rte on saorsat at 9.e question?.

No official figures but rumoured to be less than a thousand

Regardless, I suspect that saorsat will be gone by the end of this decade and Saorview by the end of the next decade.

How much would it cost for RTÉ to setup a FTV card service and encryption?

I can't imagine why anyone who had to pay to install saorsat wouldn't have it combined with UK/Free to air ? Imagine paying up to 400€+ installation cost, just to have Bog 1,2 & 4.

Yeah, grand. It's beside the point though. Saorsat is the infill service for Saorview - not Saorsat & UK FTA.

If Sky had picked up the UK rights for the Euros, where would that leave Saorsat viewers? They shouldn't need to depend on the UK FTA services (which Ireland has zero control over) to get the basic service that their TV license fee is supposed to cover.

The fact that the Euros were FTA anyway in all of the Saorsat 'overspill' locations just makes the decision to block them on Saorsat even more ridiculous.

What about FTA protected events? I only ask here as I can't seem to find a clear answer eitherway anywhere else.

As I understand, events like the Euros final are protected to ensure there are broadcast FTA. But.. it doesn't work if satellite viewers are forced to buy a subscription to watched an unblocked RTE, while the FTA RTE version on Saorsat is blocked off.

I may be slipping more to a 'broadcasting' point, than 'satellite' but . if you can't receive Saorview, you have no choice it seems than to pay a satellite subscription to see an FTA protected event such as this. (Unless to say it's freely available on the player covers it?) Or maybe 'Saorview protected events' is a better way to phrase it than 'FTA protected events'

I can understand blocking friendly matches or such that it would not be worth to pay the overspill costs to show ..but, is their not an obligation to show what has been legislated to be FTA?

My understanding is that the feed for the RNI_1 mux in NI is fed from Donnybrook to either Divis or Black Mountain in Belfast via microwave link (or at least originally was, could be fibre-fed now) where it is multiplexed with additional data (e.g. Freeview EPG) before being distributed to relevant transmitter sites. It's definitely not fed from Saorsat or even cross-border Saorview transmissions, as when RTÉ2 was the only HD channel on both platforms the SD picture quality of RTÉ1 & TG4 on RNI_1 was better (720 x 576) than on Saorview & Saorsat (544 x 576) at the time (and still is better than Saorsat for TG4).