The Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House. Pic Phil Coomes, 1999

The BBC Online team are gearing up for another BBC Online Briefing. This time we are in London in the magnificent, historic surroundings of the refurbished Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House in London. The Briefing is being held on Friday May 4. 

The idea behind the Briefings is to share with a broad cross section of the UK digital media industry our latest service and product plans as well as latest thinking on significant topics.

This is the third in the series – the format will be similar to the successful events at BBC North, MediaCityUK in November and at BAFTA, London in June. You can find out more at the Spring Briefing site: the speakers, the delegates, et cetera. One of our guests, Steve Rosenbaum, has already blogged about one of the topics. Finally we are publishing BBC Online’s Workplan for the coming year (PDF). I hope this will give you a better idea about what we hope to achieve in the next twelve months.

The Briefing is by invitation only and we’ve filled up the Radio Theatre. If you want to follow events on the day then look for hashtag #BBCOnline. And, as in November and June, all the presentations and sessions will be videoed and published on the BBC Internet blog next week.

Andy Conroy is General Manager, BBC Online

It's five months since our last industry briefing at BAFTA, London. Later today we're holding the second event in the series, this time at BBC North's headquarters at MediaCityUK in Salford. The event will follow a similar pattern to the first. We want to share with a broad cross section of the digital media industry our latest product plans and thinking about significant topics.

The BBC speaker list includes a healthy sprinkling of our leadership in the North. As you may be aware, we are in the process of moving six out of ten products to be based in Salford: homepage, search, CBBC, Cbeebies, Sport, and Knowledge & Learning. This Northern bias extends to our guest list which has a number of features of suppliers based in the North.

The schedule for the event looks like this:

Ralph Rivera, Director, Future Media will update partners on our performance over the last five months.

Holly Goodier will share insights about audience relationships with Computers, TV, mobile and other devices.

Jane Weedon, Controller, Business Development will talk about how we work with a range of device manufacturers to bring BBC programmes and content to our audience

The leadership of products newly based in Salford, Children's and Sport, will talk about the emerging product and answer questions

Daniel Danker will welcome partners into an industry panel discussion about simplicity and "Delivering Products that Delight the Whole Audience"

Finally Ralph Rivera, Roly Keating (Director, Archive and Executive Editor, BBC Online), and Mark Harrison (Head of Production, BBC North) will take questions

As in June, demand for places has far exceeded the number of people we can squeeze in to the room. So videos and write-ups of the talks will appear here on the BBC Internet Blog, this week and next.

And as in June please tweet with the hashtag #BBCOnline.

If you are joining us at MCUK, I look forward to seeing you here. If not I look forward to reading your comments.

Andy Conroy is General Manager, BBC Online and BBC Red Button

It's with this in mind that we host today what will be the first of two annual engagement days with partners. Over 175 people from a cross-section of digital media companies will convene at BAFTA in London this afternoon for a session of talks and workshops. Delegates have been invited to tweet using the hashtag #BBCOnline. BBC Online has far more partners than that (we are oversubscribed for this event), so we're going to open this event up to others by sharing material from it here on the Internet Blog over the next few days.

Today is another important step in our continuing attempts to create a new, more open engagement with the digital media industry: the second of these events will take place in the BBC's new Salford base, MediaCityUK, in October. I wrote yesterday at /commissioning to give some context to the event and explain about the various process reviews we've undertaken to improve our relationship with partners.

Clearly this event takes place at a particularly important time for BBC Online. The event builds on the announcements we made in January as part of BBC's Delivering Quality First strategy. We made a number of significant commitments; to do fewer things better, be clear on boundaries, set out the areas we were not going to enter, and to introduce Product Management as a common way of working across the BBC.

This afternoon we want to put a little more detail to that bigger ambition. And we want to share our plans for this financial year 2011/12. So it's a broad agenda this afternoon, and for those who can't make it, here's a summary of this afternoon's presentations - most of which we'll be making available on this blog throughout next week:

Ralph Rivera - Connected Storytelling. The new director of BBC Future Media, Ralph Rivera, will open the day. He'll be talking about how BBC Online is being re-shaped as one service, comprising ten products and delivered seamlessly across four screens - PCs, mobiles, tablets and connected TVs. He'll be posting later today on the About The BBC blog with more detail.

Holly Goodier who leads one of our audience teams will talk about how audience behaviour is changing in a digital world.

Jane McCloskey - Making it easier to work with the BBC. The audience today will include many of our hundreds of suppliers. We have a special session devoted to some of the practical changes we're proposing to make it easier to work with us.

