BBC Wants AI To Help Pick Your Next iPlayer Show

BBC iPlayer could soon get its own AI assistant – and you might not have to wait long to see it.

The assistant is reportedly called “Iggy”. It would recommend programmes, summarise them for you and even talk to you in different languages.

It’s one of several ideas shown to BBC staff this week, alongside a home screen built around what you’ve watched before and a mode that lets iPlayer choose your next show with a roll of the dice.

The BBC’s new director-general, Matt Brittin, told employees the corporation plans to start testing some of these ideas with viewers “in the coming weeks”.

So what’s actually on the table, why does a former Google executive think iPlayer needs it, and what does it have to do with reports that two BBC TV channels are about to disappear?

Meet Iggy, And “Vegas Mode”

The ideas were shown during a speech Brittin gave to staff from the BBC Radio Theatre. Deadline reported them after obtaining an audio recording of the session.

They come from Manon Dave, head of future world design in the BBC’s Media Tech unit, who told colleagues he spent part of his holiday redesigning iPlayer “without any internal limitations”.

He wants people to talk about iPlayer the way they talk about Netflix, and to say: “I want to iPlayer and chill.” Whether the BBC has fully thought through what “Netflix and chill” usually means is, to put it politely, not clear.

The ideas he presented included:

Iggy, an AI agent that recommends and summarises iPlayer programmes, and can speak to viewers in different languages.

A personalised “hero” image at the top of the home screen – the big banner you see when you open the app – picked by an algorithm based on what you’ve watched before.

“Vegas mode”, which lets you “roll the dice” and see what iPlayer chooses for you.

The Guardian, which also reported on the meeting, adds one more: a version of iPlayer that includes the BBC’s YouTube content, such as the World Service, whose YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers.

The YouTube idea could matter more than it sounds. The BBC runs a sprawling network of YouTube channels, including BBC News and BBC Earth, and pulling that into the app would make iPlayer feel less like a catch-up service for BBC One and more like a full streaming home.

These are still one designer’s concepts, though, built without the usual internal limits, and Brittin only said that “some” of them would be tested.

Nobody has said which ones, on which devices, or whether any of them will reach everyone.

How Will The Tests Work?

The BBC hasn’t said, and none of this has been officially announced. In the past, though, it has tried out big iPlayer changes with a smaller group first.

When it redesigned iPlayer in 2021, with the menu moved to the side of the screen, viewers could switch on “iPlayer Beta” in the app’s settings to see the new look before everyone else.

The same option was used last year for the BBC’s low-delay live streaming trial, which tried to cut iPlayer’s lag behind live TV and started on a handful of Fire TV and Samsung devices before expanding to hundreds.

Whether Iggy and friends follow the same route is still unknown. But if you want to be among the first to see what the BBC is cooking up, iPlayer’s beta setting is the place to keep an eye on.

Why A Former Google Boss Wants To Move Faster

Brittin spent 20 years at Google before joining the BBC in May, and Deadline describes his speech as a plan for a Silicon Valley-style overhaul of the corporation.

He told staff he wanted the BBC to “be more Elvis”, by which he meant: “A little less conversation, a little more action.” He wants new online products built and tested quickly, and for digital, rather than traditional broadcast, to be the BBC’s flagship.

He also wants success measured by results, not activity: “Not [just], ‘We did this great marketing campaign,’ but actually, ‘It drove up watch time usage and active accounts,’ right?”

According to The Guardian, Brittin believes iPlayer has become significantly outdated, despite being a pioneer when it launched back in 2007.

“Our apps have to work much harder too to personalise, to localise, to aid discovery,” he told staff. Translation: iPlayer needs to get much better at showing you things you’ll actually want to watch.

He also wants BBC programmes to be easy to find on other platforms, including YouTube, Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video.

When Does The BBC Go Fully On-Demand?

Brittin’s most striking line was about TV channels, not apps.

“We have to make decisions about when the on-demand consumption of our content starts to go so far ahead of the broadcast consumption that we make choices about. When do we move fully to on-demand?” Brittin asked. “And that can be painful for audiences.”

That’s the BBC’s director-general openly asking when traditional TV channels stop being worth it. He made the same point in an interview with the BBC last week: “We might have some channels and services where maybe 100,000 people are watching the broadcast service but 500,000 are getting those programmes on iPlayer.”

And some of those decisions may already have been made.

Staff had expected Brittin to announce TV channel closures this week. He didn’t. But The Guardian says it understands that two channels, BBC Three and BBC Scotland, will stop broadcasting as traditional TV channels to help ease the BBC’s money problems.

The BBC hasn’t confirmed this. When the reports first surfaced last week, it said it doesn’t “comment on speculation”.

If it does happen, BBC Three fans will have a strong sense of déjà vu. The channel went online-only in 2016, before returning to TV in 2022.

Behind all of this is the plan to move TV off the airwaves altogether.

As we previously reported, the government wants to switch off Freeview and move free TV onto broadband, with 2034 as its preferred date and 2044 as the alternative.

Once the aerial goes, streaming apps become the only way to watch, and iPlayer will have to carry the BBC on its own.

iPlayer Is Turning Into The BBC Itself

The new features sit on top of a plan the BBC has been building all year. In March, the BBC proposed opening up iPlayer to ITV, Channel 4 and 5, turning it into a shared home for British TV.

In July, Brittin confirmed the BBC had approached Channel 4 about putting its programmes inside iPlayer. And last week, a committee of MPs said it “strongly” supported the idea.

There’s a money side to all this, too. You already need a TV Licence, currently £180 a year, to use iPlayer, and in July a senior BBC executive told staff that locking iPlayer to licence payers remains on the table for the future.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that the government and the BBC are looking at plans that would see anyone who watches any streaming service told to pay the licence fee – the same direction the MPs’ report pointed in last week.

If iPlayer ends up as the main way to watch the BBC, it could also end up as the place where your licence gets checked.

And all of this is being planned while the BBC works through a plan to cut as many as 2,000 jobs, and Brittin conceded to staff that the BBC was ‘going to be smaller’. that the BBC was “going to be smaller”.

Whether Iggy ever reaches your telly is anyone’s guess, and Vegas mode may never leave that staff meeting. What’s clearer is that the BBC is pushing more of itself into iPlayer, with fewer people to do it. When the first tests appear, we’ll let you know.

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