From Silent Witness to news, BBC content is going deeper into homes in the CEE and wider region, via dedicated channels, the BBC Player on-demand service, and a new Polish-language news site, launching this week.

Bartosz Witak is tasked with increasing BBC Studios’ regional presence. When he sat down with Deadline one year ago at the NEM market in Dubrovnik, he was months into his new job as General Manager for BBC Studios across CEE. He has since added Turkey and the Middle East & North Africa to his purview and built out his team, adding new ad sales, marketing, comms, and research execs. He is now scouting for a Programming Director for all of CEE & MENAT.

From his Warsaw HQ, Witak’s job is to get the BBC’s British fare into more homes and join the dots across the BBC Studios business, which spans channels, digital, program sales, events and more… and to do that across a wide patchwork of territories.

“We are sitting on a goldmine of tens of thousands of hours of content,” he said. “The worst type of content you can imagine is the content that is left on the shelf. That doesn’t work for anyone, so we are trying to properly structure and strategize and window.”

BBC Player – which is distinct from the UK iPlayer and the drama-skewed Britbox offerings – is a growing part of the business. Witak’s team inked new distribution deals for the on-demand service with CDA Premium in Poland, Cosmote in Greece, Slovak Telekom’s Magio TV and T-Mobile’s Magenta TV in the Czech Republic in the past year.

The nature of the TV biz in CEE is, as the recent deals illustrate, about working with many different partners. “This part of the world has actually made us entrepreneurial, because you do not deal with one or two big clients,” Witak explained. “You do not have territories of a massive capacity, value wise. You have to constantly keep bundling, keep building, keep leveraging [multiple] third-party partners.”

BBC Player is not a sold directly to viewers like a Netflix or Prime Video, but is launched in partnership with existing pay TV players, telcos and now, in the case of CDA Premium, with a streamer.

“We do not sell direct to consumer, because we are not Netflix or Max or Disney,” Witak said, before drilling down into the CDA Premium deal. “We sell bold British creative content, and for the first time, we decided to launch with a partner that is an online streaming service, which is a slightly different model than previously, where we partnered with more traditional cable satellite operators.”

In news, a Polish-language BBC News Polska site launches June 24 with original content from the BBC’s Polish-speaking broadcasters including Kasia Madera and Tomasz Schafernaker. Other BBC news reports will be translated using artificial intelligence. The BBC said the service for Polish speakers “will help counter a wave of disinformation in the region.”

It is a sign of things to come in the world of news. When the Polish service was  first announced, the BBC spoke of “bold plans to pilot more non-English-language content where there is a demand for independent, impartial news as press freedom reduces globally and disinformation is rife.”

In terms of the traditional channels business, the BBC Studios CEE and MENAT team have agreed numerous recent deals. The BBC Earth and BBC First channels launched to Czech customers via Vodafone and a trio of BBC-branded channels also launched with the same telco in Romania. Elsewhere, a big channels distribution deal with pay-TV service Polsat Box was also renegotiated.

Looking at the big picture, Witak concludes that his job is providing a through line for the array of BBC Studios activities. “It’s about connecting the dots and talking to the market as one team, one brand, one solution. That doesn’t mean that me or my team talk [to partners] about everything at the same time, we have different divisions: production, brand licensing, consumer products, events and many others. But the most important thing is to make sure that we are the face of the business.”

Looking ahead, he added: “One thing is continue building the reach for any service, any product that we are deploying in a given territory. The second thing is how we are monetizing these products and services in all these territories across the regions. Another element is to build digital products.”