The BBC has just put 84 delivery managers on notice for redundancy — a dramatic purge targeting the middle layer of its digital product and engineering teams that run iPlayer, BBC Sounds, Sport, News, and Bitesize. The official line is simple: too many coordinators, too many sign-offs, not enough actual progress. In practice, it’s the clearest sign yet that the corporation finally admits its flagship streaming service is in deep trouble.
iPlayer is no longer the pioneering on-demand platform it was in 2007. Today it feels like a relic: a catch-up service dressed up as a streamer, with a smaller library than Netflix, Disney+, or even Channel 4’s All 4, clunky personalization, persistent buffering complaints, and a content pipeline strangled by rights restrictions and endless internal approvals.
While the rest of the world moved to algorithm-driven discovery and global scale, iPlayer has been treading water for the better part of a decade.
The numbers are unforgiving. Among 16–34-year-olds, only one in four use iPlayer weekly, compared with more than half for Netflix. The median library feels thin, offline downloads are crippled outside the UK, and the recommendation engine is still playing checkers while competitors play chess. Yes, iPlayer still dominates total viewing hours for BBC content and grew faster than Netflix in the UK last year, but perception matters more than raw minutes when you’re trying to keep an entire generation from drifting away forever.
Enter the great managerial cull. The roles being cut sit in the “delivery” layer — the people whose job titles sound important but whose day-to-day reality, according to insiders, is mostly scheduling meetings about meetings and making sure no one takes a decision without seventeen other people’s blessing. The BBC’s leadership wants to rip out that layer entirely and replace it with small, empowered, cross-functional squads that ship fast and own outcomes — the same structure that powers Spotify, Netflix, and every halfway-successful tech company of the past fifteen years.
It’s a classic “become a startup or die” moment, and the timing couldn’t be worse — or more urgent. The TV licence fee is politically radioactive. Evasion is soaring, the fee barely covers inflation after years of freezes, and the next Charter Review in 2027 could scrap the whole funding model entirely. If the BBC can’t prove it can run lean, modern digital services that people actually choose to use, taxpayers (and politicians) will rightly ask why they should keep writing the cheque.
Getting rid of 84 managers won’t magically fix the content pipeline, the rights mess, or the decades-old engineering debt. But it sends an unmistakable message: the era of comfortable bureaucracy is over. The corporation that once moved at the speed of parliamentary committee is now openly copying California playbooks because the alternative is slow extinction.
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Whether this gamble works remains to be seen. Flattening hierarchy can unleash creativity and speed, or it can create chaos if the remaining teams aren’t ready to own real responsibility. What’s certain is that the BBC no longer has the luxury of moving slowly. The licence fee clock is ticking, the competition isn’t waiting, and British viewers deserve at least one home-grown streaming service that doesn’t feel like it’s stuck in 2012.
The managers were never the only problem — but they became the symbol of a much bigger one. Now they’re gone. The real test starts now.
