Ms Tríona Quill:

The Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill previously provided an exemption from the levy for community broadcasters but only if their income and turnover was below €250,000. There is now no threshold. We are just saying that all community broadcasters will be exempt from the levy.

On the 15% limit, it was previously the case that the commercial radio sector could have no more than ten minutes of advertising in an hour and no more than 15% of broadcasting time in any 24-hour period could be used for advertising. We are keeping the overall limit and saying that advertising cannot be more than 15% of total broadcasting time, but we are abolishing the hourly limit. That provides more flexibility to broadcasters so that if something is on which attracts a big audience, they have more leeway to shore up their revenue through advertising. That echoes some additional flexibility for advertising on television that the AVMSD introduces. That is being transposed by the online safety and media regulation Bill.

In addition to the Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill provisions, two of the three additional heads that were integrated were intended to be integrated on Committee Stage. One relates to abolishing the requirement for RTÉ to continue to maintain a teletext service, Aertel. The second is about the independent radio sector's advertising limits. The final one is to introduce a provision regarding the prominence of public service media. This was an option under Article 7 of the AVMSD. We listened to the views brought forward by the European regulators group, RTÉ and TG4, and we propose to include a provision in the online safety and media regulation Bill related to that, given the importance of public service media in an increasingly fragmented market and rapid technological changes that mean that media content on those stations that was previously easily found might not be so easy to find in future.