BBC Digital Project ‘Complete Failure’

MPs have yet again blasted a £98 million BBC project designed to revolutionise the way the broadcaster delivered content as a “complete failure”.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said the Digital Media Initiative only had one working system in place, which had 163 regular users and a running cost of £3 million a year. That was compared to £780,000 for the system it had replaced.

The DMI was supposed to deliver new technology for BBC staff to create, share and manage video and audio content, and programmes from their desktops.

BBC failure

The BBC cancelled any further work on the Digital Media Initiative last year, admitting it had wasted licence fee payers’ money. It was supposed to have completed the project in 2011, but failed to do so, despite ditching contractor Siemens and taking the project in-house.

That move did not save it, however. In the end it was only used to produce one programme: Bang Goes the Theory.

“Given the gaps in the BBC’s in-house capability, it is in retrospect unclear to us why the BBC ever thought it could complete what Siemens had been unable to deliver,” the PAC report read. “The BBC was far too complacent about the DMI’s troubled history and the very high risks involved in taking it in-house.”

The BBC was also criticised for not supplying “important evidence” – a 2010 report from Accenture about the DMI, when it reported to the committee in January 2011. That “contributed to our false impression of the progress by DMI”, said Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the PAC.

“The BBC’s Digital Media Initiative was a complete failure. Licence fee payers paid nearly £100 million for this supposedly essential system but got virtually nothing in return,” she added.

Former BBC chief technology officer John Linwood revealed he is taking legal action against the corporation, after he was suspended then sacked over the apparent failure of the DMI. He contested the claims that the project had not delivered much useful.

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