BCD0002
Written evidence submitted by Prof Philip Jackson
(Professor of Machine Listening at Centre for Vision Speech & Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey)
This evidence addresses the National Audit Office's inquiry into the digital transformation of the BBC, considering whether it is on track to deliver value, has robust plans, and appropriate resourcing and governance to achieve this transformation. This document expresses the personal expert opinion of Professor Philip Jackson of the Centre for Vision, Speech & Signal Processing at the University of Surrey and Fellow of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence.
He has investigated state-of-the-art engineering research with the BBC since 2006 including UK Research Council funded research projects in collaboration with BBC R&D (e.g., "QESTRAL" EP/D041244/1; "S3A" EP/L000539/1). Currently he leads activities within the BBC-EPSRC funded prosperity partnership ("AI4ME" EP/V038087/1), which aims to develop novel technologies in the area of smart media. Smart media is a term used here to encompass technologies built on object-based media (OBM) in combination with Internet protocol (IP) distribution and delivery, which enable flexible and personalised media experiences to be provided to mass audiences.
The current wave of digital transformation is not the BBC's first and nor will it be its last. This wave is not about digital television or digital radio or continuing with the BBC's existing broadcasting practises through new transmission devices. This wave is much more wide-ranging in its implications: it brings the full gamut of BBC services across all media and modern experiences into the Internet age, with semantic and interactive capabilities embedded into its infrastructure, to provide completely new kinds of service and support completely new kinds of experience. This is a transformation to smart media.
To realise this transformation's potential, the BBC must re-imagine what its values mean in the smart media landscape and therefore re-define its contributions to inform, educate and entertain the public. In the domains of news and opinion, we have seen how the wide-scale use of the digitally-native (smart) social media platforms has challenged national identity, representation and diversity, and the security of national institutions. Online, one can find opportunities also for personal development and training on the one hand, and connectedness and support on the other. The transformation of the BBC's impartial, high quality and distinctive services into this algorithmic arena therefore presents a complex set of nested challenges.
I will now discuss the main areas that will be affected through this wave of transformation towards smart media: media technology, media production, and the creative economy, media-related culture and wider societal impacts.
This digital transformation is a technology-led change bringing the opportunity to offer new kinds of service to audiences and embedding BBC values into the algorithms, processes and systems that support large-scale automation of personalised media distribution. Using secure authenticated IP connectivity, distributed storage, streaming and processing of object-based content, and flexible, interactive presentation of wrap-around media provision, the entire media distribution system becomes a platform for personalised information, education and entertainment services. In terms of technological development, the beauty of this digitally-transformed system is that services can be redesigned and redeployed ubiquitously through software updates, rather than requiring wide-scale hardware interventions (e.g., to broadcast transmission network, set-top boxes or consumer devices). Thus incremental advancements can accumulate until these universal personalised services become unrecognisable in relation to current or contemporary instantiations.
Examples of these improvements may include alternative language, subtitles and audio description, variable speed playback as on YouTube and BBC News, dialogue enhancement with Dolby Atmos, recommendation systems on Netflix or Spotify, immersive media such as Virtual Reality headsets or Augmented Reality glasses, Amazon's X-Ray feature to view bonus material on Prime Video, and advanced features in iPlayer such as chapter points, enhanced audio and live match stats. Further examples are found in Ofcom's 2021 report on Object-Based Media (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/technology/general/object-based-media).
With the digital backbone put in place to support layers of features over the top of media-on-demand delivery, here lies a wealth of opportunity to develop advanced personalised services through user interaction and analysis. After decades of research and experimentation with object-based media, it is now abundantly clear that UK media industry is poised to capitalise on its leading position as new features and applications of this smart media technology reveal themselves. These encompass both technological opportunities and creative opportunities, now discussed, to deliver positive economic, cultural and ultimately social impacts.
As print news media went online, the focus has shifted from the columnist's printed prose towards social media platforms that can exploit the opportunities of delivering news in new formats (Apple News, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.); the currency has changed from those column inches to threads, likes, recommendations and retweets as the audience's attention scrolls their feeds of online personalities and influencers. Analogously, the transformation from broadcast slots in the programming schedule to online delivery means that there will be opportunities for new entrants to create new services and new forms of experience. The implications of this wave of digital transformation with the use of smart media are as significant for broadcast production as live satellite TV in the 1960s when the Moon landing reached global audiences of hundreds of millions, or as smartphones could first play media in the 2000s, the time when BBC iPlayer was launched. Now, through the use of smart media, bespoke access to a personalised version of a core experience is provided that can be tailored to a multitude of devices and presentation formats. Consequently, this affords much greater capability and power to those smart-media platforms that attract large-scale audiences.
Since the early 2000s, broadcast media have seen increased competition from social media, streaming services and online gaming. As the BBC transforms from a broadcast organisation into a smart media platform, it supports the UK powerhouse of skills and talent in these related contemporary creative industries. The UK's creative industry is a strong, rich, vibrant, diverse, fluid and adventurous industry, in part supported through the training and cultural influences that the BBC has pioneered and continues to champion. In these new awakening media markets, a transformed digital BBC may nurture, cultivate and evolve this peach in the UK's economy that has proven time and again its global appeal and influence.
Within media production, this transformation will change the culture from that of working with live footage or for a release date to that of an ever-evolving campaign or event; a shift from the production edit to various entry points and versions for different viewers, with content re-used, re-formatted and re-purposed to reach people in different ways. Equally, in terms of the BBC's social function, the role of the smart media platform inevitably encodes social values within its algorithms. Thus, the goal is to build public trust in those automations such that they embody the BBC's values and broader mission.
The scale of this digital transformation in the BBC is huge as it undergoes metamorphosis from broadcaster to platform. The required changes implicate technical, production, culture and the BBC's social contract, touching all aspects of its current enterprise. Technical changes include new tools, systems, their technical development, testing and support, and widespread training in the use of these new tools. From the production perspective, the creative use of these tools is yet to be established fully and disseminated; there is a need to provide input to their development and testing, to assume a mindset shift, to adopt new workflows, to define new roles and to find new paths for agile, efficient production. For BBC culture to maintain its core values across smart media, it must now develop new training, policies and processes to prioritise those values more explicitly, including ethical reflection and review as part of business as usual. The social contract in the relationship between BBC and its audiences, that has relied on the BBC's editorial track record, its high-quality content and thorough transparent processes, must find new mechanisms to build trust. As values become encoded within algorithms, public engagement to debate those solutions is needed to ensure consistency, meanwhile allowing the BBC to continue to be probing and challenging in a way that remains consensual. Fundamentally, there is a need to redefine public service broadcasting for this new age of smart media: streaming, social, flexible, personal media that is touching all our lives.
To advance this agenda, the government is called on to provide long-term strategic funding to support this nationally important digital transformation:
The current context reveals more than a decade of production trials to explore what smart media or object-based media (OBM) offer, significant R&D activities aligned around OBM technology, new OBM systems and processes under development with key world-leading partners, ongoing exploration of ethics and audience value, and a nascent connexion of OBM practice to mainstream production, such as with BBC Studios and third-party production houses. BBC needs to accelerate its transformation from a broadcaster that distils and transmits to the masses into a values-based smart-media platform that curates diverse signals and distributes to provide tailored access. This requires a fundamental shift in mindset to permeate all parts of this monolithic institution, meanwhile its operations remain lean, agile, distributed and diverse. Steady and secured financial and political support from government can hasten and boost confidence to seize the opportunity of this smart-media digital transformation that the UK is uniquely positioned to grasp.
January 2023