RTÉ director general Mr Bob Collins yesterday cast doubt over the company's previous announcement that it would seek to develop up to five new digital channels. "I can make no prediction re digital television," he said yesterday.
RTÉ's strategy for digital television is in disarray amid a cash crisis at the broadcaster and legal difficulties, which are stalling its debut on the Sky digital satellite platform in Northern Ireland.
His comments came on the eve of the presentation of a report to the RTÉ Authority today which contains a number of radical options to cut costs at the national broadcaster. This report, which has been prepared by KPMG and Logical Strategy, will detail a range of costed strategy options based on RTÉ's current revenue forecasts. They do not factor in the licence fee increase being sought by the broadcaster.
The options to be put forward by the consultants will include plans to sell large tranches of land at its Montrose headquarters, cut more jobs and scale down RTÉ's programme-making significantly.
The station's much-delayed digital strategy may be scaled back even further. It is more than three years since Mr Collins said RTÉ planned to introduce a 24-hour news service, an education channel and a youth channel. None of these plans has progressed due to financial problems. Recently, another firm, Ireland Live Television, introduced the State's first 24-hour live news and sports channel.
Yesterday, Mr Collins initiated a €500,000 pilot project with the Department of Education to explore the potential of digital broadcasting in the education field. He said there was no contradiction between pilot projects on digital learning and the difficulties RTÉ was experiencing.
Meanwhile, RTÉ's plan to broadcast its channels on the Sky digital platform to hundreds of thousands of subscribers in Northern Ireland has hit a legal hitch. RTÉ had planned to go live on Sky from April but has been forced to enter negotiations over programming rights with AGICOA, a Geneva-based organisation which represents hundreds of content developers.
An RTÉ spokeswoman said yesterday the firm did not know when these matters would be resolved. The problems relate to the broadcasting by RTÉ in the North of programmes for which it only has the rights in the Republic. Industry sources said that, with rights to hundreds of programmes from Eastenders to GAA, possibly up for negotiation, these negotiations could drag on for many months.
Sky subscribers in the Republic should be able to receive RTÉ from April 23rd on their satellite dishes. This will follow the completion of testing on a new satellite dish installed at RTÉ and the signing-off of a satellite licence between RTÉ and the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland.
