People would not have to navigate to the Doctor Who subsite, and access a fixed video display dedicated to showing one particular video. This would differ from the way they had earlier made video available. This newly-complete Invasion would instantly drive Doctor Who fans to their new player. They commissioned animated versions of the missing episodes of The Invasion to offer the whole serial for the first time since its original broadcast. They envisaged offering whole episodes of Doctor Who to their web users. In the end, it received only a web debut.Īround the same time, BBCi started to generate content for what became the iPlayer. It was a 'test case' for the digital broadcast platform, created by the BBCi to a standard that could have been broadcast via the Red Button of the day. Scream of the Shalka came towards the end of 2003. Shada was a step up in terms of animation, but it took already-existing audio and married it to newly commissioned artwork. In 2003 they returned to converting audio projects to video. In December of 2002, they followed with the first project actually conceived as a webcast: Real Time.

They converted it to an animated story in 2002. Radio 4 declined to pursue the series, so BBCi picked it up. Death Comes to Time was originally commissioned as a pilot for BBC Radio 4 in 2001. Regardless, their early forays into commissioning new fiction for their web services are the earliest efforts of the BBC to provide additional narratives outside regular television episodes, and shaped the futures of both Red Button and Online. However, the BBC have occasionally used both the broadband and interactive television capabilities of Red Button to add to their viewers' enjoyment of Doctor Who.īecause the BBCi was the combination of what is today the separate entities of the Red Button and BBC Online, it is difficult to know if some of the things that BBCi broadcast online would have been made available on digital television today. Historically, Red Button and BBCi have generated the most content for sports, news, business and other non-fiction programming. Some are video based and can be optionally viewed as a picture-in-picture display, or simply chosen as a regular, full-screen channel would be. Some of these channels are text-based and generally remain displayed over the main programme being watched.

This drops a menu in a box over the programme being watched, allowing a viewer to pick from a variety of different 'channels'.

The name 'Red Button' derives from the fact that viewers access it by pushing an actual red button on the remote control.

What channel is bbc red button