After what can only be described as a turbulent year for the broadcasting sector (and that was just RTE's weather department), the next 12 months should prove even bumpier for everyone on air.
As far as the State broadcaster is concerned, the forecast looks somewhat bleak as we enter 2000. Viewing figures for some programmes have fallen, others including Cursai Ealainne and Later with John Kelly have been axed while profit losses and cutbacks have been announced. Meanwhile, the Broadcasting Bill, due to be adopted during the next Dail session, will see RTE enter into its most risky venture yet. The future, whatever it may cost them, is digital.
Since the Director General, Mr Bob Collin's announcement earlier this month that RTE is to shed around one tenth of its workforce morale has not been good in Montrose.
The uncertainty is as much about the future expansion of RTE as it is about the cuts. "People are very concerned about what the future holds," one source said. An audience, already fragmented by the increasing choice on the TV dial, is likely to break down even further as RTE involve themselves in up to 40 per cent of this country's Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) service, Digico. "We have got to get our house in order," says Kevin Healy, Director of Public Affairs with the station.
Housekeeping will begin in earnest next year across a number of areas, not least of which is programming output. According to sources in RTE, one of whom suggested there was a patronising attitude from management to the independent production sector, there is increasing confusion about the station's strategy with regard to producing and commissioning programmes.
"We are coming around to the fact that our future lies in good quality home produced programmes that will pull an audience," says Mr Healy. A figure of £16 million, an increase of £6 million, is to be spent on the independent sector in the year ahead.
Nibbling like an annoying pup on the heels of RTE, is TV3, but not, unfortunately for the fledgling station, in the arena of the ratings war. Some of the biggest successes on the commercial station are programmes such as Judge Judy and Jerry Springer and station bosses are delighted with a product they describe as "tabloid television".
In terms of their impact on the sector, the most significant activity has been their constant highlighting of issues that RTE as a once untouchable monopoly had, until recently, no reason to justify.
Last March the station made a complaint to the European Commission that RTE's licence fee (a fee they are trying to convince the State to increase) was being used to compete with other stations and not exclusively for public service broadcasting. According to Mark Deering, TV3's Director of Regulatory and Legal Affairs, this is a "distortion of competition".
Deering also maintains that it is inappropriate for RTE to be going digital. "It is an extremely risky venture and they shouldn't be involved because of this risk," he said. "The fact that RTE will be involved in it as a distributor and a programme provider gives them opportunity for anti-competition practices."
The digital landscape will be developed in earnest in Spring of next year. Sky have been running their digital service here for several months now, but the quality of programmes and somewhat prohibitive cost of the service has meant the take up has been far from the wild success they are experiencing among subscribers in the UK.
The main players here will be NTL (formerly Cablelink) who will be hoping to hang on to their 370,000 existing customers across the country. Irish Multichannel, owned by Princes Holdings and the US company TCI, are also to wire up customers and, like TV3, are critical of RTE's proposed stake in Digico. Further on down the road, Eircom's experimentation with ADSL, where video services can be set down the phone-line, will clutter up the market even more.
Peter Branagan, who oversees the area for RTE, acknowledges that there are a number of legal and technological difficulties to be overcome if Digico is to have a smooth launch in October. And even if all does go to plan, he says there will be a "head to head fight" for digital viewers.
Even sooner, another broadcasting battle is set to take place in Dublin with the launch of three new radio licences, one of which, Spin FM, could be the subject of a legal challenge by a consortium who lost out in the licence race. "Obviously, it will mean slicing the pie up a little more," said John Taylor, Programme Director of 98 FM. He maintains that Dublin is grossly "under radioed" compared to other cities including Taylor's former stomping ground of Auckland, New Zealand, a city around the same size as the capital, where 25 stations are in competition.
HE speculates that if the radio stations Lite FM, News Talk FM and Spin are to have immediate appeal they will need to recruit known names. "The key thing for them is to anchor key people, personalities that listeners can relate to. They have to be better than a jukebox," he said. The year 2000 will see the Dublin-based radio stations compete for advertising revenue even more aggressively than the Irish listener has been used to.
For their part, Today FM are set next year to further capitalise on the pulling power of their two most popular programmes The Last Word and Ian Dempsey's Breakfast Show, but management have indicated the station is likely to concentrate on developing more flagship programmes in the year ahead.
Other areas are ripe for development too. According to Chief Executive Willie O'Reilly, the Internet is to become an increasingly important part of their portfolio; "We have plans in that direction. It is easy to see the value of Internet shopping malls run by radio stations. The station would be a kind of presidium arch through which the public march. It would also obviously bring the attention of the public to the radio station and reinforce that relationship. We are certainly examining this whole area at the moment," he said.
Two-year-old Today FM, along with RTE, is also keeping one ear on digital radio, a medium that is unlikely to take off here for a number of years. Digital Audio Broadcasting, (DAB) will provide better quality listening but also video transmissions and information updates with customised stock market reports or sports results as part of the service.
"At the moment the digital radio set is prohibitively expensive. If, for example, a car company began putting one in every car as standard then it could really fly," he said.
Currently, digital radio is around two years behind the UK and four years behind the US. The service is only available in the Dublin area on a test transmission basis and to access it consumers need a DAB set costing from £500.
The broadcasting consumer of the year 2000 will be faced with only two questions once the plethora of digital products are on offer: How much will it set me back? And what, (spare me all the techno-babble), will I get for my money?
Better quality sound and vision, more channels and more control over when and what you watch are the main benefits of digital. It will involve hooking up a set top box to the TV, a device expected to be provided free of charge when the competition really hots up.
Simple point and click interface technology should mean video recording hassles are a thing of the past and with "mass storage" the system can be requested to record up to seven feature films and around 30 soaps with just one button.
Those who do not want to go digital will not be affected as the analogue service is not likely to be turned off until around 2010.
Whether or not RTE and its future partners in Digico can compete successfully with satellite and cable companies, the consumer of the new millennium is likely to be king in a broadcasting sector offering more choices than ever.
Whether RTE will emerge quite as regally from the digital scrum, remains to be seen.