The BBC is moving from the era of broadcasting towards a new era of publishing, BBC Two controller Roly Keating said yesterday, likening the dramatic shift of the industry to a plot in the cult TV show Doctor Who.
Speaking at the Broadcast Digital Channels conference in London, Keating said "our familiar universe seems to have been upended and mind-bending concepts become commonplaces with alarming regularity".
"It's all a bit like one of Steven Moffat's genius scripts for Doctor Who... full of apparent paradoxes."
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Keating said the perception of time and location within the industry are changing as viewers increasingly demand content that can be watched anytime and anywhere.
The BBC now frequently commissions project to run online elements ahead of the broadcast date, such as the new Bruce Parry series on the Amazon which airs in the Autumn, but which has been offering on-demand content through the BBC website for the past year.
Ewan MacGregor and Charley Boorman's travel adventure Long Way Down, ran online with presenter blogs and itineraries ahead of the show, which Keating said "brought a pre-built audience of addicted fans who had been spreading the word of mouth and building expectation".
"The internet has made us all greedier and more demanding for information and content of all kinds," he said.
"Whether you call it the principle of permanence, or perpetuity, or continuous availability, this feels like an emerging rule of media, and it's something that will gradually affect all the key decisions we make about platforms and programmes. Some of our most common terms will change their meaning: 'transmission' will evolve into 'release', which in its turn is becoming something not unlike 'publishing'."
The programme pages, announced by Vision director jana Bennett on Monday, will give one web page to every episode of every BBC TV show, and give TV the chance to become "a medium with a mature relationship to its own past".
"It will also be a sure way to identify content with really lasting value, while in commissioning there'll be an increasing premium for programmes that are genuinely built to last."
BBC's iPlayer has already become an icon for on-demand content, he said, but - like Doctor Who's tardis - the relatively small volume of content on the site made it feel "bigger on the outside than the inside". Kangaroo, the joint web TV venture with ITV and Channel 4, would go some way to fulfilling this demand.
Keating said the global nature of the web fits with origins of the BBC and that its audience increasingly has a "whole earth mindset".
"One way or another the power of the web will render our industry global, and if we don't anticipate that now and find ways to get UK content of all kinds findable by audiences right across the planet, then other powerful voices will begin to crowd us out.
"One of the best bloggers on these topics, Tom Coates, formerly of the BBC, now at Yahoo, once advised anyone contemplating a web start-up to think less about immediate profit and more about how to 'make the whole web better'. The BBC's hardly a start-up these days, but that's still not a bad aspiration I think."
