Webcast

Webcasts are stories which have been formatted for 'broadcast' on the Internet.

One of the earliest examples of a Doctor Who webcast was the 1999 Comic Relief spoof The Curse of Fatal Death, which was broadcast on TV in the UK, but also made available online worldwide. Today such streaming of televised programming is not considered "webcasts", but Fatal Death predated this format by several years.

The BBC subsequently has produced four original webcasts which were 'broadcast' on a weekly schedule on the BBC website. These were animated (or partially animated) stories featuring the voices of TV cast members.


 * Death Comes to Time
 * Real Time
 * Shada
 * Scream of the Shalka

Following the broadcast all stories have been released on CD, except Scream of the Shalka; plans to release a DVD edition of that story were cancelled after the announcement of a new TV series in 2004. A novelisation was, however, published.

As all four stories were produced under the auspices of the BBC, their canonicity has been debated, although Scream of the Shalka is no longer considered part of mainstream continuity due to the decision to follow a different direction with the revived TV series.

The BBC website also featured Captain Jack's Monster Files, a series of retrospectives on various Doctor Who monsters, featuring original footage of John Barrowman. This is to date the only original webcast to use live-action footage.

Attack of the Graske, an interactive game from 2005, is often erroneously referenced as a webcast; it was not produced for the Internet.

During the second season of the revived Doctor Who, broadcast in 2006, the BBC uploaded brief one-minute "Tardisodes" to the Doctor Who website and to cellphone users. These mini stories tied in with the episode broadcast that week, often filling in backstory for the episode. These features were never released to DVD.

A different form of "webcast" is original fiction published exclusively online, with no print version made available. Since approximately 2004 a number of original short stories have been published by the BBC online, beginning with WC: The Feast of the Stone featuring the so-called Shalka Doctor, and between 2007 and 2009 the BBC's Doctor Who website periodically featured original fiction featuring the Tenth Doctor, as well as a series of Web-exclusive comic strips dubbed the Writers' Comics.