RTÉ admits paying Tubridy €345,000 more than declared

Nonsense, they were able to encrypt analogue in the early 90s.

Everything is digital now.

The idea that is somehow insurmountable to encrypt binary in 2023 is beyond remedial.

Lol, maybe even NKM will blackball him now, killed the golden goose

Isn't that my point? and again it doesn't matter that you are not watching an Irish drama but that we are give people the opportunity to write, direct, acting in those dramas and to potential further their careers in other countries or in this country and even see that drama on the Streamers in other countries.

Wait and see the cap become a target.

A far better idea would have been a complete regrading of sliding scales

I fear you are correct, given the paucity of management skills in that place.

run without handouts is never going to happen unless you want to scrap public service content and just have another virgin media.

the whole problem for rte in the first place is that it is expected to be a fully public service content operation but run commercially with the tv license then being the state money.

Also just on wages if most of your TV programming is going to be independently produced there are going to be a lot of presenters on High wages, that we will never hear about.

They scrambled the video part of analogue TV in the early 1980s. TV services started encrypting audio (there is a difference between scrambling and encrypting) only towards the mid 1980s (Sky's OAK Orion in Europe and VideoCipher II and B-MAC in the US) and in Europe in the 1990s (Filmnet, the D2-MAC Eurocrypt and BSB's hybrid DigiCipher/D-MAC systems). It wasn't until the late 1990s that digital TV (what you think of as "digital") became widespread in the UK and Ireland. Digital Terrestrial TV only happened in the mid 2000s in Ireland with the launch of SaorView. There was an attempt at an Irish subscription DTT service (Boxer TV Ireland) but it failed.

The analogue systems used in the 1990s were hacked. The UK's subscription DDT service was hacked. Satellite digital TV services were also hacked because of a theory that identified a flaw in all systems that was published in 1991. This led to the rise of the first generation of dodgy boxes which received the keys necessary to decrypt the programmes via the Internet. You don't seem to understand that even if a digital service is encrypted that it has to be decrypted at the audience side. That takes technology and a subscription management system. RTE has neither.

While the subscription managment side of things might be outsourced, the costs of the CA technology for such a small market, especially for those that do not use online services and are not cable TV subscribers would be substantial. The cable TV subscribers could have your hypothetical RTE service on a separate subscription tier like Premier League soccer or movies. But that would inevitably lead to content cannibalisation where some Pay TV programming might have to be broadcast free to air (FTA) after being broadcast on the subscription sevice in order to entice people to subscribe. Add an online subscription service and now you have more problems.

The Tubridy payments scandal exposed RTE as a highly dysfunctional company. It simply does not have the expertise, technology, infrastructure (subscription management services) and the money to properly build a non-niche Pay TV service that operates over the air (Saorview), via cable TV, via satellite TV (you probably only thought of it being carried by Sky on the Astra satellites but forgot SaorSat) and online.

Regards...jmcc

No one's going to agree to that

Just keep the figures at that of a Marty Morrissey

In the terms of the business, Sky and Virgin are known as gatekeepers due to their dominant positions. They dominate their markets. With Ireland, most of the cities and population are in Virgin media areas and the bulk of channels on its networks are encrypted. A subscription based RTE service would have to have online, cable TV, Satellite TV and over-the-air (SaorView) delivery. That's a very complex model that involves different systems. Apart from the programming, it involves multiple systems and RTE just hasn't the expertise or the money.

Regards...jmcc

They are already on cable and satellite

You can only view rte on satellite via a sub, same with cable

No sure on how much they are getting for this, no much

Online is the easier part

It's terrestrial tv that's the issue

There's no system in place and what is available is not worth a subscription

Contractors employees doesn't make a whole pile of difference

As long as they are paid a realistic sum

The Tubridy thing is nothing to me, it's them topping up Gerry Ryan's pension that should have broken rte

I think that Virgin and Sky have deals with RTE on carrying RTE channels. There is also SaorSat which uses a different satellite to those in the Astra slot and requires a different LNB for the dish. Terrestrial is now concentrated on SaorView and many TVs have a slot at the back for a Conditional Access Module (CAM). The problem is that RTE has nothing to go in that slot and developing a system would be expensive. RTE simply hasn't the people with the necessary expertise. Many of those outside the cable networks may already have Sky or using the UK Freesat channels (BBC/ITV/C4 and some others) which don't require a subscription. The problem for RTE is that the market can't be covered by a single delivery method and the terrestrial TV fragment outside the cable networks is much smaller than the size of the online and cable fragments.

Regards...jmcc

There is one reason: money. Who pays for each CAM and for the smartcards? Who deals with the problems when a CAM or card doesn't work? There's more to it than simply licencing a system and hoping for the best.

Regards...jmcc