Davie speak

There's much to admire about the BBC's Tim Davie, boss of BBC Studios. He stood in well as acting DG in 2012; he's good on diversity; he's not afraid to shake things up. But he sometimes goes on in a way that's difficult to understand. Here's a few extracts from a new interview ahead of a keynote speech at this year's International Broadcasting Convention.

“There has been a fundamental transformation in where the control sits in the industry and it’s profound. If you are running a business like ours, the challenge is very clear: it’s around how you secure a content pipeline, because in every market scenario this is where the true value of our business sits.”

“We are seeing an evolution in our business and that really makes sense, particularly as scale becomes more defining. Being able to work across the whole value chain from production to exploitation is important because in this market we need to be fleet of foot and responding rapidly to the changes. It’s about being able to re-set yourself, so you are benefitting from the winds of change rather than just being buffeted by them.”

“What we’ve done recently is not only about the integration with BBC Studios, it’s also about expanding our base of partnerships with independent producers. If you look at my average day this is an ideas-driven business, so you can do all the strategy charts you like but at the end of the day it’s driven by people with ideas. My job is simply about attracting the best talent into the organisation. Everything becomes secondary to that.”

"I think it’s really important that a business like ours is infused with an editorial sensibility. More than anything we want the great work to happen and that often requires us to have partnership conversations. I’m not naive about it. There will be times when we are fighting over talent but more often than not this is about making projects work through partnerships, and part of that is about ensuring the health of our biggest customer, which is the BBC public service and the iPlayer.”