Say hello to the new look CBeebies
Post categories: CBeebies
| 10:52 UK time, Monday, 24 August 2009
It's been seven years since CBeebies hit the digital airwaves, and ever since it first went live the red button offering on the channel has remained, to all intents and purposes, the same - bar one or two minor facelifts. All of that is to about to change with the launch of the brand new CBeebies Red Button service.
From this week, pressing the red button while watching the CBeebies channel will launch you into a big, bright, loud and fun new world.
So, what's changed?
First of all, how it looks! We realise that for most viewers, the characters are the most loved thing on the channel, so we've put them at the heart of the service. No longer are all the characters squeezed onto one page, or written down in a boring list - we now have a big, bold and bright menu linking you straight into games, services like CBeebies Karaoke, Birthdays and Star of the Week messages.
Games are one of the most popular services for the CBeebies audience, but for a long time the games we've offered on the red button have felt a little bit tired and out of date. The new service brings with it brand new games for some of the most popular shows on CBeebies.
Who doesn't love In the Night Garden? Well now you can play along with Makka Pakka, Upsy Daisy and Igglepiggle whenever you want.
The Green Balloon Club opens kids' eyes to nature. Whether they live in the countryside or the middle of town, the gameplay has been designed to get children really involved.
The CBeebies bugs feature heavily on the CBeebies channel all day every day, The CBeebies bug games have children catching or rearranging these bugs across loads of fun levels.
Sky, Virgin and Freeview viewers will have slightly different gameplay from one another - this has enabled us to offer the best game experience we can for each platform.
The red button service not only caters for the 0-6 years olds, it also has something to offer the grown-ups (often the person pressing the red button in the first place!) If you want to know what games will be available and when, what last night's bedtime story was, how to send in a birthday message or when CBeebies karaoke is available - pressing the Green button when in the service will tell you. It will also give you the low down on what hot topics are being talked about on the BBC Online 'messageboards' and give you some great ideas for educational games you can play with your kids.
And that's not all as CBeebies radio takes its bow on the Red Button for Sky viewers who will be treated to the best bits of the previous week's CBeebies radio featuring stories, songs and clips from popular CBeebies shows. If all that 'happy' gets a little too much it can be turned off by simply pressing the Yellow button.
The new CBeebies service has been a long time in the making, but we hope you'll agree it was worth the wait. We'd love to hear what you think.
The new look CBeebies is available on Sky and Freeview by pressing the red button on the CBeebies channel or by pressing red and selecting page number 5900 from any other BBC digital TV channel. It will be available on Virgin Media shortly but at this time won't be available on Freesat.
Damian Vicary is Interactive TV Producer for BBC Children's
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Comments
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This is all very nice but how do I get to the normal BBCi service now from CBeebies? Previously I could type a page number and read the financial news (or whatever) while the kids watched CBeebies, now it appears I cannot unless there is some secret key combination.
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A much needed update, but the In the Night Garden "game" is rather dull. Looks great, but over in a couple of clicks of the remote.
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Hi Brekkie - each of the games are targeted at slightly different age ranges. The In The Night Garden games are aimed at the lower age range of 2-4 year olds, and are therefore a lot simpler.
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pottager - sorry, realised I didn't reply to you.
I'm afraid there is no way to do what you want any more. We found the overwhelming majority of people pressing red on CBeebies were going in for the games, so we wanted to make the experience better. Obviously we were never going to please everyone with that decision.
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Just a couple of decades (and a half!) too old for that one then! The game this week though is much better.
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Thanks for the reply Andrew, at least one of them is nearly old enough for CBBC and it still works there - for now! I understand why you want the Press Red prompt (which is too big, by the way, and even the oldest child now presses Green to get rid of it) to go straight to the menu page but I'm still not sure why there can't be an escape route from there to allow entry of a page number.
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pottager - Every time we make a change we know someone's not going to like what we do. However we do do a lot of research to try and make sure that any changes are the best decisions we could make. In the past we've not provided the best service we could for CBeebies users because we've ended up trying to fit closer to the same patterns used in our normal services. With this re-launch we really wanted to make this the best service possible for the target audience. And I'm afraid the target audience aren't particularly interested in financial news or sports scores.
We could have hidden an option to allow access, although the work required to implement it would not have been simple and quick, and if you hide things, or even provide things that people just aren't expecting to see, they don't tend to get used.
This will be the only channel we do this for - CBeebies is a special case. CBBC won't be losing this option in the future.
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Well i've tried the new look of the Ceebbies menu. It looks pretty good so far (Tested on Vista Media Centre with TV Pack 2008 using a Freecom DVB-T USB stick) and the moving buttons for the main menu is a first (i think). I've recorded it a a video as well so might upload to youtube.
From reading "pottager"'s first comment maybe there could be a link to the main BBCI pages from the "Grown Ups" section of the Ceebbies menu.
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When can we expect the red button service to be available on Freesat? My daughter is being "bombarded" with trailers saying new improved red button games are available, but we can't get to them (we don't have freeview, only freesat).
Thanks
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