MUMBAI: UK pubcaster The BBC has announced that it is to close its Digital Media Initiative (DMI).

Beginning in 2008, DMI set out to move the BBC‘s production and archive operations to a fully integrated, digital way of working. The decision to close DMI follows an operational review of the project which was launched in October 2012. The report found that DMI was not going to deliver on its stated objectives and as a result BBC DG Tony Hall, took the decision to close it with the agreement of the BBC Trust. The total cost of DMI to the BBC will be ?98.4 million.

Following the decision to close the project, the BBC Trust has launched an independent review to establish what went wrong and why.

Hall said, "The DMI project has wasted a huge amount of License Fee payers‘ money and I saw no reason to allow that to continue which is why I have closed it. I have serious concerns about how we managed this project and the review that has been set up is designed to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned. Ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure, it does not mean we should not attempt them but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here."

The DMI set out to create new digital production tools and link them with a central, digital archive that would allow BBC staff to access a seamless digital chain throughout the production process, from camera to archive. The BBC has worked digitally for some time, DMI aimed to bring those processes together so that everything could be accessed from the same system and stored on a computer.

The individual components of DMI were: new production tools that could be used to create content digitally on a desktop; a store to house the newly created digital content; a database to search BBC archives and a place to store production reports digitally.