In April 2006 the BBC announced Creative Future, its five-year strategic plan. One of the earliest and most significant reforms to be implemented, in the July of that year, was a profound organisational restructure to ‘enable 360 degree commissioning and production and ensure creative coherence and editorial leadership across all platforms and media.’ This institutional transformation – a strategy for wholly integrated multi-platform public service content production made manifest – represented the full scale adoption by the BBC of a multi-platform and multimedia approach to commissioning, production and distribution, and shift from a focus on linear broadcasting of programmes, first embarked upon in the early 2000s.

In 2001, BBC Director of New Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield, had announced, to some controversy, “The days of commissioning programmes are over. We are now only commissioning projects that have levels of interactivity” (authors italics).This paper explores the multi-platform ‘Project’ as a cultural form emergent in the early 2000s, as early experimental forays were made across channels, across media, across departments, across organisations. It sets out a typology of textual configurations: ‘granular’, ‘bundled’ and ‘woven’ before going on to map the aesthetics and textual workings of A Picture of Britain (2005) as exemplar of the ‘bundled’ configuration: an offering across channels and media under an umbrella brand, that consists of a disparate range of content exhibiting vastly different modes of address, production budgets, discursive formations. It concludes with consideration of the Project as a response, by the BBC, to some of the challenges -and opportunities – for public service content in the first phase of the multi-channel digital era.