Cianan Brennan: Time has come for the RTÉ Player to grow up
Cianan Brennan asks why can’t RTÉ Player be as good as the offerings of TG4 or the BBC? File picture: Colin Keegan/ Collins Dublin
On December 19, 2020, I had my final fit of pique with the RTÉ Player.
The All-Ireland Football Final between Dublin and Mayo was on, and the country was about to fall into the next Covid-related lockdown.
I needed pre-Christmas cheer in the form of the GAA’s footballing showpiece, which is one of my annual highlights. You can probably guess where this is going.
The following 90 minutes was among the most frustrating viewing experiences imaginable — the stream hung constantly, each time it did we got put through the same four ads on repeat, each instance lasting about two minutes (the fact the ads are the only thing that seems to work on the player has become something of a niche 2020s' Irish joke, one people probably won’t understand the relevance of in 40 years’ time).
The player wasn’t fit for purpose then, and while some performance improvement has been noted in the interim, it still isn’t exactly up to scratch now, something acknowledged by RTÉ repeatedly at recent Oireachtas committee hearings.
That’s not a great record when you consider the player was first launched just under 13 years ago. That’s a long time to not manage to get it right.
So why does this matter? Is the player that big a deal?
It matters for several reasons.
Firstly, yes, a fully functioning multimedia player is a prerequisite for any modern media platform. The world has moved further towards streaming, with live television becoming less of a priority in the era of on-demand content.
Secondly, for RTÉ specifically, the move towards a blanket household broadcasting charge is fundamental to its future. Such a charge is designed to account for the money lost by the broadcaster to licence fee evaders and ineligible ‘no-tv’ households (an estimated 15% of homes).
RTÉ estimates the revenue it’s losing out on due to the “utterly broken” (to quote director general Dee Forbes) licence fee model is over €65m per annum.
But if we’re to move to a broadcasting charge, the State’s preeminent media player would need to be in good nick. So it is very much in RTÉ’s interests for the player to be performing well.
Lastly, RTÉ’s ongoing, seemingly never-ending financial plight isn’t exactly a secret at this stage. In that respect, the money needed to upskill the RTÉ Player may equate to a drop in the ocean. But the need for that relatively small technological bailout seems symptomatic of an institution which has to constantly fight the appearance of always having the begging bowl out. It’s indicative of a wider financial malaise in Montrose.
Last month, the broadcaster appeared before both the Oireachtas public accounts and media committees to discuss its finances, and the player came up repeatedly.
Before the PAC, Ms Forbes said, in terms of what it will cost to bring the player up to standard, that she didn’t “have that number to hand”.
“It is significantly more than we are spending now or have been spending for a number of years,” she said.
She acknowledged that in the current media world, having an efficient player is a given. “We have to be at the table in this space,” she said, adding that, assuming the funding were not an issue, improving the player would be “top of our agenda”.
A week later, before the media committee, Ms Forbes got a little bit more specific.
“The honest answer is it will cost millions,” she said.
Crucially, she said: “We have made some provision in the future for some of this but if funding does not come our way then this cannot come to a place where it can be up there in that world-class space.”
The truth is RTÉ is walking a tightrope here, which sees it hammering the Government over the head with the fact it needs to be funded adequately without looking like it’s constantly grasping for taxpayer cash.
It goes some way to explaining the broadcaster’s reaction to an report on the funding required for the player published on Tuesday.
That report covered the RTÉ’s most recent correspondence with the PAC dated February 9, in which it said it could not provide a specific figure, but that a “conservative” estimate would suggest that “several million euro… as a minimal requirement” would be needed.
Upgrading the player would require “specialist skills”, necessitating even more operating expenditure, it said.
The broadcaster went further.
“On-demand and live streaming technology requires extensive investment and infrastructure to deliver parity of service with linear broadcast services, which have been in operation for many decades, with continued investment of significant capital funding to the level of tens of millions,” it said.
When the piece made reference to “tens of millions” being required to upgrade the player and bring it in line with industry standards, the reaction was swift. RTÉ issued a press release decrying the “incorrect” statement, saying the phrase had been in reference to the historic spend on legacy broadcasting formats.
Ms Forbes told the PAC in April 2021 that RTÉ had had to “invest substantially in the player in order to make it fit for purpose because of course we are being compared with Netflix, Amazon etc”.
The increased audience for the player since the pandemic began is now a matter of record, with an increase of time spent on its content of 43% in the first 12 months of Covid.
It saw 67.5m streams in 2020 alone, split 60:40 between on-demand services and live programming, while Ms Forbes proudly told the media committee in January that streaming of Euro 2020 last summer on the platform “almost broke the internet”.
Leave the might of Netflix et al aside though — why can’t RTÉ Player be as good as the offerings of TG4 or the BBC (reported annual spend on its iPlayer of about €6m). Even Virgin Media TV’s relatively no-frills player feels a deal more reliable than the RTÉ variant.
Thirteen years after its launch, the fact that a money pit may be required to fix the RTÉ Player’s ills smacks more of poor vision or management.
The yesterday asked RTÉ to confirm:
When did the RTÉ Player go live and what has been the specific spend on it — in terms of development, administration, and maintenance — in each year since its inception?
RTÉ said: "RTÉ Player launched as a Beta service in April 2009. Since launch, serving the audience with the best possible user experience and content offering on RTÉ Player has been and is our top priority.
“We are continuously iterating and developing RTÉ Player, keeping pace with both technological developments and new platforms, expanding from browser to mobile, as well as smart and connected TVs. We also work with distribution partners, making sure RTÉ Player is available to as wide an audience as possible.
“RTÉ's content strategy ensures that the service is efficiently run within available resources to deliver the best possible service to Irish audiences, offering a distinctive mix of content, live and on-demand.
“We understand that our audience has high expectations, and we want to deliver on these expectations. RTÉ Player is operating in a very competitive set with international players and SvoDs who have significantly more money to invest in infrastructure, development, content and technology. RTÉ is working within its current resources to continually invest in developing and improving RTÉ Player.
“While RTÉ does not disclose investment details relating to RTÉ Player, note 2 in RTÉ's Annual Report includes spend on Online Services, which includes RTÉ Player as part of our channel and genre breakdown, along with other items.”
According to the report, under ‘online services’, RTÉ spent €8.7m in 2019 and €9.2m in 2020 on "general broadcast, transmission and other output costs". The report refers to RTÉ having spent a further €22m over the two years on indigenous programme costs for online services and a further €2.6m on acquired programmes in the same category. Its total net cost over two years was more than €26m, covered by its licence fee revenue attribution to online services.
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