Digital Media Initiative
Date | Event |
---|---|
February 2008 | DMI promoted by director of BBC Technology Ashley Highfield; BBC Trust approves scheme and £81m funding. Project is outsourced to Siemens. |
December 2009 | Siemens contract is terminated in £27.5m settlement; BBC losses amount to £10.7m. Project is brought in-house. |
March 2010 | New DMI business plan rejected by the BBC Finance Committee |
February 2011 | National Audit Office criticises the DMI project |
June 2011 | DMI is partly outsourced to a consortium of three IT companies: Computacenter, Mediasmiths & Vidispine. |
May 2013 | BBC cancels DMI |
The Digital Media Initiative (DMI) was a British broadcast engineering project launched by the BBC in 2008. It aimed to modernise the Corporation's production and archiving methods by using connected digital production and media asset management systems. After a protracted development process lasting five years with a spend of £98 million between 2010 and 2012, the project was finally abandoned in May 2013.[2][3]
Initial impetus and relaunch
The technology programme was initiated by the director of BBC Technology
Costs of the project rose after a number of technical problems and delays, and in 2009 the BBC terminated its contract with Siemens.
When we checked in with Siemens to look at, "Okay, where are these deliverables? Where is the software?" it turned out that the project was not going according to plan at all.[...] So, basically, the relationship with Siemens with regards to DMI was [...] rather distant.
— Erik Huggers, Evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, 15 February 2011
After the termination of the Siemens contract, the DMI project was
In 2012, it was reported that BBC staff who worked on a number of projects including DMI had suffered from severe
Developments in 2013-14
According to a report in The Guardian, problems emerged in April 2013 during the coverage by
In late May 2013 the Director-General of the BBC, Lord Hall, announced that the project was to be abandoned and that the BBC's chief technology officer, John Linwood, was to be suspended pending an external investigation into the management of the DMI project.[2][3][15] It was subsequently revealed that a senior BBC manager had expressed grave doubts about DMI to the BBC Chairman Lord Patten one year before the project was cancelled. He had also claimed that there was a "very significant risk" that the National Audit Office had been misled about the actual progress of DMI in 2011. Other BBC executives had also voiced similar concerns for about two years before DMI was abandoned.[16]
The NAO commenced an inquiry into the failure of the project and commissioned accountancy firm
On 24 January 2014, the BBC confirmed that the contract of former technology chief John Linwood had been terminated the previous July due to the failure of the Digital Media Initiative.[18]
On 10 April 2014, the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts presented the "BBC Digital Media Initiative, Fifty-second Report of Session 2013–14" in which it defines the project as a "complete failure" [19]
See also
References
- ^ a b Bevir, George (24 May 2013). "DMI: from beta to bust". Broadcast. Retrieved 25 May 2013.(subscription required)
- ^ a b "BBC abandons £100m digital project". BBC News. 24 May 2013. Retrieved 25 May 2013.
- ^ a b "BBC closes Digital Media Initiative". BBC press release. 24 May 2013. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
- ^ "Cinegy & Siemens, Enabling Media Technology for Digital Media Initiative at Major UK Broadcaster". Cinegy company website. Archived from the original on 9 December 2012. Retrieved 24 May 2013.
- ISBN 978-1136033612.
- ^ Rushton, Katherine (10 December 2009). "BBC ditches Siemens from £80m DMI scheme". Broadcast. Retrieved 15 February 2012.
- ^ "BBC Loses £38 Million In Failed Digital Media Initiative". ITProPortal. Retrieved 15 February 2012.
- ^ Plunkett, John (1 February 2011). "BBC IT project criticised by audit office". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 15 February 2012.
- ^ "Oral evidence Taken before the Public Accounts Committee" (PDF). The BBC’s management of its Digital Media Initiative. House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts. 15 February 2011. p. 20.
- ^ "Digital Media Initiative". BBC. Archived from the original on 10 March 2012. Retrieved 15 February 2012.
- ^ "Enabling the BBC" (PDF). BBC Annual Report 2009/10. Part 2: BBC Executive's review and assessment: 2.44. 16 August 2010. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
- ^ Rushton, Katherine (11 February 2012). "BBC spends £19,000 treating stressed out staff at The Priory". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 15 February 2012.
- ^ Conlan, Tara (11 February 2012). "BBC's Thatcher coverage highlights problems with non-digital archives". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 3 May 2013.
- ^ Conlan, Tara (3 May 2013). "BBC's troubled £133m digital video archive delays 'tapeless' future". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 3 May 2013.
- ^ Conlan, Tara (24 May 2013). "BBC axes £98m technology project to avoid 'throwing good money after bad'". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 May 2013.
- ^ Conlan, Tara (5 June 2013). "BBC Digital Media Initiative project doomed to failure, Lord Patten was told". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
- ^ Halliday, Josh (10 June 2013). "BBC accused of misleading parliament over 'catastrophic' digital media project". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 June 2013.
- ^ "Former BBC technology boss sacked over failed project", ‘’BBC’’, 24 January 2014
- ^ "BBC's Digital Media Initiative a complete failure", ‘’BBC’’, 10 April 2014
External links
- "The BBC's management of its Digital Media Initiative". Independent report commissioned by the BBC Trust from the National Audit Office. National Audit Office. 1 February 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
- Kallinikos, J. and J.-C. Mariátegui (2011). "Video as Digital Object: Production and Distribution of Video Content in the Internet Media Ecosystem". The Information Society. 27 (4): 281–294. S2CID 17395381. (An empirical research based on DMI)