Jim Sheridan: Traditional TV is ‘reaching extinction level’ and needs State support

Award winning film director Jim Sheridan has warned that traditional television is “reaching extinction level” and has called on the Government to support the television sector the same way that it supported the indigenous film industry.

Mr Sheridan said that it was sad to see the fall in people paying their television licence.

RTÉ was in an impossible position because nobody wanted to pay for a TV licence. The State broadcaster was in “the invidious position of being the person coming to take the money out of your bank account. You are just going to make the population at large hate them.”

People were prepared to pay for streaming services like Netflix and Amazon so if a tariff was put on such services then that money could finance television production, he told Newstalk Breakfast.

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“Just put a tariff on them and give one tenth, or one twentieth of the finance to the indigenous industry. So you’d be giving €100 million or €200 million to Irish film or TV production companies or you let the streamers just decide who they want to finance. That’s the economics of it. And that’s just Ireland. Can you imagine what it is worldwide?”

The threat from such services was not being exaggerated, he said. “People watch [terrestrial] TV, but they think it’s free.”

“They’re getting [money] in, but they’re spending billions and they have to stop doing that because they don’t have the money to do it.”

Mr Sheridan said there was no way to compete with services such as Netflix and Amazon. Stations like RTÉ and BBC would go if they were not supported by the Government. They needed “life support”.

Mr Sheridan said the Irish film and television industry had shown itself to be up to world standard in recent years so it was essential for it to receive State support. In the past RTÉ had helped fund films like My Left Foot and The Field, but they were no longer in a position to give “€50,000 or €100,000″ to productions like the Banshees or Inisherin or An Cailín Cúin.

Traditional markets for TV content were gone, he explained. Previously films could be sold in secondary markets such as television and DVD, but streamers had eliminated that market and revenue stream.

The current situation for RTÉ was very sad, he said. “Either you support public television or you don’t. The trouble is, every time the government changes, RTÉ were the only place where the likes of Prime Time and that would criticise them. So all the governments hated them, every party. It just became really difficult.”