Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 18 January 2023
Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media
Future of the Media Sector: Discussion
Mr. Adrian Lynch:
On another point, there is collaboration on the content side, which many of the people here today already do. Also, when it comes to the new media commission and policy on prominence, Mr. Farrell from Virgin Media brought up earlier the fact that the way in which audiences consume public media has transformed significantly, as we know, over the past five years. We are about to go through another huge change in respect of the fact that there are more sophisticated connected televisions and other devices and major tech companies now that will, potentially, under the legislation, carry free-to-air channels to Irish homes and audiences and so on. That is a massive shift from a prominence point of view. These platforms, for example, apply algorithms to make recommendations as to what the viewer should watch next. If you think about it, in the old world there was the electronic programming guide and prominence was guaranteed to RTÉ, TG4 and TV3 through channels 101, 102, 103 and 104. That will now all be algorithmically run by gatekeepers. The question therefore is, as technology moves on, how we guarantee that public service media will be discoverable by Irish audiences. It is one thing fixing the broader funding question; then we have to think about the audience and how we deliver to them. That is a massive challenge, particularly for the broadcasters in the room, but it applies to audio and to community television as well. That is one of the big strategic things we as a group need to take up.
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