So what role should BBC Online play as we plan for the BBC’s future in a complex, changing global media landscape? The principles and purposes that served us for the last 80 years remain unchanged; as a public service broadcaster, the BBC’s appeal needs to be broad. The internet age has not changed what we’re for, but has changed the way we do it. Without the natural limitations of broadcasting spectrum it’s easy to lose focus. Couple this with the lack of a single unified, online strategy, you get sprawl - which amounts to patchy quality and a loss of identity.

This underpins our approach to BBC Online in Putting Quality First, a wide-ranging review of the BBC’s strategy, announced last March. It was approved by the BBC Trust in December. Today, the Trust have announced their approval of our plans for BBC Online, and we’ve been talking to staff about what this is going to mean for them, as well as explaining to the press what this means for the public.

A New Approach
This is about reducing the scale and scope of BBC Online, to focus the site on our five editorial priorities - halving the number of top-level directories and delivering a 25% reduction in budget by 2013. The relationship with the wider industry is also important. Focus creates clarity on what BBC Online will and won’t do - and we’ll be taking a more open approach on what we are doing, engaging with industry twice a year about our plans. Plus, we’ll double the number of referrals we send to third-party websites.

Doing Fewer Things, Better
When I last blogged about our plans in the Summer, I outlined how we intend to move from building one-off websites to managing products and some were unsure as to what I meant by a product.

Products are the common currency in many businesses - it’s how they package what they do to make them distinctive, competitive and attractive to customers. But it’s not the common currency at the BBC and the commercial connotations are at odds with the clear public purposes enshrined in programmes, the BBC’s currency.

BBC News and BBC iPlayer are two of our most popular websites, and it’s no coincidence that they are run as products already. Each has a clear sense of purpose and identity, each has a clear sense of what its audience wants from it and meets that audience need. Each combine our distinctive editorial voice with great technology and design. It’s this partnership and focus that makes them successful, so we want to capture this in everything we do.

Products also explain how we’ll be reorganising BBC Online. They become the reference point for budgets, targets and objectives, and lines of accountability. Each will have a converged technology and editorial team working in partnership at a product level.

Product is is not a word that we expect audiences to start using, but it does explain how we applied boundaries to the service as a whole, created a single, united strategy for the first time, and reorganised how we operate to make it a better service for audiences.

Maximising Distinctivenes 

In order to decide where to focus, we looked at every website we have and applied three tests to each. First, do we really need this website to meet our public purposes? Second, to what degree does it help meet our five editorial priorities? And third, how does it differ from what else is out there in the market; is it distinctive?, and if not - should we be doing it all? Working these tests through iteratively, merging some websites, and looking objectively at how much each costs and how much it’s used and valued by the public - we ended up with ten products.

Fewer, Better Products

News, Sport and Weather remain broadly the same technically, but with significant editorial changes (outlined below).News already combines technology, design and editorial to great effect and we’ll aim to replicate its success across the service. These three products continue to be the backbone of BBC Online.
 
CBeebies will consolidate its position as the best-loved and most trusted site for pre-school children and their parents.

Games will feature prominently; complementing the digital channel’s focus on learning through play. CBBC too is a place children, parents and schools can trust to provide a safe online experience.

BBC Knowledge has produced great factual programming for many years and websies like Bitesize have pioneered BBC online learning. But the current online knowledge websites are hard to navigate. The same is true of learning websites; fragmented and in parts lacking distinctiveness. Both can use the power of the web better to satisfy the curiosity of audiences wanting to discover and engage in new ways. Our plan is to merge all these sites into one cohesive product.

 
But perhaps the most significant changes are in how we approach TV and Radio online. We will continue to innovate and create great content built for the medium. But we are going to significantly consolidate the standalone, bespoke websites we have that surround our linear output to create just two new products; TV & iPlayer, and Radio & Music.

The BBC iPlayer has been through three major evolutions since its launch in 2007. The next will bring together the current drama, entertainment, comedy, TV, /programmes, /archive and /iPlayer websites in one product. This centres on the audiences’ primary needs of TV on the web: quick access to the programmes and programme information, but building more on the editorial power of our TV brands so it feels even more simple, intuitive and engaging for the audience.

While BBC iPlayer has been a good home for online radio, the way audiences want to interact with radio and music online is different to TV. Radio and music will come out of BBC iPlayer, and we’ll develop a new stand-alone product. All radio station sites, music events, podcasts and programme pages will be integrated to focus on highly interactive live radio, quick and seamless access to programming, support for new music and personalisation - on whatever internet-connected device you happen to have.
 
