Ms Dee Forbes:

We have seen incredible growth in the RTÉ Player. Streams in 2020 were up 35% on the previous year. That was driven by the pandemic and people having a voracious appetite for every sort of content. The player has grown significantly in the last two years in terms of usage and people viewing it.

The Senator mentioned Disney, Amazon, etc. There are a couple of fundamental differences between what they provide and what we provide. First, the Senator knows the scale and resources of those multinational giants. The other big difference is what they do in terms of on-demand viewing versus live. RTÉ, being a national broadcaster, has a large amount of live output. This can also be watched through the player. We have spent a lot of time and resources improving the delivery performance of our live content and that held up incredibly well through Euro 2020 when we - I will use my head of technology expression - almost broke the Internet with huge concurrent streams watching that event. There is room for improvement and we are not complacent. However, as Ms Doherty said, we have to match the moneys we have with what we can do. Further investment is required and, pending an outcome on funding, it is top of our agenda.