[Keith]

Speech by DG Tim Davie today on the future of the BBC. Seems a bit light on detail of if there will be cuts and what they will be. Rather comically, the feed of Tim Davie's speech cut halfway through - could easily be an allegory of the modern BBC.

www.bbc.co.uk 

www.bbc.co.uk 

Perhaps worth noting is...

One area that we will discuss with government is the World Service. It is uniquely valuable and globally important, particularly in light of the trends that I talked about earlier.

However, we cannot keep asking UK Licence Fee payers to invest in it when we face cuts to UK services. We will need to discuss a long-term funding solution for the World Service that comes from central government budgets. Even in the short-term we will need more help. Russia and China are investing hard, and not properly funding one of the UK’s most valuable soft power assets makes no sense economically or culturally.

I'm guessing this will possibly be used as leverage for additional funding, as well as the charter renewal / future of the licence fee. Arguably the BBC World Service is more of a mouthpiece for the UK government, compared to the BBC in general. I dare say there's the hint that cuts could come in this area if additional funding is not provided (or licence fee gets frozen again).

There's also the slight curious bit of...

As part of this, we will accelerate our content spend towards streaming value and away from broadcast-only output. We will deliver more value for younger audiences by focusing all our commissioning, marketing and social media activity on BBC iPlayer rather than through BBC Three’s linear channel.

Maybe this implies they're considering repurposing BBC Three to be less youth focused and more of a general channel? I dare say doing so would make it easier for if/when BBC Four closes, as well as during major sporting / live music events.