RTE's budget

pseudonym1 wrote: »

Ya and we should all wear grey, cull music and alcohol :rolleyes:

I'm just going to assume you mean that would be boring or something.

Privately owned channels focus primarily on entertainment. RTE have no business competing with them when funded by the state.

Same way it is wrong for Dublin Bus to try to kill off competition when subsidised by the government.

They are there to provide a service others won't, not to compete for services that others will offer.

pseudonym1 wrote: »

Some folk depend on state funded channels and do not have the luxuary of private owned channels. NTL etc..

Yes competition is healthy but unfortunately it can then become monopolised and even controlled!


Yes you assumed correctly!

With Digital Terrestrial Television being released later this year, there will be other channels available.

There is also Free to Air Satellite which my father uses on which you can a lot of the best channels available for free once you buy the dish and a box.

On FTA you can get BBC 1-4, ITV 1-4, Channel 4, Film 4, E4 and many others although some of them are crap. All you really miss is the Sky channels although Sky News is FTA. Even some of the music channels are FTA.

It sure beats paying for channels, I'll tell you that much.

pseudonym1 wrote: »

Digital terrestrail Tely sounds scary!
Satellites wouldn't be everyones cup of tea - which brings me back to point some people (Granny rural living outside the pale types) depend on state provoided networks!
I have no idea of how many - but it seems unfair to exclude them access to the commercail entertainment.

Well the analog transmission (current broadcasting system) is being shut down in 2012 so unless Grannies don't want TV, they will have to migrate to DTT.

It isn't excluding them from commercial entertainment. They will be able to buy extra channels on the DTT such as Setanta I imagine and some others and they will get more channels standard from DTT as it is much cheaper to broadcast DTT than the current analog transmissions.

Overall RTE aren't good at home grown entertainment so why not let private companies do it. They can't compete at the moment with the state subsidised broadcaster. We have TV3 already and more channels could start up once RTE step out of the market.

Oh and my father is 60 years old, when I told him about FTA and showed him a list of channels he could get for free instead of paying Sky, he went out and bought a FTA box and setup a new bigger dish for it to get better coverage from other satellites and he aligned the dish himself and set it all up.

He's never been happier Oh and he lives in the middle of a bog about 6 miles from the nearest form of civilisation so its not just for the pale types :P

I think overall FTA is the way forward. You can even get FTA HD boxes and receive BBC HD for free. Its all about education and on top of all that you get a quality improvement! People should break free from NTL and Sky subscribed TV and hopefully this will help them move toward cheaper and good alternatives.

Arcee wrote: »

Lets say the independent production company is submitting an idea for a reality tv show or quiz show or something. They'll submit a list of expenses, eg a presenter, all the various camera, sound, production crew they need, post production facilities, editing rooms, voiceovers, graphics for the credits etc and a total cost including their fee as the producers of the show.

If RTE are interested, there's usually some negotiation. They might not like a particular aspect of the show or they may insist that an RTE presenter is used rather than one of the production companies choosing. They may want it to be filmed in RTE studios rather than an other location or they may just say no, it's too expensive, cut corners/re-do the proposal and come back to us.

Eventually the two parties will reach an agreement and the show will get made - on RTE's terms mostly. The whole process often leaves a great idea torn to shreds just so it fits RTE's idea of 'entertainment' but as they're the ones with all the money, if you want to have a job and get paid - you just have to run with it.

From talking to people that do work for these production companies they pretty much say it is always the same people hired to do the same jobs.

This is why you only get crap out IMO. There is no attempt to introduce new people to it. It is essentially a club for current members.

RTE rather than picking the best ideas, seem to pick the people they know and this isn't what the public pay for.

There's no grand conspiracy here. If you want the answers to all your questions why not just go to www.rte.ie/about and read their Annual Report?

You can read it here http://www.rte.ie/about/annualreport.html

In there you will see that, broadly, RTÉ is dual-funded. 44% of income comes from licence fee; the remainder comes exclusively from commercial revenue. There is no other funding route.

