Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 10 December 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Future Funding of Public Service Broadcasting: Discussion

Mr. Rory Coveney:

RTÉ has been delivering linear services on television for 50-odd years. We spent hundreds of millions of euro in infrastructure, towers en masse, and we have hundreds of people who do nothing but try to get the signal to people's homes in high-definition. On the shift we have announced in the strategy, in one sense there is a lot of focus on the cost-cutting elements, and that it has been the case here. The shift to on-demand is the big challenge that RTÉ has to wrestle with. As Ms Forbes mentioned, the shift is technically very difficult, and it is costly in terms of the investment made. Disney, one the most well-resourced media companies in the world, just launched Disney+ a couple of weeks ago with great difficulties in streaming in the first couple of weeks at the types of scale we are used to. We are very acutely aware we have things to do in improving RTÉ Player, but it is a big part of our future and it will require a multi-annual investment over a number of years to do that.

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