Homepage and Search bind all the products together. Both have an important functional role, guiding audiences around the service; but they perform important editorial roles as well. As the discovery engine for the BBC, the homepage is one of our most-used products and will be re-designed to reflect the new products, deliver nations “editions” and make all the products simple to use. Search has evolved from being a bolt-on technology to a BBC-built product delivering greatly improved targeted search results. As the service evolves, this too will become even more important in helping people find what they are looking for.
 
Editorial Focus
These plans outline a BBC Online that will get better, not just smaller. Within that, there are key things we want to focus upon:

• High quality news focused on up-to-the-minute news updates backed up by rich multimedia content from correspondents across the UK and the world
• BBC News Entertainment and Arts section will have more culture and arts coverage
• Dynamic  ‘editions’ of BBC Online for each Nation
• Clearer focus of local sites on news, sport, weather and travel
• Sport will focus on fast, reliable and in-depth news and dynamic coverage of the best live events that bring the nation together
• Safe, creative spaces for children 
• A single merged offer in Knowledge & Learning, making the most of BBC content, from science to literacy, arts to maths – for adults pursuing a passion or brushing up a basic skill, and for children learning at home and school
• Radio will focus on live output, and the discovery of new music as played and recommended by BBC DJs and iconic musicians
• BBC iPlayer will be re-shaped into a unified television offer, bringing together TV channels, programme information and live and on-demand content
• Selected archive content will be featured in TV & iPlayer and Radio & Music

Closures and Reductions
As a result there are some editorial areas we’ll be pulling back from, and some websites we’ll be closing completely.

• The closure of half of the 400 Top Level Domains (with 180 closing ahead of schedule later this year)
• The replacement of the majority of programme websites with automated content
• The automation of bespoke digital radio sites 1Xtra, 5 live sports extra, 6 Music and Radio 7
• The closure of RAW, Blast, Switch, Video Nation and the disposal of h2g2
• The removal of non-News features content from Local sites
• A substantial reduction in showbusiness news on the News website
• Fewer News blogs, with more focus on the updates from leading editors and correspondents
• A reduction in the overall amount of Sports news and live sport
• Standalone forums, communities,  message-boards and blogs to be reduced and replaced with integrated social tools
• The closure of the 606 community site and the closure of the BBC iPlayer message board

Where BBC Online will not go
Equally, there are areas which we will not cover, and have no intention of going into. BBC Online will not:

• Launch its own social network
• Offer specialist news content for specialist audiences
• Publish local listings
• Develop encyclopaedic propositions in Knowledge
• Provide continuing professional development materials for teachers or a managed learning environment for schools
• Become  a video-on-demand aggregator in BBC iPlayer, although it will link to other on-demand providers
• Produce online-only music sessions Offer track-by-track music streaming
• Invest in exclusive online sports rights

Common Functionality
As I outlined in the summer, common technical functionality means that products are supported by the same infrastructure, delivering operational efficiencies and a consistent experience throughout the service. It creates the means to login and personalise the site and links your login to social networks. It also allows the site to be repurposed for different devices, provides the templates for programme automation and hosts the BBC’s archive material.

Changes for Staff
This is a big change for the BBC and the staff working on BBC Online. In addition to the operational change of working to a product management culture, there will be a substantial number of post closures.

Subject to consultation with the Unions, we are proposing the closure of up to 360 posts, phased over the next two years.

They won’t fall equally across each BBC division. We estimate that 120 posts will close in Future Media & Technology, 70 posts in Journalism (News and Nations non-News), 85-90 in Vision, 35-39 in Audio & Music, 17 in Children’s and 24 in Sport. Though we aim to mitigate the redundancies by redeploying staff, this will be a difficult time for the staff affected – these cuts will be painful, but we believe they are necessary.

Looking Ahead
This is the first time that BBC Online - as a whole - will have a single, unified strategy and I am confident that the new focus it will give will deliver much more for much less and enable the BBC to become as highly regarded in the internet age as it became in the broadcasting age – with six of the ten products to be based in Salford, which will become a digital hub for the BBC.

As in the early days of TV, when we simply filmed radio programmes, we are only just beginning to understand the huge potential of the internet, not just as a platform, but its creative potential. If any digital media organisation has the talent in its ranks and the imagination to harness that potential, it's the BBC.

While the BBC's first-class editorial output is what makes it so appreciated by the public, its innovation culture and engineering expertise has allowed it to keep pace with their changing expectations, a legacy that can be traced right back to Lord Reith himself. Putting online at the heart of the BBC’s future means this legacy continues in the connected digital age.

Erik Huggers is the Director of Future Media & Technology

You can read more about how the BBC spotlights the role of Product Manager in the media  in the press release.

