Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on May 17, 1999:
Sir John Birt
Thank you very much, Curtis, and thank you to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. When I see the list of speakers that have come before you, I was really honored to receive the invitation. It’s a great pleasure to be speaking in this lovely city of Los Angeles, genuinely one of my favorite cities anywhere in the world.
I’m in California for a number of different reasons. First, mostly to visit here in Los Angeles, San Francisco and later in the week in Seattle. I’m here to visit the pioneering "wild west" of new technology. Curtis just told you a little about the BBC’s history. The BBC, it is interesting to note just over 75 years ago, was itself launched in a period of revolutionary technological change, since that’s what radio was and interestingly--visiting this week a number of new start-up businesses, one this afternoon in Los Angeles-- the BBC was itself a technology-led organization. It was formed by a consortium of wireless manufacturers in the UK who had this wonderful technology and wanted the consumers to take it up and decided that nobody seemed to be willing to provide any programs.
So all these technologists got together and decided that they would find a way of doing it, too, and what they did was to appoint a most remarkable man, a man called John Reith. He was a great big, tall, 6 foot 7 inch Scot, formidable, energetic, irascible, unflappable, son of a manse. When he became Director General of the BBC back in 1922, he was 33 years old and an engineer--not surprising that they should appoint an engineer in all the circumstances. But he nearly didn’t take the job at the BBC, because the alternative was to build a railway system in the Amazon and he balanced up the options and decided to instead run the BBC, and he turned into a true visionary. He invented, he and his colleagues created an institution which invented much of what broadcasting became. He helped invent whole new ways of doing things, which frankly, a lot of the rest of the world learned from and copied.
Interestingly, somebody is here tonight who introduced himself to me on the way in, Jeffery Samuels. I don’t know whether he’s known to all of you. He tells me that he worked with the BBC in the 1930s , [and] he met the person I’m speaking of, which I never did, so the World Affairs Council is connected to the BBC in this way. [John Reith] had a buccaneering enterprising spirit, again the spirit of the times, wherein he had a "can do" attitude. One of the reasons for the music and people, again not much known, was that John Reith actually, before he became Director General of the BBC, worked for quite a long time in America. He confided to his own diary at the time, and I quote from his diary: "I acquired an American outlook and adopted much of American practice and procedure and above all tuned into American tempo. I was too young to move quickly in England." And I think it was some of that "can do" attitude he learned in America that enabled him to be so bold and enterprising when he started the BBC. He was also a man famously confident about his own abilities and, again, a quote from his
diary-- he wrote [that]--soon after the BBC’s inception--and I quote: "What a curse it is to have outstanding comprehensive ability and intelligence, combined with the drive to use them to maximum purpose." Something which I suspect a lot of us have felt from time to time.
Reith was a fantastic operator and he soon learned to butter up the British establishment--which is a vital thing for any Director General of the BBC to learn to do. After being Director General for just a year or so he invited the Archbishop of Canterbury and his wife around to dinner at his own private home because, again, this was a new technology and lots of people hadn’t heard it. There weren’t many wireless sets in the homes, so the Archbishop was invited to dinner and they sat down to dinner. The radio in the dining room was switched on, and this caused a great deal of surprise to the Archbishop and his wife. So the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife said, "I’m absolutely astonished that the radio waves can travel through the windows! I was expecting you’d have to open the windows so that the radio waves were let in." But, no, radio waves travel through glass, she was told. The Archbishop of Canterbury then frowned and complained about the music. A symphony was playing, and the Archbishop of Canterbury thought the symphony wasn’t a very good accompaniment to dinner, that it was sort of loud and crushing. And my distinguished predecessor tiptoed out of the room and using another piece of new technology at the time, the telephone, made a telephone call. As the next movement of the symphony drew to the end it was replaced by a sweet Schubert piano sonata. This was the first known example of interactivity in broadcasting.
The early days of the BBC had a wild improvised quality. Dame Nellie Melba popped in one day to sing. The BBC’s first chief engineer each day would sing the theme tune of the children’s hour in a high tenor voice, and there was a sign put up straight away in the studio because people weren’t used to performing in this new media; the sign said "Don’t Cough or You’ll Deafen Millions."
