BBC head of Future World Design, Manon Dave, and BBC Future World Design principal product manager Laura Harrison spoke with SVG Europe about the origins and potential evolution of Signals, the interactive layer that ran alongside the BBC’s live Wimbledon coverage that used the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s (AELTC) ball-tracking data to deliver on-screen serve speeds, winners, dominance graphs and match quizzes.

SVG Europe: Where did the idea for Signals come from and how did the project start?

Manon Dave: My background is mostly in building tech products for the creative industries, but more on the consumer end than broadcast, and generally very design- and culture-focused. Most of the projects we start, including Signals, begin with some kind of reflection or personal story about things we’ve enjoyed using, and what those would be like now.

When I was a kid we had four channels and my entire understanding of sport was basically sitting in front of the TV on a Saturday watching the numbers change on Teletext. So many companies, the BBC included, are constantly thinking about second-screen interactions while you’re watching the main screen. We decided to take a different tack: what could be a primary-screen experience that does some of those Teletext-like things? What should probably have happened when the internet arrived is that Teletext became contextual and melted onto whatever you’re watching.

Data is now a big part of sport, and it’s become the lexicon of sports fans — xG in football, all kinds of ratios and percentages, especially in American sports. So we tasked the team with imagining what interaction with live data, and things like trivia, might look like on these broadcasts, focusing on an area other broadcasters haven’t been concentrating on: interaction on the actual live broadcast rather than latent interaction. We were lucky that BBC Sport and Wimbledon — a 100-year-old BBC partner — were interested in trying something out, so we built the prototype, and here we are.

So it was always developed with Wimbledon in mind?

Manon Dave: We started this project about seven months ago and we tried not to look too far out, as we (Future World Design) are a bit of a mini accelerator for inventions within BBC R&D. What was coming up was the World Cup and Wimbledon, and we knew Wimbledon, being so close to home and a BBC broadcast exclusive, could be a bit of a playground, and so it came to fruition.

We’re just over a week into the Championships. How has it gone so far, and has anything about how audiences are using it surprised you?

Laura Harrison: It’s going really well. When we were building the features, we were looking at a broad spectrum of audiences. The first thing I said we had to do was a serve-speed animation, because when I’m watching tennis I’m often looking to the corner of the screen to find out whether the serve speed is being shown. That’s a simple way to engage entry-level fans.

Then, for tennis lovers who want deeper data analysis, we’ve got the dominance graph, which is very visual, so you can grab it at any level of tennis knowledge. But if you want to dig in, you can click on key moments and understand the speeds and spins in as much detail as you like.

What we’ve seen as the week’s gone on is higher engagement and more time spent, particularly with the tennis lovers we were aiming for. On the other side, simple interactions like the serve speed have stood out for a lot of people. And the quiz element changes the perspective again: it moves away from heavy analysis and lets people at the entry level improve their knowledge. We’ve got data-driven questions as well as pop-culture ones, so people can watch a match and learn something — like the most-used shot of the match for a given player — and that multiple-choice format makes them think, ‘was I watching closely enough? Maybe I’ll watch more next time!’

Manon Dave: The most common anecdote is that once you have it, and you toggle it off, you feel like you’re missing an element of live. That’s interesting to hear, especially from younger people used to seeing everything latently — it’s an expectation of live now accompanied by data, which feels like a real revelation.

Tell me about the decision to move away from the second-screen model and put those layers of interactivity on the main feed. What drove that?

Manon Dave: A big part of it is that there are already smart people tackling second-screen, not just at the BBC but across many broadcasters. The gap we felt was in the age of over-IP, which is becoming more common in most homes. People watching live TV over an internet connection comes with other opportunities that all the platforms are exploring in their own ways. One of those is the kind of two-way engagement we used to have via Teletext, or the red button, or even simply dialling into a show in the 1990s — two-way interaction points on your primary viewing surface.

Now, whether that surface is a TV — the holy grail for us — or your phone, all those platforms have the same capabilities, at least theoretically. The interesting area is when you partner that with live content. There’s another BBC R&D trial running right now, the low-latency trial, and that’s further evidence: as things get closer to real time, the real USP of Signals is that it’s two-way, not just unidirectional data delivery. The quizzes are editorially driven — the people with editorial responsibility for the Wimbledon broadcast react in real time to how audiences are engaging and put out a quiz or poll that relates to the match. On a second screen you start to distribute attention; if we can hold it on the primary screen, there’s much more opportunity to add value.

