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

He was a member of RTÉ's Executive when Dee Frobes was running the company. Did they ask if he took a redundancy payment? Was he aware of the barter accounts? Is this all a fall out of the mismanagemnet of RTÉ, under part of his watch?

Willie and Moya were riding high on Today FM and its transformation. You have to remember that Radio Ireland was about to collapse prior to the arrival of Today FM and Ian Dempsey. Really only The Last Word was keeping Radio Ireland alive by that point. Then bring Ray D'Arcy into the fold in 2002 or so, "Guess who's joining our Den".

Does anyone actually believe that the government will have come up with a replacement for the television license system "by the summer recess" ? I e within 6 weeks time? My arse they will

An post getting a tenner from every licence sold was daft to begin with

They may somehow wriggle out of actually implementing the new funding model before the government finishes up, especially if the general election is this year, but I think they'll have to commit 'in principle' to something this summer, given how clearly they have signalled their intention to do this…

Just read an analysis/history of 2FM on the RTE website.

https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2024/0526/1451253-2fm/

These paragraphs at the end were the most interesting part:

"The main problem may be one that Dan Healy knows better than most -
the relationship between a radio presenter and their listener is a
delicate thing.

Who you switch on and invite in to your kitchen is a deeply personal
choice and all the enthusiasm in the world can’t compel the listeners to
stay tuned, regardless of who is comin'atcha."

Does this kitchen table market from 45 years ago even exist at the same scale today for 2FM's 15-34 year old target market? Is RTE radio and TV, and especially under the Dee Forbes era was, largely pitching to a set of markets that ceased to exist in those forms almost half a century ago?

Did the licence fee create a kind of Montrose timewarp while the real world outside moved on while RTE continued to operate in a pre satellite TV/Internet bubble? Ironically, Forbes had a background in cable and satellite TV. The problem in hiring her was that those battles against cable and satellite TV had been fought and lost by RTE decades ago. The competitor was and is the Internet and streaming.

Even the licence fee is a concept from another century.

Regards…jmcc

And my guess is what will happen is a combo of licence fee and Govt subvention of maybe around 50mil.

And they would be kept to that!

Maybe Backhust is up to the job after all.

How is Dee getting about these days without her RTE funded chauffeur ?

Pure politics. The public service that the Post Office provides yada yada yada.

@jmcc

Did the licence fee create a kind of Montrose timewarp while the real world outside moved on while RTE continued to operate in a pre satellite TV/Internet bubble? Ironically, Forbes had a background in cable and satellite TV. The problem in hiring her was that those battles against cable and satellite TV had been fought and lost by RTE decades ago. The competitor was and is the Internet and streaming.

I'd argue that streaming is just an continuation of this competition. I'd argue that Dee Forbes was largely cocooned in Discovery, much of her work was office work and overseeing other people's work, rather than adding anything major. Lots of higher ups are just coasting in their careers. I imagine she might be one of those types.

Thats him, married to Theresa Lowe who became a barrister after Where in the World.

Discovery Plus was launched well after she left. (2021)

RTE Player has been a problem for years. D+ is has most of the Discovery channels but the advantage is that a subscription gets some of the series months before they go to air on broadcast. Some of the Australian ones are up to three months ahead. One thing I've noticed with some of the Discovery advertising is that can be woefully off-target. The advertising isn't there (not surprising with a range of channels aimed at different demographics) or is generic with the odd bit of local advertising. With broadcast, the Discovery channels are typically on the lowest tier of Pay TV with a few on FTA.

I think that she was upper management rather than programming. The streaming aspect seems to have happened years after she left for RTE. Not sure when Virgin and Sky added the Discovery channels to their playback service.

DVRs (digital video recorders) began to replace DVDs and they are an integral part of Pay TV now. DVDs were a bit of a technological deadend in that they offered better quality than VCRs and video tape but less usability for the consumer. Once streaming and access to broadband Internet kicked off, the days of the DVD rental chains were numbered. Netflix adapted well. (It was DVD rental based initially.)

Regards…jmcc

I am not arguing the history of Media. I do think the DVD revolution was very fast in comparison to the VHS/VCRs. I think between 2000 - 2010 broadcasters and distributors were helped by the arrival of DVDs because for the broadcaster less people had access to recordable media / PVRs, and DVD sales boomed, far outstripping that of VHS sales. Considering that some movies of the period lived on DVD rather then in Cinemas on their release, e.g. Blade.

You just have to go into a charity shop or a recycling centre today and see the effects of the 2000 - 2010 DVD boom.

