The BBC has cut its losses by binning its flagship digitization program after spending $150 million and in the process squandering some of its reputation for technical capability that reached a peak in the afterglow of its London Olympics coverage.
For other broadcasters currently engaged in similar exercises the lessons are that digitization is a complex exercise that is doomed to fail if undertaken as a big bang rather than a series of smaller projects that each moves closer to the ultimate goal of end to end all digital archiving, storage, production and workflow. This was the BBC’s objective in its Digital Media Initiative (DMI) to enable entirely tapeless production, based on digitizing its entire media archive. Highly ambitious in scope, DMI, otherwise known as ‘BBC Fabric’, failed for reasons familiar to students of grand IT projects.
Some clues can be found in a recent survey by US management consultancy group McKinsey, which looked at 1400 IT projects costing $15 million or more and identified a vast litany of failure to deliver either the anticipated benefits, be on time, or on budget, often failing on all three counts. The relevant finding here was that many projects failed for one or more of four reasons, firstly being off focus with unclear objectives and lack of business direction; secondly poor execution with unrealistic scheduling and planning being reactive rather than proactive; thirdly content related issues with shifting requirements and technical complexity; and fourthly skill related issues.
The BBC’s failure can almost entirely be attributed to the third category, although not so much shifting requirements as a moving technical target with technologies evolving quickly. Although the stated goal of digitization sounds clear enough it does not define many parameters such as resolution for storage, what the underlying media will be, how it will be managed and what bandwidth will be required for communication. There is no such thing as an end game in digitization and so the objective should be to create a vehicle suitable for what will be a continuous journey involving adoption of new standards and restaging of content to new media.
The BBC has been guilty of hubris in attempting to go it alone at a time when other broadcasters have at least in part been collaborating, for example through the European PestoPrime project, which has been researching and developing practical solutions for long-term preservation of digital media objects, programs and collections. This has also been examining ways of integrating the media archives with European on-line digital libraries in a digital preservation framework. The end product is supposed to be a range of tools and services delivered through a networked Competence Centre and available to all broadcasters. Naturally the BBC has contributed to such initiatives but has fallen on its sword for attempting to jump the gun when it has one of the most complex and extensive media archives in the world.
Perhaps the BBC should have waited for PestoPrime since it does provide much of the underlying framework it needed for its project. It is in tune with how broadcasters should be approaching workflow digitization, creating a preservation framework incorporating risk management and content quality and corruption control measures capable of supporting audio-visual signal migration and preservation methods, using federated services for distributing and storing content. It also uses fingerprints to track and manage content and ensure that where relevant digital rights are enforced.
But ‘BBC Fabric’ kicked off in 2008 before such tools were available, which meant the BBC had to develop its own. It stuttered along, with the first outward evidence of problems coming in April 2011, when the UK Public Accounts Committee criticized the scheme.
It was then interrupted late in 2012 when the BBC Trust set up an internal review. This has finally reported that the initiative had been badly managed beyond repair and had failed to keep pace with evolving production and video storage management technology. The new chief executive at the BBC Tony Hall has now described it as ‘a huge waste of license fee payers’ money’. He cited ‘serious concerns about how we managed this project. It’s struggled to keep pace with new developments and requirements both within the BBC and the wider broadcasting industry.’
The original estimate was $125 million so in cutting its losses the BBC has spent more than the entire project was supposed to cost. At a time when it is seeking to cut costs its reputational damage has been amplified. It also means that the anticipated benefits will take longer to materialize if they do at all, since it had been hoped that by 2015 the project would have already paid back its costs in operational savings, with prospects also of revenue generation through digital asset sales.
For the BBC, full asset digitization could bring significant revenues from access to its digital library and use of its digital infrastructure for expatriate viewing, as well as extending the export opportunities via the overseas version of its iPlayer platform. It risks now falling behind other broadcasters in Europe and elsewhere that are only now proceeding with digitization having started later, in some cases using technology that the BBC has contributed as well as learning from its unhappy experience.
NBC for example has only just started digitizing its vast library of sports content dating back 80 years in the case of Olympics footage, having been waiting for the technology to mature, but now believes it will bring big advantages in attracting and holding onto viewers by enriching content. Sports fans tend to be addicted to trivia and NBC anticipated being able to dredge up relevant footage from its archives within seconds in response to asides from commentators or tweets from viewers say. The ability to search and play content almost instantly from anywhere in the archive is the principle goal of the project.
The project has yet to deliver and NBC too is be-devilled with some of the same issues, with multiple formats to deal with, including 2 inch film, 1-inch, DigiBeta, and HDCAM. But it has waited and outsourced part of the project to Deluxe MediaRecall, with the objective being to create a searchable archive within a fully file-based production workflow at its Stamford facility. The BBC initially outsourced its DMI project to Siemens but then brought it back in-house in the belief ironically this would hasten delivery and maintain focus. To some extent though this is a warning that it does not pay to be ahead of your time.