Ms Dee Forbes:

Commercial revenue or advertising revenue is really all about demand and supply. Over the years, when there was only terrestrial television, advertising revenue increased. Since the advent of digital players, such as Google, Facebook and others, the number of platforms available to the advertisers has grown. In the main, the money involved in advertising has reduced and the number of players having to fight for that has also increased. There is less money with more players. Having said that, we are working at the moment on really trying to maximise our linear advertising, which has seen declines in line with the overall market, and on trying to maximise our digital offering. This is where we are seeing a progression of viewing going to digital. As I said earlier, €1 on linear television does not equate to the same on digital. We must work with the industry and our advertisers on maximising the digital offering. There is no doubt that digital advertising is taking money away from linear, but we have strong Irish content and strong programming, and Irish advertisers want to be seen in that light. We need to do more of what we are doing. We need to diversify more into digital areas, and we also need to come up with new revenue streams, which we had certainly planned for last year. Of course, Covid stopped a lot of our plans. We had a lot of plans to create events, to do more with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and to take some of our programmes on the road to have immersive experiences for the audiences, such as by taking "The Sunday Game" on the road. We had plans to do a lot of that last year as another way of diversifying our revenue as an organisation. A combination of all of those things will help us to get revenue to a more stable place.