Reith was a very severe figure, he was uncomfortable with popular culture. He hated the Charleston, and tried to ban it from the BBC, and he was strict about other people’s, if not his own, morals; he refused to allow a lady violinist to play on the radio because she was a divorcée. He hated competition, and kept all the competitors away during his time as Director General. Commercial television didn’t start in the United Kingdom until the ‘50s and Reith, in retirement, said, famously, that he thought commercial television was worse than smallpox, the black death and greyhound racing. He believed in quality and integrity. He was a visionary, and he helped create a very important cultural institution. He created an institution which was absolutely dedicated to supporting and buttressing Britain’s and the United Kingdom’s rich national culture, broadly defined, working with the best writers, the best comedians, the best actors, the best directors, working within the grain of our national culture and trying always to break the mold, to pioneer, to do interesting, arresting and important work in every sphere of the art. He created an institution which was dedicated to insuring that our national debate in the United Kingdom is a properly informed and vigorous one and informed by a determination--we don’t say we’ve achieved it, but we always try to support the national debate with a core of journalists who are interested in what is significant and who are properly the experts in all their fields.
We have the largest news-gathering operation of any broadcaster anywhere in the world, right round the world and, of course, in our own country, and we try to do our best to make sure that all the things that matter in the United Kingdom are properly discussed and have the widest possible number of people talking about them. Right from our inception as an organization, we’ve always had a very clear educational role, education very broadly defined. We’ve tried to widen the horizons of every single person in the country with programs about science or all the arts or natural history or our own history, our own history as a country, or tried to tell the history of the world. Again, Curtis has mentioned the death of Yugoslavia. I don’t know how many people saw it, but there was a remarkable series which went back over the last ten years and painstakingly delineated the current causes of that conflict in that part of the world.
The organization that [John Reith] helped create and which flourished for decades thereafter now faces, together with other broadcasters in the world, possibly the biggest challenge in its history. For technological reasons, for the last 75 years broadcasting has used analog technology to create and transmit its programs. That technology has had a profound impact on the very forms of broadcasting, and its given way, and its starting to happen already, but it’s given way to a completely different technology with different characteristics, digital technology. The first and most obvious characteristic of digital technology is that we move away from the world of scarcity, which has been the hallmark of broadcasting for most of the 75 years. That’s been changing over the last years as we’ve invented a multichannel environment. But by and large, in America and other countries, the hallmark of a relatively small number of national networks is available to viewers and to listeners. We literally are moving gradually into a world where, in theory, an infinity of services are possible, from a world of scarcity to a world of plenty. It’s an interactive world. Broadcasting, again, hasn’t been interactive. The broadcasters decide what to transmit, it goes out in real time, and the only interactivity has been the phone calls or letters of complaints. New technology allows the viewer, the listener and the user the feedback that is used [to connect] directly to the broadcaster, to become involved in a way that hadn’t been possible before these things. As any of you know who use the Internet, these things are happening really quite powerfully already.
The third characteristic is going to be a world of "on-demand." As I said, in the world of television and radio networks, the audience got what it wanted at the time that the broadcasters decided. Again, we thought it happened in the Internet, but over the next ten years, increasingly you’re going to be able to receive any program of your choice, at a time of your choice. You will decide what you want to watch or what you want to listen to. It’s going to be a world of much greater access to all. Again, this will be dominated by a relatively small number of powerful players due to the commercially-funded, or, like the BBC, publicly funded. The new technologies mean that the cost of program-making will drop and the cost of distributing programs will drop severely as well, and all sorts of individuals and small organizations are going to be able to make programs and offer them to the consumer.
Another characteristic of the technology, and again, very important but not much commented upon, is the growing power of memory. In the space of probably under ten years every single program that the BBC makes in a single week can be contained on a small disk. Your television set or your setup box is going to have fantastic memory capability, and that will mean, essentially, that you’ll be able to have your own library, your own archives, in your home. You’re going to have a lot more choices, not just on-line, but from the sources that you yourself control. This is going to be an inevitable mobile world. Screen technology is improving the whole time, you’re going to be able to fold up a screen in your pocket, take out that screen, unfold it, and it’s going to connect you to all the riches of the digital world and give you very high quality pictures to see them on. That’s not here yet but it’s going to be here quite quickly.
This is going to be a truly global world. There has always been some global broadcasting on shortwave, across national frontiers, but primarily broadcasting has grown up as an experience behind national frontiers, highly regulated by governments right across the world, less so here than in most countries. But these new technologies will not respect national frontiers and all the things that I’ve talked about and the availability of material will be true right across the world. It’s not just to be able to see and hear what you want, you’ll be able to get it from anywhere in the world--and that has quite profound implications.
