By C. Thomson, Chief Operating Officer, BBC

June 5, 2008

Thank you for inviting me to give this lecture; it really is an honour.

I see that this year’s Vital Topics have already ranged from the credit crunch to the global reach of Manchester United. I have to tell you: the most vital business topic for the BBC at the moment is quite different and if anything even more serious.

What we’re all biting our nails over is who Sir Alan’s going to hire as his next apprentice: Alex, Clare, Helène or Lee.

What’s so interesting about the latest series of The Apprentice is not just that it’s been pulling in large audiences on BBC One, but that it’s being doing the same for the iPlayer.

Along with a resurgent Doctor Who, Sir Alan’s been dominating the 20 most-requested programmes, helping propel iPlayer traffic to nearly a million requests a day. You’ll appreciate that getting a service like iPlayer off the ground hasn’t been easy.

On the 1st of April we had to use some particularly novel marketing tactics, using a video I’d like to play for you now. [Penguins VT]

Light-hearted I know, but this is a great example of well-aimed short-form content really punching through and driving new media.

In its first seven days alone, this little film had nearly two million viewings on YouTube, and just under half-a-million on iPlayer. Thanks to TV coverage, over a quarter of UK adults are now thought to have seen it at least once.

How many of them now think Penguins fly and migrate to the tropics is an open question. I’d hazard a guess it’s a good deal fewer than those who thought spaghetti grew on trees in 1957 when we put out a similar April fool – not that many in this audience will remember that!

There may be a lesson here somewhere about levels of trust; who knows.

The iPlayer is one of the most obvious embodiments of all the changes that are underway to create a BBC fit for the 21 st century – the topic I’ve been asked to address in this lecture.

But if technology is central to the challenges we face it’s not in itself the real issue – the issue is how audiences respond to technological changes and how we respond to audiences.

So, tonight I’d like to give you the bigger picture. To focus more on the whole future shape of public service broadcasting, in the context of Ofcom’s current review of the sector.

I know it’s often said we live in an ‘age of transition’. Listen to the pundits and we seem perpetually to be in one.

I have a colleague who jokes that, when Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, Adam must have turned to Eve and said: “Eve, we live in an age of transition.”

And we’ve been living in one ever since it seems.

And so my apologies in advance for telling you about yet another transition – though there’s nothing hackneyed about this one.

There’s something special about the combination of forces at work in modern broadcasting, and it’s making for really profound and disruptive change.

The forces we face are, of course, common to many industries: globalisation, digitisation, market fragmentation, the erosion of old regulatory privileges.

All require more agile, efficient and partnered approaches in future.

Certainly, all of them disrupt the current system of public service broadcasting in the UK, and form the backdrop to Ofcom’s current review of our sector.

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