Specifically with regard to TV, RTÉ spent 77million euro on programmes commissioned from the indepdent sector in 2007. It's statutory obligation was to spend 30million euro. It exceeded its obligation to the private sector by more than 50%. As such, without RTÉ the independent production sector would collapse as, without a statutory mandate, a private company would have no obligations in this regard (eg TV3).

RTÉ is also not-for-profit. All monies are re-invested. Fair enough, you don't like x or y programme, but I don't see that as a sound basis for advocating the removal of Public Service Broadcasting as a model.

RTÉ is required, by legislation* to operate as a Public Service on behalf of the people of Ireland: this includes operating two TV channels (with minimum statutory commitments to news and current affairs, regional output, Irish language output, young people's programming, multi-cultural programming, arts, factual and entertainment; subtitling, access services, teletext, 10% content to TG4, Sport); 4 radio channels (Radio 1, 2fm, Lyric (Limerick) and R na G(Galway)), 6 digital radio channels (RTÉ is also charged by law with the maintenance and development of a digital radio hub for use by all the peoples of Ireland); performing groups (the National Symphony Orchestra, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the Van Brugh Quarter, RTÉ Philharmonic and Cor na Nog); RTÉ Publishing (incorporating RTÉ.ie with requirements in law to develop a web-tv platform, and the RTE Guide, as well as a range of books, DVDs, cds etc, www.rte.ie/shop); and RTÉ Networks Limited which is charged, by law, to maintain and develop Ireland's broadcasting infrastructure, an infrastucture used by all independent radios, by Gardai, by emergency services, and by TV3. RTÉ also operates a range of regional radio and TV studios (Cork, Galway, Limerick, Sligo, Letterkenny etc), a studio in Belfast and a news bureau in London.

RTÉ is also mandated by law to fund Ireland's transferral to DTT and the analogue switch-off (2012); it is mandated by law to fund the diaspora channel RTÉ International; it is mandated to run the Supporting the Arts scheme and is instituted on the board of the Irish Film Board and the Broadcasting Commision of Ireland (soon to the the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland).

RTÉ also donates 7.5% of its licence fee to the BCI Sound and Vision Fund, which funds programmes on Today FM and TV3, for example (so it is inaccuraute to say these outfits are purely commercially funded -- they are also funded by you.)

RTÉ is obliged to act as a corporate arts sponsor (Dublin Theatre Festival, Beckett Centenary etc).

RTÉ is also charged with maintaining and exploiting the National Audio-Visual Archive. To do this it runs a full restoration and storage unit off-site at Furze Road, Dublin. The riches and importance of this archive, going back to the foundation of 2RN in the 1920s, is inestimable.

The license fee, and commercial income, is spread across this very substantial diversity of activities. All these activities are instituted in law.

If you want to know what RTÉ is doing with your money this year you can look at the 2009 Strategic Plan here http://www.rte.ie/about/policies.html. The BBC have similar pages.

You could also look at the Statement of Commitments 2009 here http://www.rte.ie/about/statement.html. Again, the BBC operate by similar principles.

As someone who works in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility I take a nerdish interest in these matters (you don't say ...)

My point I suppose is that all the information people are looking for in this thread is available, freely, to all of us. There's no mystery. Whether, after all that, you like The Afternoon Show or think it's a pile of crap is part of the colourful debate that is Boards.ie

*(further provisions and PSB obligations will be instituted when the new Broadcasting Bill becomes law, see http://www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?) fn=/documents/bills28/bills/2008/2908/document1.htm)

Arcee wrote: »

Eventually the two parties will reach an agreement and the show will get made - on RTE's terms mostly. The whole process often leaves a great idea torn to shreds just so it fits RTE's idea of 'entertainment' but as they're the ones with all the money, if you want to have a job and get paid - you just have to run with it.

Fair point. This happens a lot and it's why we get sanitised, safe and unoriginal programming. You rarely see anything that pushes the envelope or takes a risk because they're afraid of their own shadow.