BBC Boss Matt Brittin Sets Out Silicon Valley-Style Revolution At British Broadcaster

EXCLUSIVE: “Move fast and break things.” So goes Mark Zuckerberg’s famous credo for building Facebook. The BBC’s new boss has embraced his own version of this mantra as he seeks to reinvent the British national broadcaster over the coming years.

In a speech to staff from the BBC Radio Theatre, where some anticipated he could announce channel closures, Matt Brittin instead made his most significant remarks yet about his vision for the corporation’s culture. The director-general, who spent 20 years at Google and started at the BBC in May, told employees that he wants the broadcaster to “be more Elvis,” by which he meant: “A little less conversation, a little more action.”

Attempting to lift staff from the gloom of corrosive job-cut announcements, Brittin spoke about the BBC radically rethinking how it meets audience needs online by decentralizing decision-making power, embracing a sense that digital — not traditional broadcast — “can be flagship,” building and testing new online products quickly, and recognizing that it’s ok to “experiment and fail.”

In other words, Brittin outlined a Silicon Valley-isation of the BBC.

“We have to recommit to our mission, our public service mission, pursuing truth, bringing people together, boosting homegrown storytelling,” he told staff, per an audio recording obtained by Deadline. “We have to recommit to that mission. We have to reinvent how we do it. [We] have to understand and protect the magic of the BBC and change everything else, in order to serve those audiences.”

He continued: “I love the BBC. It’s full of words and discussion and slide decks and framing and reframing and reconstituting, and going around the houses, and actually, I’d like us to celebrate activity less, and outcomes more. And getting faster to outcomes that make a difference to an audience.

“Not [just], ‘We did this great marketing campaign,’ but actually, ‘It drove up watch time usage and active accounts,’ right? Or, ‘We did this piece of journalism, and it changed the law, and it landed with these audiences.'”

“iPlayer And Chill”

Brittin illustrated this by introducing BBC employees to Manon Dave, the head of future world design in the corporation’s Media Tech unit. Dave told colleagues that he spent time on holiday redesigning iPlayer without any internal limitations. He wants the streaming service to become a place where audience members say, “I want to iPlayer and chill,” though it is not clear if this means retaining the sexual connotations of the original “Netflix and chill” internet slang.

Dave’s vision for iPlayer included an AI agent called Iggy, which helps recommend and summarize iPlayer content, and can speak to audiences in different languages. Other ideas Dave presented to staff included a personalized “hero” picture at the top of iPlayer’s home screen, which picks out algorithm-led content recommendations based on past viewing habits. He also demonstrated “Vegas mode,” allowing viewers to “roll the dice” and see what iPlayer selects for them.

Brittin said Dave — who at one point during his presentation referred to the director-general as “my big homie” — had captured a “pioneering mindset” that he wants to see more of at the BBC. Brittin added that the BBC plans to begin testing some of Dave’s ideas with audiences “in the coming weeks.”

Some BBC employees told Deadline that they were energized by Brittin’s remarks, while others felt that the corporation’s heavily scrutinized public service remit limits risk-taking. He was challenged on this during the town hall.

“One of the challenges in this organization is managing risk, and I think we are naturally quite a risk-averse organization,” a staff member said. “People are understandably cautious about risk, particularly reputational risk, and particularly because when it goes wrong, it can be quite painful and quite expensive from a resource point of view, if not from a literal cost point of view.”

Brittin responded: “I don’t believe in fail fast. I think it’s a crazy idea. I think get better fast is a better idea… I do understand the culture and how we think about [that]. We shouldn’t be betting the farm. We don’t bet the BBC on one big risk. Ideally, we need to sort of understand how to do that within a framework. It will take time to build that muscle.”

Some insiders were not convinced. “Google breaks things and can afford to pay the fines or consequences later,” one person said. “He’s trying to implement Google culture in an organization that has nowhere near as many resources whilst simultaneously cutting existing resources. He mentioned getting smaller several times. Google is only getting bigger.”

Brittin’s view is that the BBC has no choice but to change. He did not announce TV channel closures, as was expected this week, but again hinted at a future in which the corporation has to pull away from analogue distribution methods.

“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. When do we move fully to on-demand?” he said. “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 personalize, to localize, to aid discovery.”