Q&A: Ashley Highfield, head of BBC's Future Media and Technology unit

How will the recent BBC cuts affect the BBC's Future Media and Technology department?
We are meeting three per cent annual efficiency targets, which will mean over the next five-year period a reduction in headcount of, gross numbers, around 180 staff reduction. With redeployment and natural churn we imagine that's going to be somewhere between 120 to 130 net redundancies. A large amount of that - around 65 plus of those are effectively as a result of the implementation of a tapeless BBC - the digital media initiative - so the impact is going to fall on areas which currently deal a lot with tape, which we'll have far less of in the BBC by 2012.

We are going to be creating jobs as well though. Actually what is going to happen in Future Media and Technology in the short term is a rise in headcount to fulfil all the ambitious plans for Creative Futures.

And what about new funding for BBC Future Media and Technology?
Future Media and Technology is going to be receiving in the next financial year [2008/09] about £50m of new funding to help deliver all of its ambitious plans like my news now, web 2.0, the next release of iPlayer and so on and so on. Not all of that money is going on the audience-facing stuff. A fair proportion is going on internal deployment of technology. A lot of the new investment is going into creating a digital BBC - the advantage being that anyone would be able to access any content the BBC is making anywhere inside the BBC. The cost of actually making new programming and the costs of getting our programming out to our audience, particularly on IP and on-demand platforms, will fall. So I'm spending a disproportionate amount of money on the infrastructure and behind the scenes re-engineering of the BBC.

With web 2.0 hype still at its peak you recently talked about 'web 3.0'. What exactly do you mean by 'web 3.0'?
The 1.0 is the basic, the digitisation of your business and the BBC, like many media companies, has not even done that yet. I think that the internal digital media initiative is our web 1.0 or BBC 1.0. Web 2.0 is the BBC's move into having a much more personalised website where people can freely and easily post and exchange their views with each other. It's a BBC that has very rich media right across its web offerings - embedded video everywhere you look. That's our 2.0.

The world of 3.0 I think is when the BBC maybe really comes to the fore again. The semantic web, the intelligent web, is one where the technology only takes you so far and Google's search engine still provides you with 100,000 answers pretty much irrespective of who you are or where you are. The web 3.0 world puts a layer on top of that you could call editorial. It says this is probably what you were actually looking at. It says we the BBC know who you are. We've built up a good relationship with you through CRM. We know you were looking for a cop show from the '60s well here's a really good one that we know you - because we know something about you - will enjoy.

It's the next evolution of the internet and I think it's one where the BBC, by combining technology and editorialising, packaging, aggregating, scheduling, selecting - all of those skills that we've had over the last 80 years - can actually come to the fore again to help people through what has been described as the cacophony of choice or the paradox of choice.

What are the future challenges for the BBC as it moves towards a digital future?
I think we have a range of challenges. I think that the world is moving incredibly quickly, our audiences are expecting things to be on their terms, they are increasingly fickle and therefore the speed of change has got to increase. My concern is either we can't adapt as quickly as we need to or the regulatory environment makes it hard for us to innovate and implement as quickly as we need to. I think the increasingly global landscape and the fact we are predominantly a UK player is affecting all UK players. The BBC website is number three in the UK. The two companies above us - Google and MSN - and the two companies below us, Yahoo! and eBay, are all the American giants. How we can adapt to that and operate on a global scale while still being predominantly funded through the UK licence, that's an issue for us. But I think that we have a world-class team within Future Media and Technology so I hope we will be able to stay ahead of the curve.