Stef Lewandowski
Create something every day

Photo by Bounder in The Big Picture

In short - they’re investing in media production outside London and they see Birmingham as being important to delivering on that promise. (Like this new summary idea? Leave a comment…)

Last night I was invited down to an evening drinks affair hosted by the BBC’s top 150 ‘leaders’ including Sir Michael Lyons and Mark Thompson. It was at the end of the first day of an annual conference that they run to share ideas about the future strategy of the corporation. This year, they’ve chosen Birmingham as the location, which in itself is positive.

I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to publish some of the things that were said, but Sir Michael gave a very promising speech. I paraphrase:

The BBC has a commitment to 50% of programming and production being delivered outside of London. Birmingham will continue to grow and see investment so that it continues to be a BBC production hub.

There’s been rumours abounding that with the new Salford centre in Manchester that Birmingham might start seeing less of an investment. From where I was standing it certainly seemed that they wanted to reassure the room that the opposite was true.

Chatting to some of the important BBC types who were there, I asked a few about programming - how come Birmingham/West Midlands just doesn’t seem to have anything on TV that represents the region culturally. It’s a ‘me too’ argument, but seriously - almost all regions of the UK seem to have some kind of representation on TV. The answer was generally that Birmingham generally does lots of much-need ‘behind the scenes’ work. Half of the BBC’s online production is done here, for instance. Interesting…

Also the hot topic was looking at how to exploit the BBC’s unique position in World media. Should Americans who want to watch the iPlayer (obviously not American Mac users ;-P) have to pay for the service. If so, would that open up potential revenues that could boost the BBC’s competitiveness? Would that then be unfair to independent broadcasters?

And @dubber twittered that I should ask ‘do they realise they aren’t in broadcast any more?’, which I dutifully did. The answer - they definitely do. They’re finding it more and more difficult to see into the future. The length of time that can be realistically ‘finger-in-the-aired’ is shortening over time. Changes are afoot and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about some radical new business models and ideas coming out of the BBC in the next few years. Could this be an opportunity for Birmingham to step in on the change and be innovative?

Anita Bhalla seems to think so - her department is responsible for perhaps the biggest number of job increases in BBC Birmingham.

Hmm. Maybe we shouldn’t just be thinking about what the Americans want to watch and start looking East as well as West?