The BBC Got This Wrong — and Ex-Google Boss Matt Brittin Should Know Better

On Wednesday, the BBC told its staff and its suppliers what £500 million of savings looks like from the inside. Shows will be decommissioned. Around £80 million a year will come out of commissioning by 2027/28, taking with it somewhere between 100 and 150 hours of original network television and several hundred hours of audio. Hundreds of roles will go. All of it sits on top of an existing £1.5 billion savings target, and behind it is a simple, brutal gap: 94% of Britons use the BBC every month, but fewer than 80% pay the licence fee that funds it. The new director general, Matt Brittin, arrived from Google last month, and he has not eased into the job.

Most of that is the ordinary, grim arithmetic of a public institution under pressure, and most of it will be reported as such. But one line in the email sent to independent producers is worth stopping on, because it is doing something more interesting than austerity. The BBC’s chief content officer, Kate Phillips, wrote that the corporation will also cut its television development spend by around 15% a year — and she gave a reason. The cut is there, she explained, to ensure the BBC focuses on developing the ideas with the strongest chance of success.

Read that twice. It is not the language of a budget line being trimmed. It is the language of better decisions. And it contains, in a single sentence, one of the most expensive misunderstandings in the way creative institutions think about money.

You cannot pick better by looking at less

Development is the search process of a studio. It is the cost of looking — of optioning books, commissioning scripts, running writers’ rooms, taking meetings, and carrying a portfolio of possibilities most of which will, by design, never be made. A development slate is supposed to have failures in it. The failures are not waste; they are the price of discovering the few projects worth a greenlight. That is what the funnel is for.

So when an institution says it will spend 15% less on development in order to develop ideas with a stronger chance of success, it is describing two things that point in opposite directions. Spending less on the search does not make you better at choosing; it makes you choose from a smaller field. The only way to reconcile the goal with the method is to assume a hidden premise: that the BBC already knows which ideas will succeed, and has merely been wasting money developing the ones it knows will not.

If that premise were true, it would be a far more damning finding than any budget gap. It would mean the knowledge existed and was not acted on. And if it is not true — if the BBC, like every studio, greenlights on a blend of taste, relationships, and instinct — then cutting the search budget does not sharpen the institution’s judgment at all. It simply narrows the aperture and hopes the picture stays in focus. It is the logic of a prospector who, told to find more gold, decides to dig fewer holes.

The ratchet

To see why this is the wrong place to cut, it helps to look at where money in a production actually becomes irreversible. Every film and every series is a ratchet. Each phase commits the next, and the mechanism only turns one way. Development is the single stage at which decisions are still cheap to reverse: a script can be rewritten, a project shelved, a piece of casting reconsidered, all for roughly the price of a meeting. Then comes the greenlight, and the ratchet engages. The lead is cast, which fixes the shooting window around their availability, which sets the crew, which sets the day rate, which sets the budget, which sets the delivery date. Pull on any one of those threads in month four and the whole garment unravels at a cost no one will sign off on.

This is not a quirk of the BBC. It is the universal physics of capital-intensive creative work, as true of a tentpole film as of a returning drama. And it means that a pound of better judgment is worth the most precisely where the BBC has chosen to spend less: at the top of the funnel, where commitments have not yet hardened. Cutting development to save money is not thrift. It is cutting the one part of the system where foresight is cheapest and compounds fastest. It is, almost exactly, cutting in the wrong place.

Where the real waste lives

The 15% has a seductive quality that the thing it is meant to fix does not: it is visible and bounded. You can put it in a memo. The waste it is supposed to address is neither.

The expensive failures in television are not the development projects that die quietly in a drawer. Those are the system working as intended. The expensive failures are the shows that get made — greenlit on a logline, a sizzle, and a feeling — and then drift. The script that looked tight on the page but needed three more weeks in the room. The reshoot nobody budgeted. The commission that tested fine in a room and lands flat in the world, and cannot be unmade, because by the time the disappointment is legible every pound is already spent and every date already passed. This is operational drift, and it almost never appears as a line item called waste. It appears as a budget that was always going to be hit and a result that was always going to underwhelm, with no single moment anyone can point to as the error — because the error was a decision made at the top, on instinct, long before the money moved.

The number worth chasing, in other words, is not the 15% the BBC can see. It is the multiple of that number hiding downstream, which it cannot.

Put the asymmetry in plain terms. A 15% trim to a development budget is real money, but development is a fraction of a fraction of total content spend — the cost of looking, not the cost of making. A single high-end drama can carry a budget many multiples larger than an entire year of the development being cut. Stop one such show from drifting, or redirect it before the greenlight locks, and you have returned the 15% several times over — without making one fewer thing. The leverage was never in spending less to look. It is in looking well enough that the expensive commitments are the right ones.

