The BBC director general has suggested opening up the BBC to YouTube-style user-generated content as he backed the idea of a “public service algorithm” free from the interests of US tech companies.
Matt Brittin, who arrived at the BBC after 10 years leading Google in Europe, said the corporation and public service media in Britain had the opportunity to build a platform “unadulterated by commercial interests, by algorithms that have other interests at heart”.
Speaking at the Edinburgh TV festival, he said concerns about the influence and impact of social media algorithms were now the “most interesting public debate” in the US. Meta agreed on Wednesday to pay out $18bn (£13.2bn) and make big changes to its platforms after claims of addicting and harming children with dangerous products.
While stating it was not BBC policy, Brittin raised the idea of turning an “iPlayer 2.0” into a YouTube-style site hosting appropriate content from creators. It would be built around an algorithm aimed at “educating, informing and entertaining the public here and ideally around the world”.
“I’d like to be an open platform for creativity,” he said. “What if we could say to people, create content about where you live, about the sports teams you follow, about the skills and the businesses that are in the area, and do that in line with our guidelines,” he said. “You don’t have to be Lyse Doucet, but there would be some BBC guidelines.
“We should have a public service algorithm … [iPlayer] should do it in a way that’s not biased towards the incentives of a US tech company or commercial interests. It should be biased towards what we want public service to be all about.”
Brittin said it would allow creators to access “the expertise and the platform and the reach and the trust in the BBC, in return for signing up for some policies that might be different from YouTube”.
The idea would be a big departure from the current iPlayer, which Brittin said had “fallen behind”.
The proposal may well find favour among some in Downing Street. The concept of the BBC developing a public service algorithm was raised in 2019 by James Purnell, a former BBC executive who is now Andy Burnham’s chief of staff.
Brittin was speaking after the BBC presenter Amol Rajan had given a speech suggesting the corporation was “screwed” unless it adopted a radically different funding model. Rajan suggested a cooperative model where licence fee owners would own a majority of the broadcaster.
Brittin said he “hadn’t understood quite the severity” of the BBC’s financial pressures, stating it had lost about £1.3bn in revenue over the last decade – 60% from government decisions such as freezing the licence fee and 40% from fewer people paying the licence fee.
He conceded that the plan to cut up to 2,000 jobs and save £500m would be difficult and good programmes would go. “It’s hard and I don’t think there are programmes that nobody’s watching or services that nobody enjoys,” he said. “So anything you do is going to challenge some audience appreciation.
“Obviously, to get to that scale of savings, there’s uncertainty hanging over a lot more colleagues than those who will eventually leave the organisation. That’s really hard to deal with. But let’s be clear … 90% of the people in the BBC will remain.”
Brittin said Rajan’s fear that the BBC would shrink at an accelerating rate was not inevitable if the corporation reached the right new funding model in ongoing government talks. However, he said reports that Newsnight was under threat were “nonsense”.
“We need to create, I think, a sovereign media public space where we can create content that tells stories of who we are, that has our values, that is unadulterated by commercial interests, by algorithms that have other interests at heart,” he said.
“So the next generation of creators … can participate in that – and that can reach people around the world.”
