I’m part of the Business Development team within the BBC’s Future Media division and work with partners in the media and technology space to keep the BBC at the forefront of innovation and do deals that get our ten online products, (such as iPlayer, and BBC News) onto mobile and IPTV platforms. This is part of our broad strategy to ensure that audiences have access to our online service, whenever and wherever they want and across all four screens (TV, mobile, tablet and desktop).

Within the BBC, our job is to deliver opportunities to work with lots of different platforms and technologies and as part of this work, we have today announced a deal with Microsoft. This will enable us to work closely with them and ultimately reach the considerable audience that Xbox LIVE has to offer (35 million members worldwide – although the focus of this deal is our UK audience).

This deal will mean that the BBC will feature on all of the major gaming platforms in the UK (Wii/PS3/Xbox) and will be a key service on Xbox LIVE.

The level of awareness around connected TVs is still growing, with much of the mainstream audience still exploring the expanded capabilities of their new internet connected TVs, DVD players and set-top boxes – this is partly why the scale of and familiarity with gaming consoles is so exciting – by our estimates, we think that Xbox in the UK has one of the biggest connected footprints and so it’s a great way to reach our audiences.

I look forward to letting you know in the future about other partnerships that we have been working on.

Cyrus Saihan is a Senior Business Development Manager in BBC Future Media