BBC axes digital system that has wasted £98m

 
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Gideon Spanier24 May 2013

The BBC has scrapped a multi-million-pound attempt to create an internal digital production system after director general Tony Hall said the scheme had “wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money”.

The Digital Media Initiative (DMI) has cost £98.4 million since it was started in 2008.

Mr Hall said: “The DMI project has wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money and I saw no reason to allow that to continue, which is why I have closed it.

“I have serious concerns about how we managed this project and the review that has been set up is designed to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned.

“Ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure. It does not mean we should not attempt them but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here”.

The BBC has suspended its chief technology officer John Linwood while the review is carried out by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, “to establish what went wrong”.

The DMI was an attempt to link the corporation’s vast broadcasting archive to a digital system making it more accessible to staff.

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