Dee Forbes banging the RTE TV licence drum again 60m uncollected fee *poll not working - pl ignore*

Michael O'Leary called Martin and Ryan dunces yesterday over passenger cap.

Should the thread title be changed to:

"Backhurst megaphoning about RTE funding"

Not that I'm a fan of O'leary but they were lucky he only called them that. I can think of much worse.

But they cut in these areas anyway. I don't support subscriptions but the little give to "noncommerical" area of RTÉ is nothing to write home about. Only for RnaG and RTÉ requirement for the service do they spend on Irish Language. But there are little to no Arts programmes on RTÉ, while Documentries come and go (with the exception of Radio I will grant you). TV has very little to offer.

Dr PJ Mathews who's 2nd term decided to resign from the board with just 9 months left in his term. He says its due to work commitments but its funny how for the last 9 years and 3 months he was able to committee to RTÉ's board.

It also sounds like he didn't meet with the minister with the rest of the board.

Is there any reason to believe the deep structural changes required can't happen without shaking the other public services which operate on a similar model at corporate level.

When Irish Water was being setup they chose Bord Gáis as the corporate model to copy. Is electric Ireland, IGB, HRI etc operating on a similar model. So now ask yourself, if changes are forced on RTE, would it cause issues legally without forcing changes on the other semi states. Relatively recent news on HRI and IGB board payouts suggests similar structure. IE and BG I don't know.

The current model run by RTE is expensive and has failed for some time needing to be being bailed out by taxpayers. It is time to start from scratch, redefine the "public service" remit and cut cloth to measure. It is not going to be pretty in the early stages, there is a demand among Irish people for local content that interests them and it will get better. With a subscription model people can access the content when they need to and it opens up the possibility of adapting a YouTube model for content creators, it opens up new commercial opportunities. The platform is what matters, subscribers will take care of the content and its funding. It has already been suggested that the transmission infrastructure is split off from the company and the content creation parts split further with the orchestra being offloaded somewhere else.

If online content is poor its because broadcast content is also poor. I don't think we will see much change in the culture of RTÉ. I don't think staff in RTÉ realize this.

greens aren’t helping themselves. A car crash party.

If making the TV Licence optional would lead to a collapse in revenue to a point that it's no longer viable, then I would see the as a public expression that it isn't needed anymore.

I think a "true, comprehensive public service broadcasting service" has had it's day and isn't needed anymore.

All that's needed is to cover programming that isn't commercially viable but is important to the state from a cultural point of view.

If you're looking for Dancing with the Stars, Friends re-runs or Ireland fittest family then you need to pay for it yourself.

From an old-school Reithian approach to broadcasting, the problem with remodeling RTE as an Irish BBC4, or BBC4 meets CNN, is that a huge chunk of the population would tune out completely, or almost completely, and that undermines the public service mission. Part of the point of the current 'broad church/channel' model, from that perspective, is that people come for the Fair City and stay for the Upfront or whatever.

Agghhhhheeeeur!

You have to have balance of programming but RTÉ don't really understand this themselves.

Take a viewer interested in DWTS or Ireland's Fittest Family, RTÉ pump millions into both show, this is fair enough because their maybe a return (both from a money perspective but also to bring audiences into other programming) ... however those shows are not balanced with cheaper programming of the same kind. I keep going back to the quiz / game show, neither are expensive to produce but neither are replacing DWTS and Fittest Family nor are they doing daytime quiz programming, which could lead to giving people in the industry experience. You might consider these to be commercial but considering that our commercial TV station doesn't produce this time of programming !!!! But that is also down to competition and how both RTÉ and Virgin Media have have competed across programming (largely competition in the sports sphere).

TV production is expensive even at the cheaper end, I am listening to a podcast with Richard Ormond, I didn't realize he'd been involved in Deal or No Deal, but he said that the average prize pot was 16.5k for the show, where they produced 10 eps a day giving C4 (at the time) 200 episodes for the year. But this is a big money prize programme (ITV are so rich he said that he produced a programme were on the first game the top prize was won, causing huge problems for the producers and another show that failed to get aired even though lots of people won big money from it).

But then you have something like pointless or countdown where the prize money is small or non-existent.

The rest is entertainment https://www.youtube.com/@TheRestIsEntertainment

We've been in the death throws of RTÉ for the last 2 decades, David is just noticing this now! This thread pretty much outlines as much. Do we really need Columnist to point out the bleeding obvious?

Yes we do. It may be stating the obvious here but no one in authority believes it.

Who else in the media has declared RTÉ to be defunct. Who in the Oireachtas?

Until that happens, talking about the demise of RTÉ is just gossip.

I know no-one under 30 who would choose to watch or listen to anything from rte unless absolutely forced to. I.e. someone with a kid and they want to see the Toyshow. Then it's under sufferance.

I'm wrong I realise to expect that we could have an rte solely paid for by subscription but I don't see change happening anytime soon.

I also think that nobody at management or board level should have any connections with politicians.

The connections between these people means that all sorts of shenanigans is allowed and acceptable with no reprocussions.