament data and built specifically for the event—amplified this personalization further, pointing toward a future where AI handles routine informational queries effortlessly.
"We want to move audiences from information to conversation," says Sharp. "AI will explain key moments, generate content, allow audiences to catch up, and help people understand and make recommendations as to what they would like to watch next. We had really great audience feedback—the average amount of time that people spent was 30 minutes and four seconds, which was more than we expected. We also saw that 75 per cent of viewers chose to keep Signals enabled even when they had the option to turn it off. But really, this is just the start of what we’ve got planned."
Future expansion
With the successful Centre Court trial behind them, Sharp and her team have already identified a wide array of sports and future use cases that represent natural fits for the Signals platform.
"Football, athletics, cricket, and motorsport are all really obvious fits," Sharp notes. "We can reuse the player cards, key moments and race statistics, and we can design the interface to complement whatever we’re working with. We’ve also looked at an option where you might want to turn the commentator on and off or to choose the commentator—we can switch camera views. There are so many options. We’re rolling out some of our AI companion features. We’re also looking at commerce features including retail opportunities, exclusive offers and sponsorship takeovers. We’re looking at immersive functionality as well, so voice, 3D features and multi-camera capabilities."
A century ago, the BBC had to invent countless sports broadcasting conventions from scratch. Today, the organization is attempting to redefine sports viewing once again for an AI-first, digital-native era. Yet Sharp emphasizes that the underlying technology is robust enough to expand far beyond the boundaries of sports, pointing to major entertainment formats and live music programming like The Traitors or the Glastonbury Festival as prime candidates for future deployment.
Such is the organization’s confidence in the Signals platform that it refuses to keep the technology locked away behind academic journals or internal blog posts. Instead, the BBC plans to commercialize the platform, licensing the technology to other major broadcasters around the world who are grappling with the exact same digital transformation challenges in the modern media marketplace.
"With Signals, there’s no need to plug technologies from multiple vendors to get the solution we all want," Sharp explains. "We’ve got more supporting partners and rights holders that we’re working with, but we’ve built this out as white-label technology, so people can come to license it and work with us on it."
Reithian principles of the modern age
The BBC’s transition into a technology vendor supplying commercial rivals may ruffle feathers among domestic critics, but monetizing its world-class research helps justify heavy initial capital outlays, spreads the benefits of public-sector innovation more widely, and generates a vital new revenue stream to help sustain the broadcaster amid ongoing funding freezes.
"My vision and real hope for Signals is that it becomes the leading format for audience engagement, turning passive viewing into personalised, measurable and intelligent experiences," Sharp concludes.
The ultimate irony, of course, is found in the legacy of Lord Reith, the BBC’s first director-general appointed in 1923. Reith firmly believed that audiences should not be permitted to influence what the public service broadcaster transmitted over the airwaves. He viewed it as the solemn duty of the corporation to dictate what the public needed to watch rather than catering to popular demand, and he insisted that a true public service broadcaster required an absolute monopoly to fulfill its cultural mandate.
Now, more than a century later, the modern BBC is doing precisely the opposite—empowering viewers to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, and however they want, while actively sharing its proprietary breakthroughs to help competitors thrive in a digital ecosystem.
