Encouraging serendipity in the digital world

I was at the Voice of the Listener and Viewer (VLV) conference today and thought I’d share the speech I did there. In addition to highlighting the unique role the BBC plays in the lives of our audiences and in society, I also talked about how in today’s media world, having a BBC that serves everyone is more important than ever.

We’ve innovated over the decades and managed to remain universal. But for this to continue to be the case as technology and people’s habits change, it’s crucial that we at the BBC adapt and help our audiences to discover the wonders we create — regardless of how they consume it. And if people aren’t consuming our content live, they’re not stumbling into the next programme.

So we now we want to innovate again to preserve serendipity in the digital world. With a more personalised approach and getting people to sign in, we can serve them better, to surprise them and to widen horizons.

With this in mind, we’ll be relaunching the BBC iPlayer Radio app so that we can give our audiences a better, broader and more serendipitous experience when they listen to our content digitally. We’ll be doing this next year, and once we have more of our plans developed, we’ll be sharing them, but for now, you can read my full VLV speech here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2017/james-purnell-vlv