Part Two: Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

Delivering our strategy

Our achievements for the year
and our vision for the future
BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2013/1449

Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

Our achievements
We brought stand-out content, big moments
and the benefit of new technologies to the public;
we began the journey of changing the BBC.

Sherlock
The third series launched on New Year’s Day 2014 withan average audience for the first episode of 12.7 million and3.6 million iPlayer requests, making it the most requested
drama on iPlayer to date.

The FallCommissioned by BBC Northern Ireland and set in Belfast,
it had an average series audience of 4.3 million, the largest fora BBC Two drama series in the last ten years.

Great British Bake Off
The final achieved thebiggest BBC Two audiencein over 10 years.

Winter Olympics
Our coverage of Sochi 2014 reached 33.7 million people, higher
than any of the previous three Winter Olympic Games.
New Year’s Eve
Fireworks
The highest television
audience of 2013.

Britten 100
Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and reached an estimated
1.1 million listeners on radio and requested 97,957 times
via iPlayer in the UK.
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BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2013/14

Part Two: Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

Radio Drama
Radio 4 aired over 600 hours of drama, including a Scottish
season featuring four original dramas about the Stuart dynasty
and dramatisations of three novels by Sir Walter Scott.
Whilst as part of Radio 3’s celebration of the 450th anniversaryof Shakespeare’s birth, we broadcast Anthony and Cleopatra
in full, starring Sir Kenneth Branagh and Alex Kingston.

Glastonbury
For the first time, there were live-streams from the six key
Glastonbury stages giving over 250 hours of coverage, reachinga total Television audience of 19 million and with 12.1 million
requests for live and catch-up content online.

Local RadioGreat dedication was shownin its reporting of the floods
and in its passion for local
sport. BBC Local radio also
rightly performed strongly
at the Radio Academy Awards
with Gold Award wins
for BBC Tees, BBC ThreeCounties, BBC Norfolk, BBC
Ulster, BBC Lincolnshire.

News reaching everyone
BBC TV News coverage on
the night of Nelson Mandela’s
death was watched by
13.38 million people on
BBC One and the BBC News
Channel.

BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2013/14

World War One
To coincide with the start of the BBC’s World War One
season we launched BBC iWonder – interactive guides
designed to unlock the learning potential of all BBC content.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Paxman’s programme, Britain’s Great War,was the BBC One factual series with the highest score of theyear for helping audiences learn something new.

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Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

The Wrong Mans
The highest audience for a comedy launch on BBC Two inseven years, with an average of 4.5 million viewers for theopening episode.

New iPlayerAvailable on over 1,000 different devices and serves
10 million programme requests a day.

CBBCThe My Life documentary series continued to challenge andcelebrate our young audience with real children living
extraordinary lives.

Biggest Commitment to Arts in a generation
We committed extra funding for BBC Arts programming,
appointed strong leadership for the arts, and re-launched
BBC Arts Online as well as The Space, our pioneering online
partnership with Arts Council England.
52Apps
BBC apps have been
downloaded over57 million times.

BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2013/14

A year of change at the BBC
We are building on strong foundations to take the BBC throughto its centenary in 2022, putting the right policies in place to ensurethat we are more efficient, representative, fair and innovative.

A new top team
A new leadership team isin place at the BBC bringing
together the best of talentsfrom inside and outside– with new non-executive
directors bringing a hugebreadth of experience.

A new strategy
We set out a clear ambition
for the BBC to the end of thecurrent Charter with a focus
on quality, innovation andefficiency.

Respect at work
We want zero tolerance ofbullying and a culture wherepeople feel able to raise
concerns and have theconfidence that they will bedealt with appropriately.
Part Two: Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

Women on air
We committed that by the end of 2014 half of BBC Local Radiostations will have a woman presenting the high-profile Breakfast
shows. Other prominent appointments include Mishal Husseinon Today, Ritula Shah on The World Tonight, Carrie Gracie as
the BBC’s first China Editor and Gemma Cairney on Radio 1.

Cap on severance pay
Severance pay has beencapped at £150,000 andwhere staff resign or are maderedundant they are expected
to work their notice in full.

Contributing to thecommunity
Through our own charities
and partnerships with others,
we have helped raise£84.5million across the year.
Birmingham
We are revitalising ourpresence in Birmingham
with a focus on digital skills
and talent development.
Apprenticeships
We are delivering on our commitment tohave 1% of the workforce as apprentices.

