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"The BBC has decided to abandon its Digital Media Initiative, after spending \u00A398.4 million\u00A0(roughly $148 million USD) to try to create a more integrated and digital workflow for its employees.\r\n\r\nThe decision follows an operational review of the project, launched in October last year, which found that the project was failing to achieve its current targets.\r\n\r\nTony Hall, Director-General for the BBC, said the Digital Media Initiative had wasted \u201Ca huge amount of Licence Fee payers money.\u201D\r\n\r\n\u201CI saw no reason to allow that to continue which is why I have closed it,\u201D he said. \u201CI 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.\r\n\r\n\u201CAmbitious 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.\u201D\r\nWhat went wrong?\r\nThe project was set up in 2008 to bring the BBC up to speed with modern technology and television production processes. The original work was contracted out to Siemens and would help move the BBC to an all-digital, tapeless system.\r\n\r\nThe estimated cost was \u00A381.7 million, although the BBC suggested it would save them roughly \u00A318 million overall. The BBC terminated its contract with Siemens in 2009 following rising costs and was later criticized by the National Audit Office for the way that it handled the project.\r\n\r\nThe Digital Media Initiative was then used to develop a new system called Fabric, which would give employees access to archived BBC footage through a \u201Cseamless digital chain.\u201D\r\nThe project will live on\r\nAn email sent out by Hall to BBC employees, obtained by The Drum, sheds further light on what went wrong.\r\n\r\n\u201CIt\u2019s struggled to keep pace with new developments and requirements both within the BBC and the wider broadcasting industry,\u201D he said. \u201CThere are now standard off-the-shelf products that provide the kind of digital production tools that simply didn\u2019t exist five years ago.\u201D\r\n\r\nHall added that the BBC\u2019s need to produce content digitally \u201Chasn\u2019t gone away\u201D and that the Fabric database would continue to be used throughout the company. \u201CHowever, we will stop developing our own in-house production tools, and instead use the industry-standard production systems that are now available,\u201D he said.\r\n\r\nImage Credit:\u00A0NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/GettyImages"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/uk/2013/05/24/bbc-scraps-digital-media-initiative-after-spending-98-4m-on-a-revamped-archive-and-production-tools/>