We know that increasing numbers of you want to access BBC output on-the-go and the rapid growth of internet-connected mobiles and smartphones in the market means we can cost-effectively provide our content and services on these devices, and this is a really important way for us to deliver online services in the future. Today we begin with our News App becoming available for the Apple iPhone, and soon it will come to Blackberry and Android phones in addition to other devices later in the year.

The first class journalism that you expect from the BBC is now available to you in a way that is simple, personalised and optimised for mobile devices. My colleague David Madden has written a blog post and created a video tutorial which will take you through the features of the News app. Please let us know what you think of it.

Erik Huggers is Director of BBC Future Media & Technology

This is part of an ongoing process to make BBC Online feel like one coherent service, rather than a disjointed collection of websites,  which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Our aim is more than making a website easy on the eye; a good user-experience is essential to making the site easy to use, and most importantly to make it easy to find what you want to look at quickly.

This has been a major engineering project for the Future Media and Technology Division and I believe it's a great example of engineering and design working hand in glove with editorial - a way of working that I talked about at the Media Guardian Changing Media Summit earlier this year. To give an example we have improved the content management system, which will make it easier for journalists to upload their story and add video and pictures to it more quickly and gives them better control of the layout. My colleagues who have worked on this will be revealing some of their thinking in a blog later in the week.

As we infuse the new global design through BBC Online we will also be reflecting the plans laid down in Putting Quality First, the strategic review that is underway across the whole BBC. We will look at each component part of the whole Online service through three lenses; first, the degree to which it delivers our public purposes; second, the degree to which it fits our editorial priorities; and third, like any other BBC service, how it scores in terms of reach, quality, impact and value. As you may have read last week the BBC Trust agreed in principle to our plans in this area.

The News website is one of the fewer web properties we'll focus on in future. We have also set ourselves a target to double external linking and news is a big part of this story. A recent report on paidcontent shows we have a good foundation to build on this as in the UK outside of search engines the BBC is the top site delivering readers to UK commercial newspaper websites through our existing external links. But we can do more still.

In addition we are also introducing to news the results of partnerships with social networks, improving the way users can share and recommend content on other platforms with their friends.

All that remains to say today is enjoy using the News site and do let us know on the various blogs posted, what you think of it. I know you've already been asking a few questions about some of the technical aspects of the design such as the search function and our plans for HTML5 and colleagues are on the case with answering those points already.

Erik Huggers is Director of BBC Future Media & Technology

• Steve Herrmann blogs about the BBC News website redesign on the Editors Blog 

You can find it here.

The idea for BBC iPlayer was first floated internally around seven years ago, when the web was in its relative infancy. The potential of on-demand was obvious, even if the networks, technologies and market wasn't there yet

But the potential public value of being able to offer our audiences more control (a digital VCR that you don't have to set) and the offer of better value for money (by providing more opportunities to access programmes they've missed) was huge. Some years later, on Christmas Eve 2007, the first-generation product launched.

That moment represented a turning point for the BBC, and for me personally, the most significant development to BBC Online since its launch in the late 1990s. In just two and half years BBC iPlayer has evolved to become one of our most popular websites, integral to BBC Online, and available on a very wide range of internet-connected devices.

The BBC wasn't the first mainstream media company to offer a video-on-demand service, but I do think we were the first to get it right. Some important early decisions contributed greatly to its appeal with audiences.

First, it was high-quality and simple. We needed to make access to the content itself as quick and simple as possible, which meant moving the focus from peer-to-peer downloads to streaming. This removed delays, and the need to install a client (a piece of software on your computer). Simply click and play because the vast majority of consumers already had Adobe Flash installed.

Second, it had an unrivalled content offer - no user-generated videos of cats on skateboards here. It was always distinctly BBC, understood to be the only place for BBC long-form content, and by extension a byword for quality. As good as we make the iPlayer experience; we never forget that it's the content, above and beyond the delivery, that brings people back.

Third, the proposition was made really clear to mainstream linear TV audiences. It was this clear communication of the simple proposition of "making the unmissable, unmissable" combined with integrated linear promotion, that helped video-on-demand cross over into the mainstream. And finally, we wanted to make the BBC iPlayer available on a platform neutral basis. The ability to repurpose the site for a wide range of internet-connected devices and platforms has enabled us to take the product to our audiences rather than prescribe that they access it on the PC alone.