A similar technological revolution in the 1980s destroyed RTE as a monopoly broadcaster in Ireland. From the 1970s onwards, Cablelink and some of the other cable TV operations brought crosss-channel TV stations to Irish audiences. That meant that RTE was seeing competition from BBC, ITV and C4. RTE got a bit of a reprieve because most homes had only one TV set so people were largely stuck watching what the adults wanted to watch. Then, in the early 1980s, the manufacturing costs of TVs started to fall as the Asian manufacturers geared up for the European markets. Families began to buy second TVs (often portables) for the kids. The kids no longer had the same loyalty to RTE as their parents. The audience for RTE was changing and RTE never noticed.

At the same time, RTE radio, even with 2FM/Radio 2, couldn't compete with the pirate stations. It now had a new generation of viewers and listeners growing up watching and listening to RTE's competitors. The VCRs made things worse for RTE as most people would have already seen the "big movies" that RTE would later broadcast FTA. Ironically, RTE and An Post/TE jointly owned Cablelink and its Dublin net was the biggest cable TV network in Europe in the 1980s.

Cablelink was testing cable broadband with bandwidth over ten times that of ordinary dial-up in 1998. Unfortunately, that kind of innovation takes money and vision. RTE decided to spend the money on its management and zelebrities rather than upgrading the cable networks and the RTE/TE run Cablelink networks were not upgraded for broadband. UPC and Virgin would later buy Cablelink, upgrade the networks, and effectively dominate the television market in Ireland.

The collapse of the DVD rental chains meant that DVDs switched from being something people rented to something people bought. The record and CD shops benefited for a while. With the rise of Napster and music piracy on the Internet, these shops came under a lot of pressure. DVDs began to be sold online and often at a better price than those in the shops. DVDs required players. As laptop PCs developed, they also included DVD reader/writers so playing DVDs became more than just watching DVDs on the main TV. People were able to watch them on their laptops too. But then laptops got access to the Internet and as download speeds improved (early/mid 2000s), people started to download movies rather than buy DVDs. The RTE mindset was stuck in monopoly mode and oblivious to the way that people were watching TV and movies was changing.

Forbes was just another in that long line of RTE monopoly types even though she had experience of the Pay TV business. The problem for the Pay TV business was fragmentation (lots of people watching or wanting different channels), Piracy, and changing technologies causing new competitors (streaming). RTE's old viewing audience had been split with the advent of cable TV and satellite TV. But the range of channels available meant that specialist programming could be provided for audiences as part of a subscription tier. RTE had no such options and was never even likely to innovate given the size of the market and the lack of abilities of its management to innovate in a changing market. RTE Player was a reactive and quite poor attempt to hold on to some of its audience that it was losing to streamers. RTE needed someone who understood the challenges and was able to innovate. Forbes may have understood some of the challenges. The problem was that she was not able to innovate as the management of RTE was a millstone around the neck of any innovation. And as with the DVD boom and bust, if there's no innovation and adaptation by a broadcaster, its audience will dwindle.

Regards…jmcc

this is Ireland. It has worked for many and in 6 weeks the government holidays will arrive until some time in October. By then it will be old news and off she goes.

She's gotten away with for nearly a year now, what's to say she'll just keep on keeping on?

A right thinking government minister would realise that the only option for them would be to split RTÉ up.

1. People are angry at RTÉ, historically RTÉ have always played the poor man, now we know we got bad content from a mismanagement organisation who just failed to do any work, or avoided working.
2. People have stopped paying the licence free for this reason, a small proportion may disagree with Public Service Broadcasting but that is a tiny minority.
3. RTÉ services have never been that good, better to understand what RTÉ currently has making each part smaller than it currently is and invest in content.
4. Changing the licence fee to support this reformed / broken up public service broadcaster, shows that the new service is moving away from the current mismanagement allowing for better content or at least what might be better content, allowing audience buy into the idea of direct exchequer funding for public service broadcasting.
5. Changes to governance and some of the Human resource suggestions are now largely changes that would have been made in any organisation, they aren't really new suggestion and they don't real address the issue of content at the broadcaster.

Martin and the government just sit on reports, and those reports really just relay what we've heard a thousand times before:-

1. The licence fee is broken
2. RTÉ does sports and news well, potentially punching above its weight
3. Implement governance reviews
4. And sure the future looks bright, lets move on.

Lottery Ryan hanging in there on 2fm getting the 2 Johnny's spot.

Junior Soprano tried that stunt too, not sure if he got away with it though.

Yeah I think people are getting her mixed up with Moya Doherty. Though I wonder if Jim Jennings got to that Funeral.

This might upset the RTE lifers in 2FM.

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/we-believe-the-station-should-be-privatised-classic-hits-radio-owner-wants-to-buy-rte-2fm-and-is-prepared-to-pay-10m/a1077105122.html

Will Catherine Martin be interested in the offer and will she have to get advice from Dee and Moya first?

Regards…jmcc

A stunt. They wanted to hire Tubs 12 hours after he got the boot from Backhurst.

Easy media exposure is all.

Mr Branigan of Bray Broadcasting/Classic Hits fame, does have form for talking bollocks lest we forget -