The BBC’s new director general Matt Brittin outlines a Netflix-style vision for iPlayer, including an AI agent called Iggy that speaks to users. How does the traditional, establishment British Broadcasting Corporation compete with the platforms emanating from Silicon Valley? The answer, it seems, is to get in a new boss who’s worked in Silicon Valley. ... BBC experimenting with a Netflix-style iPlayer make-over, including an AI agent called Iggy
The BBC’s new director general Matt Brittin outlines a Netflix-style vision for iPlayer, including an AI agent called Iggy that speaks to users.
How does the traditional, establishment British Broadcasting Corporation compete with the platforms emanating from Silicon Valley? The answer, it seems, is to get in a new boss who’s worked in Silicon Valley.
In May, former Google business and operations president Matt Brittin was brought in as the BBC’s new director-general, and he has big plans for the future of the corporation and its streaming service, iPlayer.
Brittin recently outlined his vision for the BBC to staff at the BBC Radio Centre, and Deadline managed to get its hands on a recording of both his comments and those one Manon Dave, who works in the corporation’s tech department.
First, Brittin made plain his plan to make iPlayer a streaming destination in its own right, rather than a ‘catch-up’ service for licence fee payers to stream episodes of, say, EastEnders because they were at the pub the night before. In other words, Brittin wants the platform to be more like its US rivals – something he illustrated with the painful line, “I want to iPlayer and chill”.
That phrase – a twist on ‘Netflix and chill’, which as Deadline points out has sexual connotations – has already been much-lampooned on social media.
Brittin then turned to Manon Dave, who’s been tinkering with iPlayer’s design in his spare time. Dave showed off something called ‘Iggy’ – an AI agent which is capable of summarising a show or film on the platform and “speak to audiences in different languages”. You never know when you might need the hymns in Songs Of Praise read back to you in French.
Dave’s other ideas include the addition of an algorithm that can make viewing recommendations based on a user’s watch history, and also a ‘Vegas mode’ which essentially picks something at random.
Elsewhere, Brittin talked about experimenting more and adapting to compete in a digital-first environment.
“We have to make decisions about when the on-demand consumption of our content starts to go so far ahead of the broadcast consumption that we make choices about,” he said. “When do we move fully to on-demand? And that can be painful for audiences, but it’s our duty to make those choices in service of that value for money for the licensed speaker. And our apps have to work much harder too to personalise, to localise, to aid discovery.”
Brittin’s comments were intended as a morale boost, perhaps, after announcements in recent weeks that some 2,000 jobs are to go at the BBC. Brittin didn’t announce the closure of entire channels at his staff meeting, as was expected, but it seems that his Silicon Valley-inspired plans for the corporation didn’t impress everyone in attendance.
“Google breaks things and can afford to pay the fines or consequences later,” one employee told Deadline. “He’s trying to implement Google culture in an organisation that has nowhere near as many resources whilst simultaneously cutting existing resources. He mentioned getting smaller several times. Google is only getting bigger.”
