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Ashley Highfield

Ashley Highfield66 posts

Ashley Highfield is a British media executive. After starting his career as a management consultant he worked in interactive TV before he was hired by the BBC in 2000. While at the BBC he oversaw the launch of the iPlayer, and grew the corporation’s online business. He is currently the CEO of Johnston Press, a regional newspaper publisher.

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1981

Attends Elizabeth College

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Highfield attends Elizabeth College, a private school in Guernsey. While there his interest in computers is sparked by the BBC Micro, a low-cost computer made for the corporation by Acorn.

It’s a thing that you learned to program and connected up to a television set. The amazing thing now is that they’re all totally useless.

1993

Sent to South Africa, works with ANC

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Highfield is sent to work in South Africa, where his is employed by the ANC shortly after it is pitched into crisis by the arrest of Winnie Mandela in relation to the death of activist Stompie Moeketsi Seipei. Amid allegations of financial irregularities, Highfield is asked to get the books in order. He employs Olive Mungadze, a Zimbabwean, who is the only female black chartered accountant in sub-Saharan Africa. During the project, Mungadze and Highfield go into a remote Afrikaaner diner in Transkei.

I had never known an entire restaurant stop eating and just turn round and stare at me, a suited white businessman, with Olive, a suited black woman. They just stared at us for the whole dinner. An utterly different world. It was only 1993.

Joins Flextech, releases The Doll’s House

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dolls_house__flextech300At Flextech, highfield creates sites for Discovery, Playboy and Parliamentary channels. He builds the business from just himself, to 100 staff. He launches The Doll’s House, an online reality show for the Bravo channel.

It was a number of girls in a house under constant surveillance by webcam. It hit the headlines when, not surprisingly, a visiting boyfriend got caught in bed with one of the girls on webcam.

He successfully invests in the dotcom boom, including the online mapping site MultiMap.com, and the ticketing agency Way Ahead Group.

When I lucked in during the dotcom boom I bought myself a Ferrari.

While at the company he is presented with their “worst dressed man” award.

3 Oct, 2000

Joins BBC

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The BBC announces that Highfield will join the corporation as Director of New Media & Technology, starting in October. He is the youngest ever member of the Executive Committee, reporting directly to Director General Greg Dyke. The new media division consists of interactive television, BBC Online and a new research and development department called Imagineering, which has been rolled out over the past two months.

BBC Online is an incredible achievement and the advances made in interactive services are very exciting. I hope my experience, combined with the power of the BBC brand, will be an unbeatable combination.

2 Jul, 2001

Guardian Media 100: No. 81

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Highfield is placed at 81 in The Guardian’s Media 100 list of the UK’s most powerful media people.

He will be judged on modernising the corporation’s attitude to digital media and reaching a young, tech-savvy audience, which the BBC is in danger of losing.

22 Jul, 2002

Defends increased BBC web spending

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Highfield defends the previous year’s decision by the BBC to almost double the amount invested in the corporation’s websites. The corporation spent £100.4m on the internet last year, compared with £54.2m the year before. Including interactive television, the total expenditure rises to £111.6m. Highfield says future spending will be capped at 3%. Commercial rivals and some MPs have criticised the BBC’s spending, arguing it is using licence fee-payers’ money to provide online services already offered by the commercial sector.

Having arrived from the commercial sector, I’m always acutely aware of this. Whenever I think about where we’re going to put our money, I always carefully consider the consequences for the private sector. I trebled the amount we spend on nations and regions, increasing the number of Where I Live regional sites from 13 to 37. It doesn’t block out any commercial interest because most existing regional sites are heavily based on classified advertising.

A large proportion of the extra money was spent on upgrading the BBC’s server technology to cope with the increase in users following September 11.

Part of our original commitment was to encourage people to come on to the web and I think we’re doing that. Of the 500,000 visitors who used the Test the Nation site on the day of the broadcast, 300,000 had never visited the BBC site before.

12 Mar, 2003

Announces 100 job cuts

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The BBC announces 100 job losses across its websites as it looks to control costs. Highfield says the corporation’s spending on the web will fall by £6m in the next financial year to £68m and by a similar amount the following year. After several years of explosive growth in staffing and spending, BBCi will only receive inflation-linked budget increases from now on.

We have strategically positioned the move towards interactive TV because we’ve seen how popular it can be and it reaches people that don’t necessarily spend a lot of time on the web…We’ve got to work out what people look at and what they don’t.

7 Jul, 2003

Guardian Media 100: No. 25

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Highfield is placed at 25 in The Guardian’s Media 100 list of the UK’s most powerful media people.

The heat is being turned up on the Beeb’s internet activities after the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, ordered it to justify the £112m it spends each year on its online and interactive services…The Beeb’s less popular websites are facing the axe (including Crimewatch and Watchdog), while its focus on interactive TV will shift away from high-profile “events”.

12 Jul, 2004

Guardian Media 100: No. 33

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Highfield is placed at 33 in The Guardian’s Media 100 list of the UK’s most powerful media people.

Highfield, perhaps the BBC’s most consummate empire builder, has spent most of the last year on the back foot. In the run-up to the government-ordered Graf report into the BBC’s new media operations, he spent a great deal of time defending the BBC’s online reputation, commissioning KMPG to rebuff accusations that bbc.co.uk unfairly distorted the marketplace.

20 Dec, 2004

Plans to challenge Google

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In an interview with The Guardian, Highfield says that the BBC has the potential to challenge Google.

