Positive thinking

"When I appeared in front of the PAC, I answered all of the questions from committee members honestly and in good faith. I did so on the basis of information provided to me at the time by the BBC executives responsible for delivering the project." Former BBC DG Mark Thompson, in a statement today explaining his praise of the now-cancelled Digital Media Initiative in evidence to the Commons Public Accounts Committee back in February 2011.

Here's part of his evidence: What is happening at the moment is that DMI is out in the business. There are many programmes that are already being made with DMI, and some have gone to air and are going to air with DMI already working. It is true that some modules are slightly later in delivery than we initially planned, but other modules have been brought forward, though. Crucially, is it on track now to fully deliver over the course of this year for BBC North and Salford? Yes, it is. Are there going to be any significant further delays in benefit from the way we are delivering it? No, there won’t be. We have got a more flexible way of delivering, but it is out in the business. The modules which are out there are working and are making programmes, and what is exciting about DMI is that the feedback from users of the system is very positive. I think you are going to see a broader deployment of the system across the BBC than we expected, because of the enthusiasm with which it is being used.

BBC lead finance Trustee Anthony Fry told the PAC today "There was not enough technological expertise around either the Trust table, or the executive board table, to actually go ahead on something of this scale and complexity...It is extraordinarily worrying. At a personal level it is probably the most serious, embarrassing thing I have ever seen"

In February 2011, this was part of Mr Fry's evidence to that same PAC session.

Q96 Chair : I just wanted to ask Mr Fry: are you content with the degree of oversight and challenge that you have of the programme now?

Anthony Fry: I attended my first FCC in January 2009, and since then I do not think there has been a single meeting of the Finance Committee where the subject of DMI in its various guises has not been discussed. As I said to you earlier, we were more focused, rightly or wrongly, on the potential loss to the taxpayer, which is clearly very important in terms of the short term cost of terminating the contract. The longer-term loss to the taxpayer and the licence fee payer in the event that this contract goes wrong when it is managed in-house is much more serious. Am I content? No, of course I am not content. Until this is done and dusted and delivered, I am going to spend every FCC worrying the heck about this. This is a big contract. 

Q97 Chair : I asked a different question: are you content with your capability of overseeing and challenging?  

Anthony Fry: I think we have now a sufficient flow of information to actually understand what is happening and where the problems may or may not be occurring in the delivery of the contract. At the moment, I think we are content. But I am content this month; I may not be content next month. If I am not content, I can assure you I will be asking the Director-General to make me content. 

Alongside Messrs Fry and Thompson that February was Erik Huggers, Director of Future Media and Technology, about to leave the BBC at the end of that month for a job with Intel.

Q50 Ian Swales: You talked about the degree of innovation; can you give an example of something that was truly, truly innovative as part of this work?

Erik Huggers: Absolutely. I am going to be a bit technical, if you will allow me. 

Ian Swales: Go on, try me. 

Erik Huggers: Well, it is not that technical. Basically, everything stands and falls with metadata. Metadata is the data that describe the actual audio and video assets. Now, if you look at the sheer volume of output that the BBC produces, no one in the world had ever created a system to capture all that metadata in the way that we have done. We have talked to every broadcaster who is up there in scale and size, and they all say that this is unique. One unique thing that we have done is that we can track each frame of every video, literally down to the frame. No one has done that before. So, you can now search on a frame-by-frame basis-and there are 25 frames per second? 

Mark Thompson: Yes. 

Erik Huggers: For every bit of video ever shot. 

Q51 Chair : You mean all this little bit as we are being filmed now? 

Erik Huggers: Yes, absolutely. We would be able to track it if we were using DMI. We know for a fact that that is one real innovation. I think the other innovation is that it has never been done at this scale. 

And it may never be.....