Is the money for the reinvented and bespoke iPlayer, and for the half-billion-strong global news audience, to come from advertising, from subscription, from pay per view or from another new and magical source so far wholly unknown to analysts of the broadcasting sector? Big plans and brave words are fine, and Britain is lucky to have someone of Hall's vision and audacity as the BBC's director-general. But Hall's ambitions cannot be financed by licence fee money. The BBC cannot simultaneously be in receipt of a state subsidy heading towards £4 billion and chuck hundreds of millions of "risk capital" at greedy creative-industry entrepreneurs. Either the BBC is a profit-seeking, privately owned, risk-taking and slimline enterprise or it is a state-subsidised, state-owned, publicly accountable and rather bureaucratic behemoth. It cannot be both. At present it is state-subsidised, state-owned, publicly accountable and rather bureaucratic, and it has a lot of catching up to do. 

This article opened with the statement that time and technology stand still for no organisation. As far as the BBC is concerned, the guardians of its heritage and reputation have done a lousy job in the last 30 years. They have totally failed to anticipate how technology would alter the BBC's position in British and international broadcasting. Time is running out. BSkyB, which has the US 21st Century Fox as the dominant shareholder, is leaving it behind even in its home market. Much more seriously, unless it is privatised soon and given the freedom to compete, the global media companies will outmanoeuvre and outgun it in international competition. The notion of the BBC as our "national champion" will be a joke. As a lumbering bureaucracy in public ownership and dependent on state subsidy, the BBC will go the same way in the 21st century as British Leyland and British Shipbuilders in the 20th.