“The meeting, held at the BBC, was called by Pact to allow Pact members who are suppliers to BBC online – who make up a significant proportion of their external spend – to air their views about the proposed budget cuts to BBC online outlined in the BBC Strategy review.

“Chief executive for Pact, John McVay said: “A 25% cut to online is a backward step. Simply cutting overall budgets does not ensure it will re-focus on key public service areas or deliver efficiencies. We will be lobbying hard on this issue as part of our full response to the review, to ensure the BBC really puts quality first.”

“Another key proposal Pact made to the BBC at the meeting was to introduce a Window of Creative Competition (WOCC) in addition to the existing 25% external supply quota, as recommended by the Analysis Mason report and the Perspective Associates report which were done as part of the Government’s Digital Britain review.

“Pact will be talking further with BBC online as part of its full response to the BBC Strategy Review.”

The BBC must commission a quarter of its online work from external suppliers, so Pact members are concerned at loss of work.

But BBC future media and technology director Erik Huggers is singing from director general Mark Thompson’s hymnsheet on this. Huggers told Thursday’s Changing Media Summit…

“We have 400 top-level directories; they’re not all equally good - is that really the right way to go? We will literally cut it in half so we end up with around 200.

“We will go from a sprawling website with lots of stuff on it, some of which has never been updated, to a much more structured view of what BBC Online is all about.”

Huggers tells MediaTalk all 400 top-level domains would have to pass through three “lenses”...

“(1) Do these things meet the public purposes of the BBC? (2) Does it fit with the new focus on the five editorial priorities? (3) If it scores well against reach quality, impact and value for money, it goes on to the final stage. If it doesn’t, we’ll either archive it, delete it, remove it altogether, or consolidate it under bigger, broader products and categories.”

But he isn’t yet identifying which sites might go. There has, notably, been no campaign like #Save6Music campaign on behalf of web pages.