Simon Lucy, Building on our technical platform. If you're a regular reader of this blog you may have noticed the occasional tantalising mention of BBC Online's new technical platform. Simon will be giving a technical presentation on what partners need to know, as well share details of an event we're planning for later in the Summer for developers.

Chris Russell, Integrating Product Management. Chris blogged about the BBC's new approach to product management in April. Chris will give an update on how integrated Product Management is evolving.

Daniel Danker, TV & iPlayer. Daniel will share his thinking about how the product will evolve over the next two years.

Sinead Rocks and Phil Fearnley, Knowledge & Learning. Phil and Sinead will be sharing some early thoughts on how the current diverse set of Knowledge and Learning websites will be knitted together into a new product.

We are keen to make sure this stuff is discussed by as many people as possible so the presentations from the event will made available here on the blog throughout next week. And I'd like to know what you think, whether you were at the event or not, so please add your thoughts below or Tweet using #BBCOnline.

Andy Conroy is General Manager BBC Online

Update 6.30 p.m.

As part of the Briefing today we have shared BBC Online's 11/12 Workplan with the delegates.

So as promised I'm also sharing it here (as a PDF).

This follows the same style as the BBC's overall Workplan which was published a couple of weeks ago.

I'd welcome your comments.

Update: more material about the BBC Online Industry Briefing

BBC News for Connected TV's Blog Posts

• Phil Fearnley, General Manager News & Knowledge, on the launch
• Steve Hermann, Editor of the BBC News website, at The Editor's Blog 
• Rob Hardy, team lead, about software design

BBC Online Industry Briefing Video Blogs

• Ralph Rivera's Keynote
• Holly's Goodier on Changing Audience Behaviours
• Daniel Danker on the Evolution of iPlayer
• Phil Fearnley and Sinead Rocks on the Knowledge and Learning Product
• Jane McCloskey, Chris Russell, Simon Lucy and Ralph Rivera on New Ways of Working
• Ralph Rivera and Roly Keating taking questions and offering answers

BBC Online Industry Briefing Blog Posts

• Ralph Rivera on his keynote theme - One Service, Ten Products, Four Screens at the About the BBC blog
• Kate Russell's personal impressions
• Steve Bowbrick's round up of the Industry Briefing at the About the BBC blog

From divisional websites, to pan-BBC products: the operational challenge

This is a challenging process. Like any other media organisation born in the linear age the BBC has had to work out how to embrace emerging technologies to meet its purpose without throwing away what we do best.

The new strategy reflects a move away from an operational model where each BBC division has a website budget to support its own editorial ambitions to one more founded on partnerships. The aim is to bring technically skilled staff in BBC Future Media together with editorially skilled people in other divisions and ask them to create products which have a single set of objectives. This will put boundaries on what we do online, as well as create a more efficient BBC Online that's greater than the sum of its parts.

Along the way, this throws up acute challenges in governance, organisational structure and operations - as well as the challenge of hitting tough financial targets, and the implementation of major projects such as the move to Salford.

Yesterday's announcement to BBC staff

As announced in January, we expect the changes to result in around 360 job cuts, from across the BBC's divisions, over a two-year period. Today, my colleagues in BBC Vision announced to their staff how they will be setting themselves up as part of the new BBC Online. This includes:

• the detail of the job cuts (confirmation that 90 - 100 posts will close by March 2012) and;

• the impact on commissioning within two BBC Online products: TV & iPlayer and Knowledge & Learning

A new focal point for industry at /commissioning

The existing multiplatform commissioning team will be disbanded within BBC Vision, with commissioning to be run at genre/ channel level.

This means that there will no longer be an overall divisional budget to spend on individual TV websites. Instead, fewer commissions will be made and they will be part of a broader creative process which more closely aligns online and linear TV commissioning. These online commissions will also be shaped by the strategy for BBC Online's products. Victoria Jaye and Saul Nasse have outlined more details here and here. And there's more in yesterday's article in Ariel.

What this will mean for audiences

We expect this streamlined approach to deliver operational efficiencies. As a consequence, we hope, it will be far easier for third parties to work with us (this is the subject of a wider review). Also, we expect to be able to reduce investment in competing and non-interoperable technologies. And this will mean that editorial teams are free to focus their resources on providing higher-quality output which will appeal to both regular and new users of BBC Online.

Here's some additional coverage of yesterday's announcement.

Andy Conroy is General Manager, BBC Online