Beach House Pictures Adds Two to Management Team

SINGAPORE: Beach House Pictures (BHP), a production company in Singapore, has hired seasoned network exec Jim Ribbans and creative veteran Marc Checkley for its management team as it increases operations in Asia.

Ribbans has been named head of business development. In that role, he is charged with developing new regional and international business relationships across all of the company's content divisions. These include Beach House Pictures, Beach House Kids, Beach House Entertainment and Beach House Studios, as well as Beach House Pictures Taiwan, a subsidiary.

Throughout his 18-plus years working in TV, Ribbans has produced and exec produced programming in such genres as live sports, game shows, travel, factual and branded entertainment. He spent three years at BSkyB before transitioning to Singapore's ESPN Star Sports (now Fox Sports), where he served as the head of ESPN's original content, special projects and sales integration.

Checkley has been appointed as BHP's senior development producer, which sees him responsible for creating and producing original content and developing creative partnerships for Beach House Kids and the new Beach House Entertainment.

For more than a decade, Checkley has worked in content production, development and editorial/media consultancy. He has collaborated with such regional broadcasters as A+E Networks Asia, Fox International Channels and TVNZ. Before moving to Singapore, he produced and co-anchored the online Olympic Channel for The China Daily. His other recent credits include exec producing Star World's Driving Change with Caltex special and NBCUniversal Asia's E! News Asia, among others.

"We have been quietly amassing talent and experience to form a formidable senior team as BHP expands across Asia and internationally," said Jocelyn Little, the managing director of BHP. "We have a number of exciting productions in the pipeline across all of our divisions, which include international blue-chip factual programs, original kids' animation/puppetry projects and a regional reality series."

"The formation of our Kids, Entertainment and Studios divisions is the next step in our evolution to make Beach House a one-stop media company," added Donovan Chan, the creative director of BHP.