Mr. J.D. Buckley:

To respond to Deputy Dooley, we are all in agreement - certainly we in Sky are - that we need a healthy public service broadcasting ecosystem. That is our belief right around the group. To respond to Deputy Lawless, I hope we will be able to win him back as a customer. I thank Senator McDowell for his custom. It is appreciated. It is illustrative of the fact that, as a pay television provider, we fight for customers every day of the week. There are wins and there are losses, but every customer chooses to buy a television package for a reason. He or she spends hard-earned money to buy a television package because he or she wants more than what is freely available. The likes of YouTube, Facebook and Amazon were mentioned during the session. They are all operating in this market. I do not know, but I cannot imagine they are beating a path to Montrose to do deals. I do not know if they are, but everybody on this side of the table has made commercial-free contracts with RTE. We have its channels on all the Sky platforms and are trying to get them on our newly launched Now TV platform. Everybody here wants RTE, TV3 and TG4 to be part of a vibrant ecosystem, which I do not think those tech giants will provide.

As we mentioned at the beginning, we would like to work on a partnership basis with RTE. We have met with RTE to discuss various things, including helping it to target advertising more effectively through our AdSmart system, making RTE Player available on the Now TV platform, and putting RTE box sets in the Sky Store where they can be monetised. We have also had discussions about commissioning productions together. There are many opportunities to work together, but as we have referenced, going down this route would not be helpful for the overall relationship.