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.”

MS NOW anchor Lawrence O’Donnell torched Donald Trump during Wednesday night’s edition of “The Last Word,” calling the president’s attempt to obstruct mail-in voting throughout this year’s midterm election cycle the “biggest crime of mail obstruction in American history.”

“What Abraham Lincoln gave us, Donald Trump wants to take away,” O’Donnell said at the top of the segment. “The first significant use of voting by mail occurred during the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln trusted the Postal Service to deliver that mail. He trusted those envelopes.”

“We now have a Postmaster General who has put in writing his eagerness to violate the law for Donald Trump,” he then noted, referring to Postmaster General David Steiner. O’Donnell added that the latter has vowed to Trump that “the Postal Service will violate the law and not deliver mail if that mail contains election ballots sent to or from someone who the Postmaster General has decided should lose the right to vote in America.”

“Postmaster General David Steiner is now eager to obstruct millions and millions of pieces of mail,” the host summarized, calling the plan “the biggest crime of mail obstruction in American history.”

O’Donnell continued criticizing Steiner, Trump & Co. throughout the second half of the Wednesday night segment. The MS NOW anchor even expanded the scope of his outrage to the Supreme Court over its decision this week on Trump’s mail-in voting plans.

“The Republicans on the Supreme Court rejected an attempt to block Donald Trump from committing this crime,” O’Donnell explained. “The Supreme Court Republican majority said it was just too soon to know if what Donald Trump was going to do was illegal because his Postmaster General had not yet written his new rule about how to handle mail-in ballots. Never mind that he had actually written that rule on Friday and the Supreme Court ruling was on Monday.”

“He’s written a 95-page rule that was released on Friday, giving him control over all ballots mailed in America,” he said of Steiner. “The Postmaster General, according to this rule, will look at the ballot envelopes when the Postal Service receives them and then decide which of those envelopes the Postal Service will deliver.”

O’Donnell noted that only Congress is legally allowed to dictate acceptable and non-acceptable forms of mail to the Postal Service. He slammed Steiner for not taking that into account or pushing back against the president’s demands.

“David Steiner had a life-defining moment delivered to him when Donald Trump sent him an illegal executive order that was both illegal and unconstitutional, and David Steiner showed us exactly who he is, exactly how craven he is, exactly how dishonorable he is,” he concluded. “He is another disgraceful and now permanently, lifetime-disgraced Trump accomplice trying to commit the crime against democracy that Donald Trump wants him to commit.”