RTÉ admits paying Tubridy €345,000 more than declared

Cap might be 250k but that shouldn’t mean these presenters should get that.

I would suggest most should land into the 150 - 180. K bracket.

So the clowns at the top of the food chain will still get their big pay till there contract ends.

Sure that is years away for some of them .

I dont see any real change going to happen financially quick enough to pay their bills.

It will just be 56 million this year and more next year.

They Need to bring in financial experts from outside and chop the place up till it can be run without handouts.

It shouldn't be more than what a TD earns. Same with others in the Public/Civil service, none should earn more than the Taoiseach.

why 150k?

what is it specifically about that number apart from it sounds good to you that you want the cap to be that when 250k is probably the best balance between the organisations own commercial realities and market realities?

It's not affordable

They would go through the process and fold

They have no content to paywall except the GAA

Do the sums

Virgin has set top boxes based not on their content but reselling uk content and they have europewide organization behind them

Same with sky

Because I think 250k for Joe, D'Arcy, Miriam and Byrne is too much. Simple as that.

I could stomach them taking 150k, at a stretch.

And don't forget, they will probably have to give up being contractors, so if they become employees then there is added costs for rte on top of the 250k

A revolutionary idea might be to link the salaries of the "talent" with the audience figures. They lose audience numbers and they lose money. Lose a specified percentage and they get fired.

Regards...jmcc

That's it exactly. The salary cap is just a ruse, an accounting trick to shift a cost under another heading in RTEs budget where it will be easily hidden. And hiding payments is where RTE has form.

Presenters will moan loudly but take their cut, because they won't be prevented from being used in independent productions. In fact I'd say you'll be seeing more of the "talent".

RTE exists as a means of moving your cash into the pockets of a media elite where broadcasting is only a byproduct.

I've said it before. No idea why Prime Time needs 2 presenters for a 35 minute show shown only twice a week.

Morning Ireland with endless presenters.. sports, news bulletin, business etc etc. What a waste.

I'm sure there are many more examples.

The alternative would be to do away with "talent" as contractors. Ironically, if Tubridy had been an RTE employee, this whole fiasco would not have happened.

Regards...jmcc

I fail to feel any sympathy for any employee in rte at this stage.

Yes some are on a lower wage but compared to who??

And how many hours worked??

Hard done by rte employees would need to be transparent with these answers. No hiding behind poor us whining

Every employee in a workplace, including the post people, know what's going on. They know if management is doing a decent job or not.

We've had the review previously going on about redundancy improved productivity improved programming etc..this one is no better.

An awful lot of words. And not much in the way of substance. Rte all over.

CAM systems are hardly cutting edge technology, there's no reason RTE couldn't licence a system.

The analogue systems used in the 1990s were hacked. The UK's subscription DDT service was hacked. Satellite digital TV services were also hacked because of a theory that identified a flaw in all systems that was published in 1991. This led to the rise of the first generation of dodgy boxes which received the keys necessary to decrypt the programmes via the Internet. You don't seem to understand that even if a digital service is encrypted that it has to be decrypted at the audience side. That takes technology and a subscription management system. RTE has neither.

Well yes, everything can be hacked. But even when Card Sharing became common (still very niche) sky along with most European providers still grew it's legitimate customer base.

Modern illegitimate ITPV is streets ahead of CS, but hey we still have subscription TV.

Just because something can be hacked doesn't mean the end or an excuse not to start sub based TV.

While the subscription managment side of things might be outsourced, the costs of the CA technology for such a small market, especially for those that do not use online services and are not cable TV subscribers would be substantial. 

Why?

You don't have to reinvent you, you license it.

Investing in brand new far more expensive tech didn't seem much of a barrier when switching to DVB-T.

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Anyway you seem hung up on the very minor detail of how to encrypt or decrypt a signal. We have the technology.

The reality is the future is quality which is sub based and and largely on demand.

Nationwide on 3 times a week as they show us a goat testicle farm has probably run it's course.

The Tubridy payments scandal exposed RTE as a highly dysfunctional company. It simply does not have the expertise, technology, infrastructure (subscription management services) and the money to properly build a non-niche Pay TV service that operates over the air (Saorview), via cable TV, via satellite TV (you probably only thought of it being carried by Sky on the Astra satellites but forgot SaorSat) and online.

Sounds like RTE middle management throwing in the towel again.

The "we can't" attitude is one of the reasons Mr Tubridy was on nearly a cool million a year.

Cowardice and archaic thinking and lack of vision is why we will still be having this discussion in 5 years time.

It seems to me that the talent who are contractors will sidestep the 250k salary restriction which will only apply to rte staff. Plus ca change in RTE!

The only plan seems to be to close services with no audience (the lesser performing digital streaming channels and the plus one tv services) . Why not kill off fair city and save a decent amount of money? The orchestras and lyric fm/2fm should also be closed and/or spun off elsewhere.