Bluey, Baby Reindeer, BritBox and BBC News – Tom Fussell and his team have a collection of popular and venerable brands to work with.
The CEO leads BBC Commercial, an arm of the U.K. public broadcaster, which reported its fiscal-year results on Tuesday. That included record revenue, driven by animated family hit show Bluey. Fussell has set ambitious growth goals, acquiring production banners in various countries, buying full control of streamer BritBox, and targeting to double the business’ 2021/2022 revenue and profit by 2027/2028.
After Tuesday’s financial update, Fussell talked to The Hollywood Reporter about key growth drivers, challenges, the success his business has had on YouTube, Bluey, and the future of Doctor Who.
Congratulations on the record overall annual revenue and the revenue growth at BritBox International. Can you share if that is driven by subscriber gains, new market launches, price increases or anything else?
We’ve delivered record revenues. We’re really proud of that performance. But crucially, our strategy is really working. These strategic investments, like the one into BritBox International, which I’ll come to, are really paying dividends for us. BritBox’s revenues are up 20 percent. On [channels business] UKTV, we’ve done a rebrand and invested in their content, and it has seen a 56 million viewer hours increase year on year on its VOD service, doing fantastically well. BBC.com has been re-platformed outside of this country, and the BBC app and the pay model have been launched. And so I can see these strategic investments really beginning to pay off, and we continue within all of that to flourish creatively.