But back in 2007, none of us were really sure about how successful the BBC iPlayer would be. Some people had doubts about take-up. Will people go for it? Do people really want to watch TV on their computers when they have a perfectly good TV for that, with dozens of channels already? Others expected a TV revolution. "It's the end of TV as we know it" - the idea that giving the power of control to audiences would wipe out linear TV and the "old fashioned" idea of scheduling.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle: we've been hugely encouraged by the reception of iPlayer, and while people clearly love greater choice, they're not ready to abandon live TV. Our schedulers are brilliant at picking the right programme for the right channel at the right time: and nothing beats the collective experience of live TV around big events, whether it's a dramatic climax in the live episode of Eastenders or the FA Cup Final..

The facts are these, only 0.4% of UK adults watch exclusively on-demand. Linear TV is going from strength-to-strength, UK research company Thinkbox revealed earlier this month that year-on-year, average viewing is up to some 30 hours a week - an increase of two and a half hours on the year before. On-demand viewing is clearly complementary.

The BBC iPlayer saw its first major evolution in July 2008, with vastly enhanced functionality. In came the integration of live TV and radio, together with a list of the most popular programmes and contextual recommendations - based on the programme you've just watched or listened to. We launched the first download manager to aid viewing offline. A list of recently played items came too - together with a user-experience that aimed to make all this content easy to find, and later, multiple bit rates and HD quality content.

Coupled with this, through 2008 and 2009, the product was repurposed and rebuilt to work on a wider range of platforms and devices - from a Windows only base, it's now on more than 40 different devices and platforms. Our aim is to make the BBC iPlayer work on pretty much any platform or device that can connect to the web, where technically possible and economically sensible, and the BBC Trust opened a public consultation on our syndication policy just yesterday.

BBC iPlayer has become recognised domestically and internationally as best in class, a pioneer in the field and a major stimulant in the overall market for on-demand services.

We've seen impressive growth in programme requests BBC iPlayer, and as the projections below (Mediatique, 2009) for video on demand show - this is a growing area across the entire media industry.

But this is a busy and fragmented marketplace, with traditional broadcasters launching their own video on demand propositions (eg. SkyPlayer, BBC iPlayer, 4oD, ITV Player, Demand Five), content aggregator sites (eg. SeeSaw, YouTube), free to air platforms (eg. Freeview, Freesat), pay TV platforms (eg. Virgin Media, BT Vision, Sky), search companies (e.g. Google TV), device manufacturers (Sony, Nokia, Samsung), mobile operators (eg. Three, Vodafone) and gaming platforms (e.g. Nintendo, Sony Playstation) all looking to offer a video-on-demand proposition of sorts to consumers.

How does the BBC iPlayer fit in to this world and remain distinctive?

As I outlined at the Guardian's Changing Media Summit in March, just after we announced our Strategy Review, BBC Online is changing.

By halving the number of top-level domains on BBC Online, reducing the overall service-licence budget by 25% by 2012, focusing on the BBC's core editorial priorities, and developing strategic online partnerships we intend to put the internet at the heart of the BBC's digital media strategy, creating a more focused BBC Online with clear boundaries. The proposals outlined in the BBC's Strategy Review are subject to public consultation by the BBC Trust.

BBC iPlayer is a core component of BBC Online, and is the first core website in the online portfolio to be upgraded since we announced Putting Quality First.

Bringing the benefits of emerging technologies to the public is in the BBC's DNA as its sixth public purpose, and the idea behind BBC iPlayer was to give audiences greater control over the programmes they enjoy, guarantee subscription-free access to BBC content in an on-demand world, and provide better value for the content they have already paid for.

In the new beta version of the product we've launched today, we've listened to the audience and responded to their desire to have greater control over their own BBC iPlayer experience: now you can have a BBC built just for you.

We've integrated the social web through innovative partnerships, which allow audiences to interact with each other around our content. And we've pulled all this functionality together in a clean and intuitive user experience.

I can't emphasise the importance of good design enough. In age of unlimited choice - our audiences need better ways to find what they are looking for, and it is this thinking that we've brought into BBC iPlayer. In addition to discovery through traditional TV listings, you can now also:

- select your favourites, delivered to you in a playlist
- see what your friends are recommending
- browse by popularity, like a top-ten programmes chart
- browse by genre and sub-genre, depending on your mood
- try what we think you'll like, based on what you tell us

Along the way you'll be able to select your favourites, to be delivered to you when they're ready.

And later in the year, we'll be linking to other video on demand providers, and launching a new feature that will allow you to chat to friends.

There's a lot more information about the functionality and technology on the BBC Internet Blog if you're interested and you can find the new BBC iPlayer here.

So we very much hope that you like the new product, and if you'd like to be involved in the beta testing we'd love to hear from you.

Erik Huggers is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology 

• Read Introducing the all new BBC iPlayer on the Internet blog