Linwood on points

Sacked BBC Chief Technology Officer John Linwood got better as he went on, in front of Commons Public Accounts Committee this afternoon.

He pushed as much blame as he could to the "business" for changing its mind about what it wanted the Digital Media Initiative to do - and said all along he couldn't get the "business" to engage. He offered a range of names as being "the business" - George Entwistle, when he was at Vision; Peter Salmon and Alice Webb of BBC North; Bal Samra, Roly Keating and Pat Younge (for conceiving the blessed thing in the first place).

The "new" news was that, internally, the DMI project as so named was stopped in October 2012, and Mr Linwood had no involvement in the new venture, called "End-To-End".

His evidence leaves three important elements to resolve: he believes the case for DMI was written in BBC Vision, not Technology; he says that at no time was technology failure given as a reason for the stopping of DMI in October 2012; and he stands by his serious accusation that the BBC Executive chose to write down the maximum in stopping DMI, ignoring the value of working software. This points both to DG Tony Hall and the CFO at the time, Zarin Patel.  More follows, as they say....