Recommendation 7

At our evidence session in January 2023, the Director-General reiterated to us the need for urgency and how, by any forecast of the future, the vast majority of media consumption will be via the internet.8 However, he also told us that, in his December speech, he had been deliberately provocative, and that his speech had also been somewhat misreported. He stressed that “I didn’t say we are going fully digital by the 2030s”.9 He also stressed the BBC’s strategic desire to maintain universality and that the BBC was not actively setting a date for a switchover. He said that the BBC understood how many people relied on DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) and it would be “an act of self-harm to cut people off from the BBC.”10