The BBC‘s Director General, Matt Brittin, has said the British broadcaster’s streaming service could benefit from a “public service algorithm” that allows it to function more like YouTube.

The striking plans, which Brittin warned was not “policy” at this stage, would see the BBC iPlayer opened up to creators and make the service more like YouTube, the platform that the exec oversaw in EMEA before joining the BBC.

In his first address to the industry today at the Edinburgh TV Festival, the former Google exec once again warned the BBC iPlayer had “fallen behind” rivals due a focus on content spend over technology in recent years. He first made similar noise in a town hall speech to staff in May soon after he became DG.

Brittion was careful to say this was “no fault of the team” at the BBC and that the content spend meant he “inherited incredible audience reach,” but leaves a puzzle over the iPlayer’s future and an immediate challenge in improving the iPlayer recommendations functionality.

His blue-sky solution was for the iPlayer to function more like YouTube by hosting creators from around the UK – “providing they stick to the guidelines we choose to set.”

He didn’t detail how this would be achieved, what the remuneration offer would be or why creators would choose to opt for BBC digital services over YouTube or other social media platforms, but it is still one of the more tantalizing ideas to be floated by a director general of the BBC for some time.

Brittin also called for the BBC to be “a more open platform” and that there was a need to “create sovereign media public space,” while adding the UK could build something “unadulterated by commercial interests, by algorithms that have other interests at heart.”

The service, which he dubbed ‘iPlayer 2.0″, would be based around “educating, informing and entertaining the public here and ideally around the world,” he said, adding it should be created “it in a way that’s not biased towards the incentives of a U.S. tech company or commercial interests. It should be biased towards what we want public service to be all about.”

It is likely the BBC, which is in the midst of cutting 2,000 roles to save around £500M ($679M), will have to cut programs to pay for improvements to the iPlayer. He noted that the BBC had shed £1.3B over the past decade and services and programs would inevitably come under pressure.

Brittin has spent his first 100 days at the BBC travelling to different parts of the mammoth organization to identify where to prioritize his efforts and how to wrestle with the type of existential crisis that outgoing BBC presenter Amol Rajan described earlier today.

Brittin admitted he had not “understood quite the severity” of the financial pressure heaped on the BBC. “Obviously, to get to that scale of savings, there’s uncertainty hanging over a lot more colleagues than those who will eventually leave the organization,” he added. “That’s really hard to deal with. But 90% of the people in the BBC will remain.”

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