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Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

Our vision forthe future
James Purnell
Director, Strategyand Digital‘‘Last year’s Annual Report was written in the shadowof a crisis. In the last twelve months, we have sought
to focus on what audiences need today, and how wecan best serve them in the future. We start from astrong place. The UK has a world-class media sector.
Thanks to everyone at the BBC over the last twentyyears, the BBC has remained a world-class broadcaster.
It hasn’t become the victim of technological change– instead, it has found new ways of informing,
educating and entertaining. People use the BBC
more every week than twenty years ago. We want
to reinvent ourselves again.’’Grayson Perry delivers Radio 4’s Reith Lectures

54We will be doing so in a market where digital technologies havebecome mainstream. For one part of our audience, they now
represent a big part of their media consumption – with young
people consuming close to a quarter of their television on-demandon other screens or via DVD, for example. We are no longer
experimenting with these technologies – they are a normal partof our lives. As an organisation, we’re looking forward to the next
wave of innovations.
But we don’t think these new ways of consuming will replacewhat’s gone before. Radio and television channels meet enduring
human needs – to have an expert find the best of their subject
and put it in front of us; to have commissioners showcase newcontent every week; to watch or listen at home at the same time
as millions of others.
When he arrived at the BBC, Tony Hall asked the management
team to agree a clear direction for the next three years, until theend of this Charter. The BBC has renewed its strategy regularly
over the last twenty years. But this time we faced the newchallenge of innovating in a period of declining income. In pastperiods, the BBC has been able to fund innovation from efficiency.
At this time, we are using those savings to offset the fact thatlicence fee funding for our UK public services will be 26% lower
in real terms by 2016/17 owing to the flat licence fee settlement
and new financial responsibilities. To be able to keep on innovating,
we’ve had to find further savings.

An average audience of 12.7 million viewers
tuned in to see the return of Sherlock

BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2013/14

Rather than try and do everything a bit less well, we decided toprioritise three areas: innovating online, strengthening key
programme genres, and making our channels work even better.
Our proposal to the Trust to move BBC Three online is the best
illustration of what this means. We could have kept salami-slicing
television budgets, but we were worried that would mean fallingbehind in genres like drama, which were set to be cut by tens ofmillions of pounds. Instead, we are proposing to close BBC Three
as a broadcast channel, so as to avoid having to make that cut, butalso to give ourselves a chance of going to where young audiences
will be in five years’ time based on a dialogue with them about
how their media needs and habits are changing.
We want iPlayer to be the best online video and audio player in the world

Innovating online
We have begun the building of a more personalised, social andmobile BBC, offering individual recommendations, participation
and a two-way relationship with our audiences.

We already have plans for a longer catch-up window of 30 days,
more archive material, iPlayer-specific commissions, and thelaunch of BBC Store – a way to buy a whole range of programmes
to watch and keep forever.

iPlayer is central to this. We want it to be the best online video
and audio player in the world and will achieve this by extending itin three ways. Firstly, by offering more content, secondly bydeveloping a truly online TV and radio experience and, finally, bymaking all of this content easier to browse, discover and enjoy.

But that is just the start. In particular, we expect iPlayer to bea key platform on which BBC Three launches as an online-only
television service from the autumn of 2015 – subject to BBC
Trust approval of our plans.

From new programming exclusive toBBC iPlayer, to new online and pop-up
channels around special interests ormajor events, BBC iPlayer will bebursting with more content than ever.

Part Two: Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

But the BBC Three decision is only one of the many ways in which
we are implementing this strategy.

BBC Four’s Inspector De Luca on BBC iPlayer

Danny Cohen, Director of BBC Television

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Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

Strengthening key genres
As part of the strategy, we agreed to find an extra £100million p.a.
in savings by 2016/17, so as to strengthen key parts of BBC output.
In some areas, this was because without the BBC there would bea clear market failure. In music, for example, key industry players
had been telling us that our role in breaking new music andexposing it beyond niche audiences was becoming indispensable,
as business models change and fragment. They wanted us to domore. So we’re expanding BBC Introducing, providing theindustry with a pipeline of brilliant new British musical talent andoffering unrivalled opportunities for new artists. And we launched
Playlister, which lets audiences tag and remember any piece ofmusic they hear on the BBC across all programmes and genres,
get recommendations from their favourite DJs, and replay it on
their preferred streaming service.
The same was true of the arts, so in March 2013 we made theBBC’s greatest commitment to arts for a generation. Arts willtake centre-stage across the BBC with a new topical strand taking
audiences to music and arts events across the UK. There will be a
new online service, closer engagement with artists andinstitutions, more distinctive arts content across all the BBC’schannels, and stronger leadership for the arts.