Finally, and this isn’t an exhaustive list even though it’s long, the competition for the attention of the viewer on the screen is going to grow and grow and grow because the screen in your home, and, with convergence, whether it’s your television screen or the PC screen on your desktop at home or at work, not only entertainment and classical television programs are going to go through that screen but the whole world of retail. These things have already started happening. You know, you can order your Gap t-shirts on the Internet already, or your groceries, or whatever, but that’s just the beginning. A huge amount of economic value is going to go through that screen: financial transactions, and transactions of all kinds. You will be able to research your holiday and book it through the screen. The competition for the attention of the viewer or the consumer is going to be enormous and the competition to control the gateway is going to be enormous as well. Any one of the characteristics alone would have a profound impact on the world of broadcasting but, taken together, I think they justify the word "revolutionary."
Certainly in the BBC we see the digital age that we’re coming into as being a bigger landmark in our history, as was the introduction of radio in the ‘20s, as was the beginning of the television in the late ‘30-- although it didn’t really get going until after the Second World War. All the things I’ve talked about are probably going to happen, but not happen immediately. It may take ten years, it may take fifteen, it may take a generation for the whole world to become a totally digital world. I strongly suspect that will happen but we won’t be sitting around waiting for it to happen one day, it’s already starting to happen, in all sorts of important ways. A whole host of changes will come at us like an express train, and we’re going to see the whole as we have done in recent years, particularly with the Internet. We’re going to see the world change incrementally but with some speed on this journey to a total digital future.
There are huge opportunities for organizations like the BBC. We see these technologies now as we saw television decades ago. We see these technologies as offering us powerful opportunities to serve our license payers, our customers and further enrich their lives. We’ve been constrained by the analog world. We can offer a lot more choices, a lot more BBC programs available for people to see, we can offer far greater convenience, we’ll move into the world of demanding people--and if they miss the BBC program they will be able to summon it up on demand. We’re already offering improved convenience moving into 24-hour news, we’ll offer far greater involvement to our license payers for greater participation in our programs, we offer far greater depth and range of information. If you haven’t seen it, forgive the advertisement, but I commend the BBC on-line news site to you. It has more stories, more original stories each day, than any other on-line news site anywhere in the world and brings together the rich results of the BBC world service and its expertise and our own domestic and global news gathering capability. It is the most extraordinary intellectual journalistic result for anybody who’s interested, as I know most people here are in public affairs and international affairs. As well as bringing opportunities, the digital age brings us all challenges. In theory, the digital age should be marked by plurality and diversity and the opportunity for any organization to decide what it wants to offer in the market place and to see that offer consumed. But there is a real risk right across the world, the risk in the United Kingdom, a risk elsewhere, and not just in any one technology, but in all of these technologies. There are many potential gateways opening up, and the gateways for all the reasons I’ve said earlier. Because of the economic power going through them and the economic valuable services, there will be attempts to dominate these gateways and to corral and control the way in which choice is offered to the consumer. I think that is the major regulatory change in every country, including the United Kingdom.
A second challenge is the globalization of culture. I hesitate to say this in the United States, but plainly we have seen, during a large part of this century, very gradually, a global culture emerge and that, by and large, is an American culture. Why? Because America is the most powerful economy in the world. It has a fantastically rich and potent popular culture, American popular music, the cinema and Hollywood obviously has had a very big impact on the 20th century. I am married to an American. I love American popular culture as much as anyone and it’s done a lot more good than harm around the world. But the risk in the digital age is that, because of the easily available media right across the world, other sorts of national culture will be undermined by the power of American culture, by the emergence of a single global culture. And I think that is the risk for all countries, because all countries have a unique history, tradition, heritage and culture of their own.
A third risk is that in this world that I’ve described, people will pay increasingly--they have to pay for programs and services of high value. That’s plainly beginning to happen already. It’s happening in the United Kingdom, it long ago happened here. If you want to watch new movies or, in the United Kingdom, a lot of high quality live sports, you have to pay for it and I think we can expect that one impact of the new technologies is that for high premium programming of all kinds increasingly the consumer will be invited to pay for fights and such programming. I think it’s possible that we will see the growing emergence of an information-rich and information-poor knowledge pool who have less access to the riches of this world than those that can afford it. The BBC’s role in this world, as I say, "we see challenges but we also see opportunities." The one thing that we’re very clear about is that we think that our role in this digital age should be exactly the role that we’ve had in the last 75 years of our history. We think we should continue to strive to be a civilizing force in the United Kingdom and, to some extent at least around the world to continue to keep to education, widen horizons, to continue to support the best artists working in the United Kingdom and around the world. We still want to do that, but we’ll be able to do it in new ways.
Thank you very much.