Cost of watching matches on GAAGo will be revisited, GAA director general says

GAA director general Tom Ryan has pledged to reassess the cost of streaming individual matches on GAAGo. The streaming platform, co-owned by RTÉ and the GAA, caused controversy earlier this year when a number of high-profile matches were shown behind a paywall instead of on free-to-air television.

In response to questions from Independent TD Peter Fitzpatrick at the Oireachtas media committee meeting on Wednesday, Mr Ryan said he “noted” the TD’s feedback that a charge of €12 per match was too high.

“We’ll be looking at our pricing again going forward,” Mr Ryan said. Mr Fitzpatrick said that the annual cost of €79 for all matches on GAAGo was “good value”.

RTÉ group head of sport Declan McBennett acknowledged that the primary issue facing the controversial streaming platform is one of access.

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Speaking before the same committee on Wednesday afternoon, Mr McBennett recognised that consumers’ experience with GAAGo depended largely on broadband quality, but said that the issue of connectivity across the country was “not a question for RTÉ, but for Government policy”.

Responding to members of the Oireachtas who relayed the experiences of their constituents who had issues with the streaming platform, especially elderly people, Mr Ryan said that he was “not deaf to any of those issues”.

“The feedback the members of the Oireachtas were getting, we were getting that too,” Mr Ryan said.

“When there are limitations in capacity, there are choices that have to be made. It really is a question of, GAAGo is showing more games than we were ever able to broadcast before, free-to-air has more games that are broadcast, but I don’t think we will ever get to the situation where every game is broadcast.”

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Mr McBennett pushed back against the notion that RTÉ, which already avails of the license fee, was “double charging” its audience by then putting certain matches behind a paywall.

In response to the assertion put forward by Sinn Féin TD Chris Andrews, Mr McBennett said that RTÉ schedules 326 live Irish sporting events on free-to-air, 404 in total when international and European rugby is included. He says this costs license fee payers 39c per event just for sport.

Responding to the charge of attempting to drive subscriptions by placing high profile games behind a paywall, Mr Ryan said that he “can understand the perception,” but that it was “a little bit unfair”.

He said that in both football and hurling, championship finals, semi-finals and all quarterfinals, bar two in both codes, are shown on free-to-air.

Mr Ryan explained that GAAGo morphed from its initial purpose of broadcasting matches to the Irish diaspora abroad, to showing matches to a domestic audience that were played behind closed doors during the Covid-19 pandemic.

He revealed that GAAGo generates income of €4m a year, which after costs is divided between RTÉ and the GAA. Mr Ryan said that he does not know how much of that income comes from international audiences when compared to domestic, but that he is “quite happy to venture that domestic is greater”.

“RTÉ's traditional slot is the Sunday slots,” said Mr Ryan when attempting to explain why certain matches were on GAAGo and others were on free-to-air. “Depending on the package bought by the broadcasters, they will look at the schedule and try to fit games in depending on what slots they have.

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“If a game is on a Saturday, it’s more than likely on GAAGo, if it’s on the Sunday, it’s at RTÉ's discretion. The contracts are signed at the beginning of the year, we make the same revenue irrespective of which games are broadcast.”

He also explained that the most popular matches on GAAGo attract an audience in excess of 120,000 people, with the smallest audiences coming in at between 1,000-1,500 subscribers.

Mr Ryan previously said that broadcast arrangements represent 20 per cent of the GAA’s revenue. When asked what percentage of that comes from GAAGo, he responded that the figure is between 10-15 per cent.