Former Google executive Matt Brittin is set to be confirmed as the BBC’s new Director General in the coming days, replacing Tim Davie who quit after the broadcaster aired a mis-edited version of a speech by US President Donald Trump.
During his 18 year stint at Google, Brittin served as UK managing director, vice-president for Northern and Central Europe, and president of EMEA Business and Operations. He’d previously held senior positions at Trinity Mirror, owner of The Daily Mirror.
He’ll join the BBC at a crucial time for the century-old broadcaster which is facing both increased competition from global streamers and falling popularity among audiences, large numbers of which are opting out of paying the annual £180 Licence Fee.
Ministers are currently assessing the BBC’s future funding, governance and purpose as part of the periodic Charter Review.
The next Charter period will coincide with decisions on whether to end or significantly reduce the availability of both terrestrial TV broadcasting and FM radio, making it essential that the BBC develops a robust and forward-looking digital strategy.
At present the broadcaster lags behind direct rivals and other sizeable companies on a number of fronts.
It wasn’t until 2024 that the BBC took the decision to move some of its corporate IT systems, including finance, HR and procurement to the cloud – a change many comparable organisations made years before.
And while rivals Channel 4 and ITV have comprehensive digital strategies to make their content available to audiences on multiple platforms, the BBC has only recently announced its intention to do likewise.
Further, while the BBC often depicts itself as offering ‘world leading’ digital services, its iPlayer catch-up service brings audiences a much more basic set of features than other paid-for streaming apps, including being limited to 2 channel stereo and offering poor content discovery.
The BBC also unnecessarily limits the viewing and listening experience for users on some platforms – it took a decade to bring subtitles to the iPlayer app on the Apple TV set top box, which media regulator Ofcom says has at least 700,000 users across the UK, and still declines to offer either full HD or 4K on the device because Apple’s rules would require it to build a native app instead of simply deploying its usual web-based version.
And the 2019 decision to pull its content from aggregator TuneIn saw users of multiple smart speaker brands and models lose access to its content unless the devices supported either the BBC Sounds app or casting technologies such as AirPlay or ChromeCast.
Such decisions stand in stark contrast to commercially funded broadcasters which typically seek to achieve the widest possible availability of their services.
For example, the BBC’s advert-funded streaming service U (previously UKTV Play) offers full HD on the Apple TV set top box and supported subtitles on the platform years before the Licence Fee funded iPlayer did, while commercial radio operators harness services such as TuneIn to ensure a presence on all major smart speakers.
For the past 20 years the BBC’s distribution policy has been focused on building platforms – Freeview, Freesat, YouView, and Freely – where it helps set the rules, leaving it ill-prepared for an era where viewers prefer using platforms controlled by the likes of Amazon, Apple and Samsung.
If he’s to secure the BBC’s relevance in a streaming-first landscape, Brittin will need to oversee a fundamental review of its approach to content distribution and instil a deep understanding of the need to meet audiences on the platforms and devices which they already use.