BBC Online Briefing: CBBC & CBeebies and the evolution of games

I’m Patrick Healy, head of product for the Children’s Interactive division.

My colleague Simon Lumb (product manager for Games Grid) and I recently gave a presentation at the BBC Online Briefing discussing the future of CBBC and Cbeebies online and how we used the Games Grid platform and the Connected Friends feature to support the new CBBC TV series called The Dumping Ground.

The online landscape for children

Connected Friends is the name given to a feature on the CBBC site that allows users to play games against their real world friends. The user needs to register on the CBBC site and once they have been allocated a display name by our system they can connect to and play games against their friends via the MyCBBC profile page.

You can find out more about connected friends and The Dumping Ground TV show in the video below.

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Find out more about CBBC Connected Friends

You can also find out more about Connected Friends in the presentation from our session which you can find by following this link. In this PDF we have outlined the challenges we face including an outline of our Multi-player games service and how Games Grid, our high score and rewards platform, is helping us develop reusable games features that drive our audience to return to unlock game rewards and share their scores.

Please take a look at the presentation and the video and let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Patrick Healy is head of product for Children’s.

Delegates reaction to the CBBC & CBeebies and the evolution of games session:

@joeldavey: Loved the user sign in demo at #bbconline

@camyule: HTML5 & Unity are amongst the gamedev skills CBBC are looking for from indies. Not quite our experience, but reassuring to hear #bbconline

@trevoridge: Awesome to see CBBC doing phased launches and data driven game design. #bbconline

@m_boesch : Over 1700 games on BBC.co.uk "Continue to expand our Mobile games offer, developed in HTML5" #BBCOnline downloads.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/…