The BBC has terminated its digital media initiative after wasting £98m on the project that was designed to make the corporation “tapeless”. The broadcaster has axed the project to stop “throwing good money after bad”. The Digital Media Initiative, which was designed to do away with video tapes and create a kind of internal YouTube […]
The BBC has terminated its digital media initiative after wasting £98m on the project that was designed to make the corporation “tapeless”. The broadcaster has axed the project to stop “throwing good money after bad”.
The Digital Media Initiative, which was designed to do away with video tapes and create a kind of internal YouTube of BBC archive content that staff can access, upload, edit and then air from their computers the equivalent of almost 660,000 licence fees.
The BBC Trust has appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct an investigation to establish what went wrong in terms of project management, control and governance.
BBC director general Tony Hall has taken the decision to close DMI.
“The DMI project has wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money and I saw no reason to allow that to continue which is why I have closed it,” he said. “I have serious concerns about how we managed this project and the review that has been set up is designed to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned. Ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure, it does not mean we should not attempt them but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here.”
DMI has had a chequered history. After it was approved by the BBC Trust in 2008, technology supplier Siemens was given a £79m contract without open competition.
But Siemens failed to deliver and the contract was terminated in 2009 by mutual agreement.
DMI was then taken in-house but the BBC had incurred a two-year delay and lost £26m in projected cost-saving benefits as a result.
Problems with the system were first exposed during the coverage of the death of Baroness Thatcher earlier this year when BBC News staff were unable to access archive footage of the late prime minister via computers in New Broadcasting House in central London were forced to ferry tapes from the corporation’s archive storage facility in Perivale, north-west London, in taxis or on the tube.
