Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Life saving classes

Dear Boris, stick with the BBC and make big money for UK plc.

The DG kicked off his New Year speech to staff, from the shiny new Welsh HQ in Cardiff, with a bold claim: The move will release almost a billion pounds of economic benefit into the south Wales economy over the next ten years (let's hope that's not just in taxi fares, eh ?).

He announced that the BBC's Design & Engineering division will be creating a new tech hub in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; that the BBC Sounds 'curation team' will be moving to MediaCityUK to be closer to their Controller; and 150 more jobs are heading to Bristol, home of the Natural History Unit.  Not yet quite 3,000. Suspect there's some uncomfortable negotiations going on.

He also announced a new target for global reach (I suspect the 2020 Global Audience Measure will break his original 500m target, set in 2016 to be achieved in 2022). Now he weants one billion reach by 2029.

He signposted - finally - a shift in tv content production, for both networks and the iPlayer, moving money to younger audiences - that's coming in the Annual Plan, usually out in March.

This is what he said about Sounds. I'll leave you to judge what it amounts to. "We've got big plans for Sounds. Radio transformed for all generations. There’ll be a step change in podcasting with more world-class storytelling from within the BBC. And, for the first time, we’re going to open up Sounds to new British creators wherever they are and bring the best podcasts to everyone. We’ll be launching new music streams bringing together favourite radio shows and on-demand content; more gems from the archive; and the Sounds app will showcase the great audio we produce in this country to the world when it goes global later this year."

Re-invention is apparently on the way for the BBC News App - maybe even a chance to drop the vertical videos, eh ?

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