Sitting on the answer key

Here is the part that should trouble anyone who cares about the institution. Every mature industry eventually learns the same lesson, usually late and usually by accident: the data it generates as a byproduct of operating turns out to be more valuable than the thing it thought it was producing. Retailers discovered that their till receipts were a demand-forecasting engine. Airlines discovered that their booking logs were a pricing system. Banks discovered that their transaction histories were a credit model. In each case the asset had been sitting in plain sight for years, filed as exhaust, until someone realized it was the most valuable thing in the building.

The BBC is one of the oldest continuously operating production institutions on Earth. For the better part of a century it has developed, greenlit, scheduled, budgeted, and shipped tens of thousands of hours of content across every genre that exists — and it knows, for every one of them, what happened. What it cost. How it ran against the plan. Whether it found its audience. That is one of the richest production-outcome datasets anywhere: a longitudinal record, almost impossible to replicate, of which kinds of ideas, made which ways, by which teams, actually deliver. It is the kind of record that can answer, empirically rather than anecdotally, whether a particular shape of project — this genre, this budget band, this kind of team, this development path — tends to come in on plan or tends to slip.

And like nearly every studio and broadcaster on the planet, the BBC treats it as archive rather than instrument. The call sheets, the schedules, the wrap reports, the closed budgets, the daily production reports — they are filed as non-searchable documents and forgotten, recognized as paperwork but never as evidence. The quiet tragedy of the development cut is that the institution making it almost certainly holds, in its own filing cabinets, the answer to the very question Phillips posed. It already knows which kinds of projects drift and which deliver. It is cutting its search budget while sitting on the answer key, unread.

A Google executive should know better

Which brings us back to Matt Brittin. It matters that the person now running the BBC spent his career at Google, because Google is the canonical example of an institution that learned to make decisions by measuring rather than guessing — that treated its own behavioral data as the core of the business rather than a residue of it. The instinct Brittin presumably carries into Broadcasting House — that resources should follow evidence, that the strongest chance of success ought to mean something you can actually estimate — is exactly the right instinct.

But the move on the table is the legacy-broadcaster reflex, not the data-company one. Faced with the demand to develop better and spend less, a data company does not cut the funnel. It instruments the funnel. It asks what its own history says about which signals, observable at the development stage, actually predict downstream success — and it moves money toward those signals and away from the ones that predict drift. The difference between the two responses is the difference between austerity and intelligence. One shrinks the institution and hopes. The other makes it sharper as it shrinks. Brittin, of all people, knows which of those Google would have chosen.

Develop blindly, or develop with instrumentation

It is worth being precise about why institutions reach for the funnel instead of the instrument, because the reason is not that the tools do not exist. They do. The reason is organizational. Cutting a budget line is a decision a finance function can make on its own authority in an afternoon. Treating a century of production records as a forecasting asset requires an institution to first believe that its own paperwork is evidence — and that belief has to be held in three places at once, by the creative side that owns the judgment, the operational side that owns the data, and the finance side that owns the consequences. The failure here is not technological. It is the failure to recognize a production report as an intelligence asset rather than a compliance artifact.

So the choice in front of the BBC — and in front of every broadcaster watching it, because they all face the same licence-fee-shaped gap denominated in their own currency — was never really spend more or spend less on development. It was develop blindly or develop with instrumentation. Chasing the visible 15% while leaving the invisible multiple untouched is the most expensive kind of thrift there is: the kind that feels responsible, satisfies the memo, and changes nothing about why the money was at risk in the first place.

The honest version of focusing on the ideas with the strongest chance of success is a sentence about knowledge, not budget. It requires knowing, with more than instinct, which ideas those are — and the foundation of that knowledge is already inside the institution, generated and paid for and waiting to be read. The cuts will happen; they always do. The only question that matters is what the BBC can say a year from now. Whether it spent its remaining, smaller development budget on the projects its own history predicted would deliver — or whether it simply spent less, and hoped.

Generation is cheap. Taste is not. And taste, at the scale of a multibillion-pound content slate, has stopped being something a serious institution can afford to leave uninstrumented.

The answer key is already in the building. Reading it was never a budget problem — it’s a build problem. And it’s the one filmIQ is building to solve.

John Corser is CPO of filmIQ.ai and an executive producer for film and television. He has run his production company, Corser, Inc., since 1991, and is a Daytime Emmy Award–winning producer. He writes on production economics and AI at corser.substack.com.