A Brighton-based company has been building Big Brother's interactive empire.

Reality TV's flagship programme stormed back on to the screens at the weekend but sharp-eyed fans had already caught the action on the show's web site, launched a day in advance by Victoria Real.

Head of marketing Ruth Cobb said: "The ten contestants have to be in the house for some time before there is enough content to be edited for TV but we can show what's going on from the minute they go inside.

"We have had a team of 20 people working flat-out for the last two months, making sure the site would be ready to go live when the deadline hit.

"We started building the infrastructure from the moment we knew we had the contract. But the decision on who would be this year's house-mates was not made until the last week.

"We had to get all their details added at a high speed and a core team of eight designers worked for 72 hours without a break to get the site ready.

"By Friday morning, everything was in place and people could get the first glimpse of the contestants in the house."

The web site has been designed to foster a community spirit among visitors. There are chat rooms and polls alongside unprecedented access to all areas of the house through extra cameras.

Ms Cobb said: "We have been focused on giving the user instant access to what they want from Big Brother.

"There is a new 360 degrees camera which can see into corners and people can select a housemate to be followed around. There is still no option to vote for eviction online because of security issues. Instead, people can vote to choose tasks the housemates must complete each day."

A new addition is the delivery of up-to-the-minute news to a range of digital platforms, including mobile phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and inter-active TV channel E4.

Ms Cobb said: "We have learnt a lot of lessons from the exper-ience we had working on the web site for the original series last year.

"The volume of traffic was huge.

On the day Nasty Nick left, we had 1.5 million unique users log on and 7.2 million streams downloaded by people wanting to watch the conflict unfold."

www.channel4.com/bigbrother