John Birt, then Director General of the BBC, used his 1996 MacTaggart Lecture to outline his vision for the BBC in the digital age. He began by listing the BBC's major achievements and concluded with a plea for an increase in the licence fee.

Reformulating Reith's original injunction that the BBC should ‘educate, inform and entertain’, Birt claimed in recent times the BBC's role has been to ‘delight, educate and inform’ and, by so doing, to act as ‘the touchstone of quality in UK broadcasting’. Birt summarises the BBC's considerable achievements: ‘we have become a major cultural patron … we have opened up intellectual vistas; and, at the same time … we have won the hearts of our viewers and listeners’.

While the digital age of broadcasting offers considerable advantages, there are a number of dangers confronting the BBC which must be overcome by government and regulators. First, the digital age will be dominated by the key players who own and control the vital gateway into the home (the ‘set-top box’) which carries not only television signals but potentially unlimited economic and financial exchanges. The struggle to control this gateway will constitute ‘one of the great business battles shaping the next [i.e. the twenty-first] century, to rival the nineteenth-century battle for the railroad’. Second, the ready access to a global system of programming will encourage a decline in programme standards and an Americanised world culture.