What exactly is the BBC’s new interactive layer?
by Kate Dimbleby | July 2026
After two weeks of strawberries, suncream and blistering serves, Wimbledon 2026 has crowned its champions. And with their coverage of the tournament, the BBC crowned a new milestone in its shift towards a digital-first, non-linear TV offering.
In June, the BBC announced ‘Signals’ – a ‘content-agnostic interaction layer’. Signals adds an extra interactive display that aims to add depth and detail to the TV show you’re watching, and allow audiences to tailor their viewing experience.
The BBC took this new technology on its first major outing with the Wimbledon Championships. Signals brought a combination of live audience interaction and all the stats and data you could ever want, in real time. The stats added greater depth and understanding to the match, and the live polls and quizzes brought audiences together in a sense of shared experience.
In an effort to increase engagement, video is going interactive – and it’s not just in sports or entertainment. Audiences now want to be involved in the content they watch. They expect opportunities to participate and tailor their content to suit their own preferences and interests.
Data storytelling isn’t just for data analysts. It can be used to draw audiences deeper into your content and add more value and understanding. The interactive layer stops the choice from becoming overwhelming by allowing viewers to browse at their own pace through the momentum shifts and rally stats.
It’s a concept Stornaway has been building on for years. Back in 2021, Ofcom’s landmark report on Object-Based Media named Stornaway an industry leader in exactly this kind of layered thinking – media broken into “chunks,” “layers” and “transmedia” objects that can be recombined to fit the viewer. Signals is a live-broadcast expression of the same underlying idea: content and interaction as separable, assemblable layers, rather than one fixed linear stream.
The added data brings benefits for video creators too. The ability to see how audiences respond to different sections of your video and understand how they’re engaging, in real time. By understanding your audience, creators can make more relevant, more engaging content in an ongoing virtuous cycle – a huge win for everyone.
And fortunately, you don’t need to build your own interaction layer from scratch. See how Stornaway’s interactive layer works for enterprise teams at Stornaway.io.