RTE to outsource The Lotto

All of which the lottery should have been paying for. They should be paying for the air time promoting their commercial product as well.

It can be done on a budget.... Presenter wearing own clothes, fake background, guy with a camera phone.

The National Lottery, a tax on stupidity, good news it is proportional.

Yes, but the lottery are not going to pay the insane costs incurred by the heavily-staffed heavily-unionised RTE, where a five minute show would take 15-20 staff to do a full 6-8 hour shift. The Lottery told RTE that Virgin Media would happily do it for 5-10% of the cost.

Do you have a link for that? Would love to read that

Where I'm from that's how it's done, it's not part of the news but it's immediately afterwards.

The handling and (mis-)management of the Lotto has been amateurish in the extreme going back decades.

Does anyone remember when RTE used to do the Big Big Movie on Saturday evenings? And at 8pm when there was maybe 20 minutes of the movie left when the tension or the action is building, they would break to go to the Lotto results. And when they used to do a movies on Wednesday nights, they'd break for the lotto results at 8pm and then do a News Bulletin as well, in the little used Network 2/RTE2 News studio, so it'd be half an hour until you got back to the movie by which time you'd have forgotten what was happening.

They could do that, or if people can wait an hour, they could read out the numbers during the news. Or both!

As you say, theres no need for a full studio and a team of about 20 filming it.

Ah FFS!

It's been a long time since I went to RTE for my movie watching, partly for that reason.

The problem is RTE are in the mindset of the early 1990s. "We are the state broadcaster, the most trusted source for news, the government will always protect our position".

I believe I was the last generation to come home after school and watch television before watching the 9 o'clock news before bed. Look at college kids, they are ALL about their mobile phones and get their news from google. Advertiser know this and commerical advertising is moving away from tv and radio.

Arent public figure fair game? They are in the public eye. IF Enoch Burke and Bob Vylan are fair game why arent RTE celebrities?

You are using logic and commonsense when trying to understand an organisation where such things dont exist.

I am in no way defending RTE but it is heavily unionised so there are probably union rules saying something like there must be 3 sound engineers for live broadcasts, and the cost of a sound engineer working even for a 10 minute Lotto results broadcast on a Saturday night, the rate goes up. Cha-ching!

As you say there is no live programming on Saturday evening. They could probably do with some sort of Saturday Night Takeaway type show and then wrap it around the lotto results, but RTE dont want to make anything anymore, preferring to buy everything in.

It's kind of crazy when you think about it that there was The Den for kids on weekdays, back in the 80s and 90s, but in 2025, there is nothing like that anymore. Im open to correction, I'm not in the habit of watching RTE 2 on weekday afternoons.