The BBC is planning to cut at least 6,000 jobs by the end of its current financial year from the 2004 level as it is pushed by the government to achieve net efficiency savings of 3 per cent per year for the next six years.
"I believe the BBC should get somewhat smaller. It should make less. It should concentrate its finite resources on rather fewer, better hours of TV and radio and fewer, better Web pages," Mark Thompson, director general of the publicly funded organisation said in a speech delivered today.
"This isn't going to be easy. We've been worrying away at efficiency since the early 1990s. We've chopped back overheads sharply over the past three years. Independent analysis suggest that our programme prices are in line with ITV, Channel 4 and the market," Thompson said.
The director general said after years of expansion of the total volume of content, the BBC would now focus on quality.
The BBC dominates the news media scene, reaching more than 94 percent of adults through its television, radio and online services and spending more than 3 billion pounds in the process.