We have got the best content in the world and a more flexible rights framework than anyone. We have the best brand, I would argue, online in the world in terms of trust and impartiality. We’ve also got access to some of the best technology in the world. If you glue all of that together we should be in a prime position to create the best next-generation search navigation tool in the world. We haven’t yet found out across all genres what new media can do. Where we have, like in education, the digital curriculum has become a great example of a product that owes very little to radio or television and is very much of the medium.

In response to the BBC governors’ response to Philip Graf’s review of BBC Online he has been required to cut funding by 10%, axing sites deemed not to pass the corporation’s new “public value” guidelines.

In order to free up the required funding we must start to behave more like television and radio, decommissioning sites or cutting back on funding, or even archiving them as circumstances change.

18 Jul, 2005

Guardian Media 100: No. 23

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Highfield is placed at 23 in The Guardian’s Media 100 list of the UK’s most powerful media people.

Highfield has had a much better year than last, when he was regarded as very much on the back foot after the government-ordered Graf report into the BBC’s online operations.While a string of websites have been shut as a result of Graf and the government’s green paper, Highfield’s new media department is expected to be one of the prime beneficiaries of director general Mark Thompson’s controversial plans to make annual savings of £355m.

24 Oct, 2005

No 1 in Marketing magazine’s Power 50

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Highfield is awarded the top spot in Marketing magazine’s Power 50 selection. The magazine says:

The reason Highfield made number one in the Power 50 is that, so far, the BBC has not just made sense of digital but managed to drag its enormous self to the very front of its development. Highfield has led it there, while [Director General Mark] Thompson is a digital convert himself.

Highfield:

I wonder if it’s our place in the industry, which Tessa Jowell once described as the creative R&D for the nation. Whether we’re expected to innovate because we can, because we can take a long-term view on it or because we are funded differently; that we can be expected to take risks and try things out. And I think having the UK’s largest content web site, that’s got to be one of the reasons why we’ve got this huge role as a route to market. But I do hope it’s more the positive aspects of what we can do to help drive the industry – drive the market – than the 900lb gorilla that distorts the market…First and foremost is our audience, which is why we get the licence fee. You’ve got 16 million people (using BBC.co.uk), so we have an obligation to be there. It’s not something we can play around with any more. For me, number one is meeting these sometimes frightening audience demands, but not doing so in a way that distorts the market. Far from it. What we are trying to do is make sure that, in getting out to more and more people, we don’t end up dominating share.

24 May, 2006

Royal Television Society speech

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In a speech to the Royal Television Society, Highfield clarifies the role of the BBC in the commercial Internet landscape. In the previous week, a group of companies, including Associated Newspapers, the Commercial Radio Companies Association, the Newspaper Society, News International and the Telegraph Group, called for greater restrictions on the BBC asking for limits to be imposed on its digital remit.

[The Corporation] absolutely doesn’t want to be a MySpace or a Flickr or a Friends Reunited. [We want our digital presence] to shift from being a gateway to being a conduit, a channel for conveying content and frequently neither the start nor the end of the journey…I believe our audiences value bbc.co.uk as a portal, as a safe haven for many, which offers a starting point and a trusted guide. But we also believe our audience want much more as well. To find our content where they want it, whether within their favourite portal like MSN, their community like YouTube, or their environment like the Second Life virtual world website. They want to contribute their content – this we know – but not necessarily always on our site.

17 Jul, 2006

Guardian Media 100: No. 21

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Highfield is placed at 21 in The Guardian’s Media 100 list of the UK’s most powerful media people.

Ashley Highfield is among the most important technology executives working in the UK today,” said one panellist. “Yes, but talk about being in the right place at the right time,” said another. “Mark Thompson should be credited with the vision, not him.

13 Aug, 2006

Independent interview

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The Independent interviews Highfield, in his new position as head of Future Media and Technology at the BBC. He says he plans to use the department’s £250m to £400m budget and and 1500 staff to put Britain at the forefront of internet-based technology by opening the BBC’s video archive of the BBC, some 1.2 million hours of film, for free.

I think we are about to go from the predominantly text-based, predominantly static world into the video-rich, dynamic, two-way engaging environment. That for me is when it starts to get really interesting. It’s more than putting a newspaper online it’s where you can really start to empower people and give them total control over their media consumption…What we [The British] have is an opportunity now in Web 2.0 to actually get ahead of the game, because we do have one of the most advanced creative industries, our television industry is world renowned…[The BBC] has one of the world’s largest archives, if not the largest archive. And yet, because we’ve got so few channels – routes to our audience – inevitably 99.9 per cent of that content stays on the shelves. We ought to liberate it and make it available, how, when and where our audience would like to consume it.

On the UK approach to education and technology:

The streaming of people in England into arts and science means that people who can explain technology are few and far between. It’s so rare in the creative industries to find creatives who are interested in technology, because a lot of them look down on it. It wouldn’t happen in America or Germany. It’s very rare as well to find technologists who have been taught how to sell their ideas. It’s one of the reasons why the entrepreneurial culture here hasn’t made many dotcom successes.

15 May, 2007

BBC ‘still innovative’

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Responding to Greg Dyke’s comments that the iPlayer is losing ground, Highfield defends innovation at the BBC.

No one in the UK content market could innovate faster. The only thing that might stifle innovation would be the process of approving new services because that can take a long time. With BBC Trust approval framework for new services, we won’t always be able to be number one to market, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t or couldn’t be innovators.

He says the Company can help the transition to mobile:

The BBC can play this role of trusted guide, taking audiences through new mobile experiences and helping to build the market.