MUMBAI: A new name and corporate identity for BBC Broadcast has been announced. As of 31 October, BBC Broadcast will be known as Red Bee Media marking its final transition from BBC ownership. As had been reported earlier by Indiantelevision.com BBC Broadcast was sold to a Macquarie consortium following the BBC’s review of its commercial businesses.

Red Bee Media can trace its heritage back to the beginning of BBC Television providing vital playout, channel branding and promotion, and access services for the broadcaster. The former Broadcasting and Presentation BBC department was incorporated into a commercial subsidiary, BBC Broadcast, in April 2002.

Since incorporation, it has won significant commercial business capitalising on the merging broadcast and IT markets to build the state-of-the-art Broadcast Centre where it relocated in October 2003. The name Red Bee Media followed many months of work within the company to come up with a brand that both reflects its BBC history, and is appropriate for the breadth of its services.

The visual identity was created by the ideas company Antidote, working in close collaboration with Red Bee's in-house design teams. The distinctive logo, featuring a stacked “Red” and “Bee”, includes horizontal bars which reference graphic equalisers, mobile phone strength bars and even the Broadcast centre architecture. The core proposition of the new company is described as ‘Bringing stories and people together’.

Red Bee Media CEO Pam Masters said, “We wanted to find a simple human expression of what we stand for. We recognised that everything we do across the company is ultimately about stories. All our services bring stories and people together – whether it be a news story on BBC World , subtitling Lost on Channel 4, a promotion on UKTV Food for Ready Steady Cook , delivering last week’s episode of Eastenders over broadband on the Interactive Media Player, or the latest football highlights to a 3G mobile.

“We wanted a name that reflected where we have come from. When we were Broadcasting and Presentation we were known as B&P. As BBC Broadcast we have been known as BBCB. So an evolutionary step was to play with the sound ‘B’. The spelling as ‘Bee’ came from an internal brainstorm when we were looking at nature’s expert navigators, because as a company facing the digital future we need to help the consumer become equally adept as navigators. We have always used Red as our colour property and this gave added strength to the name.”

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