We have also re-launched The Space, our pioneering online
partnership with Arts Council England, where we’ll work withartists and performers from all creative industries to commission
new kinds of digital art and digital performance, and to find thenext generation of talent. The arts are at the heart of the BBC
and our ambition is to be even better.
In other areas, we wanted to invest to make sure that weremained world-class. That wasn’t just true of drama – it is also
the case in News, where we want to build on the inheritance ofthe World Service. Audiences tell us how well the BBC helps
them understand what is going on in the wider world and how
much they value the BBC’s global role. We are proud that wereach 265 million people per week through the BBC’s Global
News Services. It would be a terrible waste not to build on that,
so we have set ourselves the stretching ambition of doublingthat number by 2022. In the short term, thanks to these savings,
we expect the budget of the World Service to rise, and we will
strengthen original and investigative journalism both on theWorld Service and in the UK.

The Glastonbury Festival Pyramid Stage during the Rolling Stones’ headline performance56

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BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2013/14

Making our channels even better
By strengthening those programme areas, we will strengthen ourchannels. The great drama series or world-class news that wehope they will produce will keep BBC One and BBC Two as masschannels. By doing so, we will continue to be able to deliver therange of content that our public purposes require: challenging,
new, distinctive and different, from comedy to current affairs,
science to religion. Nearly 90% of viewing is still live; audiences are
telling us with their remote controls that they love channels; so wewill continue serving those needs.
That’s also why we want to launch a BBC One +1 service, if
approved by the BBC Trust. Our audiences love the convenienceof +1 channels. Indeed, they can’t quite understand why the BBC
doesn’t offer them one. Every other public service broadcasterdoes. Licence fee payers have funded these programmes – weshould make it convenient for them to watch them, so they get asmuch value as possible from their investment.

Technology can also help make channels work better. Audiences
will be able to go back in time – through the backwards
programme guide on YouView, for example, or into the future tocreate their own schedule from programmes we release early.
We will take this even further with channels that are more
personal and know more about what you like, what your friends
like, and what you might want to watch next.
And – to finish where this section started – we are also using thenew BBC Three to pioneer how channels will work in the future.
BBC Three online will continue to have the things we all cherish
most about the service – innovative comedy, unrivalled current
affairs for young people, incisive and entertaining factual, andoriginal entertainment. But it will also have the freedom to breaktraditional shackles – a wonderful creative opportunity to develop
new formats with new programme lengths and to reach young
audiences in an ever-growing number of ways.

Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan star in BBC Films
co-production Philomena

BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2013/14

Part Two: Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

As part of the strategy, we decided not to make BBC Four an artsand music channel. Not only did we believe that arts and musicshould be the responsibility of the whole BBC, we also listened tothose who told us they loved BBC Four as it was, a channel thataims to be the most innovative in British television.

Melvin O’Doom, Nick Grimshaw and Rochelle Humesfrom BBC Three’s Sweat the Small Stuff

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Strategic report – Delivering our strategy

The BBC and Charter review
This strategy is about what the BBC will do for the next threeyears. The Government recently announced that Charter review
will not start until after the Election. We were happy to see theBBC being taken out of the electoral cycle in this way.
To prepare for that, we will now develop our proposals for that
Charter review, so that we can give audiences and decisionmakers an exciting set of options for the future.
We look forward to that debate. We believe that the BBC is oneof the reasons why Britain is one of the most competitive andsuccessful media markets in the world. After the US, the UK is
the largest exporter of TV programmes in the world1. The UK
is one of only three net exporters of music2. We recently
commissioned a study of how audiences around the world rate
their television services on quality. Out of 14 countries the UK
emerged as the leader with 72% of the British public rating
their television service as good quality – the highest out of all
the countries surveyed. Out of 66 major TV channels aroundthe world, BBC One received the highest score of all. BBC Newsis the most trusted in the world.

The BBC is also an indispensable part of everyday life. For 40p
a day, households consume on average six hours of information,education and entertainment. That’s amazing value. And weare critical to the cultural health of the UK, finding, training,developing and supporting new talent: writers, actors, artists,musicians, journalists and technical staff.
So, as we approach Charter review, we’ll be on the lookout
for ways of improving what we do. It’s because we believe thatthe system works pretty well, that we’ll be very interested indiscussing alternatives. It would be a sign of lack of confidence
to want to close down debate. The BBC matters a lot – and thiswill be an important choice about the future of the BBC.

1 Communications Chamber, Creatve UK, The Audiovisual Sector and Economic success, 2011.
2 PRS for music economic research, 2012.

Gillian Anderson in BBC Northern Ireland’s crime drama The Fall58

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BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2013/14