News

Speaking at an event organized by the Royal Television Society (RTS) at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London Mark Thompson the director general of the BBC has made a series of landmark announcements:

• new proposals to introduce an archive that will allow viewers  to download permanent copies of their favorite programmes, initially named project Barcelona
• The BBC’s director general Mark Thompson will say the corporation should “think carefully” about the size of its news operation given the scale of the economic pressures faced by newspapers.

The BBC announced just over a year ago that 360 staff would be cut from its online operation, with its budget due to be cut by 25% to £103m by next year.

• Separately, Thompson will outline further details of a “sustained attack” by the Iranian authorities on the BBC Persian service, which it says has 6 million listeners.

“It now looks as if those who seek to disrupt or block BBC Persian may be widening their tactics,” he will say.

“There was a day recently when there was a simultaneous attempt to jam two different satellite feeds of BBC Persian into Iran, to disrupt the service’s London phone lines by the use of multiple automatic calls, and a sophisticated cyber attack on the BBC. 

“It is difficult, and may prove impossible, to confirm the source of these attacks, though attempted jamming of BBC services into Iran is nothing new and we regard the coincidence of these different attacks as self-evidently suspicious.”