Is latency a challenge, and how do you handle the timing between the on-air action, the data, and the interactive elements?

Laura Harrison: That’s the tricky part. It’s a blend, because different data points arrive at different times. We get the serve feed immediately, so we have to hold it and marry it with the broadcast feed. Other elements — say end-of-rally data — can take up to about 30 seconds; the Wimbledon team are doing all they can to automate more of that. So we need the right match-sync between the broadcast video, which is about 30 to 40 seconds behind, and the real-time data. It’s a lot of timestamps and syncs, and making sure nothing lands before its time, so you don’t give spoilers away. Making it all marry together is the real crux of it.

Manon Dave: To that effect, it’s been epic collaborating not just with Wimbledon but with the partners providing the data and support, including SMT, IBM and Sony Hawk-Eye. Seeing the orchestration of all that, and being a participant even in this trial phase, tells us a lot about how live broadcast of this nature might change once the low-latency work develops.

Laura Harrison: One other thing we built is the editorial tooling — the dashboard — so editors can understand what’s happening in the match and send out quizzes in the moment. That comes back to time-sync: when you publish, that publish time has to be immediately live rather than sitting behind that 30-to-40-second latency, so the calculation has to be bang on.

There must be a lot of back-and-forth with the BBC Sport team, particularly on the editorial elements. How do you work together as two distinct departments?

Laura Harrison: The sport teams have been really great and we have had lots of support from the start, with Ron (Ron Chakraborty, BBC Sport’s head of major events) and his team particularly all wanting to try something new with audiences. The quiz is probably the crux, because we have more entry-level fans on BBC platforms than dedicated tennis lovers, so that was the focus: what the questions look like, what drives engagement, and what we can do in the early stages when there are tonnes of matches happening at once, versus later rounds where it’s more about specific players.

For this year’s BBC coverage of the Championships, Jamie Murray has joined BBC Sport’s presenter lineup to give deeper analysis of some matches. Is there any overlap with what you’re doing, or is that a happy coincidence?

Manon Dave: It’s not directly related to Signals, but in general you’re seeing it with the Inclusive Feed (the HawkAR: Inclusive Feed that provided synchronised spatial audio cues and augmented visual overlays for all Centre Court matches) too — ball tracking and other elements in real time.

We don’t yet know what the convergence point will be, but everyone’s clearly thinking along the same lines, and there’s an effort by the club, the BBC and collaborators like SMT and Sony to move towards something more two-way and interactive during live, and more inclusive of people viewing from home, giving that sense of collective viewing back to the audience while also letting them dig deeper.

This is a trial for 2026, off to one side rather than integrated into iPlayer. Looking ahead, what’s the technical gap between where Signals is now and a ‘full-fat’ version available via iPlayer?

Manon Dave: The bigger gaps are around sources of broadcast feed, sources of data, and the editorial component — who’s on the other side of the table, and what that toolset looks like when you move into other sports, or other verticals like live game shows.

Our next steps are to keep testing and expand into more features, more sports and more verticals if we get the opportunity, then integrate more directly with iPlayer as a natural progression. It’s about making sure we have all the right levers to pull in a full live environment with tens of millions of viewers. But before that, we want to be sure that whatever you plug into Signals, we know how to plug it in and that we have the right toolset for what is really the USP in this interactive data world: real people on the other side of the table, the editorial team engaging with the audience in real time.

Do you have specific projects in mind for after Wimbledon?

Manon Dave: There’s a real appetite to see this at Wimbledon in year two, in an expanded way, and the hope is a more full-fat version there, which we’ll keep pushing for. A lot of the same tools could also be deployed for other types of live broadcast. Strictly (BBC dance show Strictly Come Dancing) was one of the first mock-ups we threw down, alongside the tennis, and there are obvious deployments in non-live scenarios with shows like The Traitors and Gladiators. From R&D’s perspective, the key thing is making sure the toolset is robust and scalable, so we have the opportunity to go wider.

And just to add, something which I think is brilliant is that apart from the data and the feed, which come from a combination of Wimbledon (AELTC), SMT and Sony, this has been built from the ground up internally at the BBC — probably six months or less of building, with little to no third-party technology. I’m really proud of what Laura, Lee Fuller (engineering lead), Katie Bird (delivery lead) and the whole team have created; the story that doesn’t often get told about the BBC and BBC R&D is that ground-up technical development which everyone does so well, so I’m glad to share it.