CH
Breakfast has never been a priority. The audience before 8am is very, very small. Ireland AM just about breaks even but it's basically product placement for 3 hours and most of it's audience appears after 8.30am.
At one point Euronews seemed to be everywhere at 7am where for a short time It was on RTE 1, RTE2 and TG4. However, TG4 made the clever move of rebroadcasting France 24 overnight. You can still see Euronews on RTE1, RTE2 and RTE News Now at about 5.30am for around an hour.
Usually, if there's something very important Happening A TV News special will be broadcast but the Starting time for that is usually 8am. It's possible the next one of these will be the morning after the UK general election. The last time I remember RTE TV news being on overnight outside of elections was for the Gulf War in 1991. They had hourly headlines for a few nights and rebroadcast CNN the rest of the time.
Just to add that RTE did use the 1984 Olympics to do a test run of Breakfast TV. They had a Morning programme with a mixture of Olympics, plus News, Sport and features from around Ireland. Between costs and low viewing figures at the time they dropped the idea after the trial 2 weeks. At that time they were so cash strapped they hadn't sent an entry to the eurovision the previous year and they were thinking of closing RTE2 during the week or for a few months over the summer.
Stop sitting on the fence and tell us what you really think!
Thing is though, is breakfast a real priority for RTE Television?
Looking at the latest radio listening figures published last week, most radio stations put in some serious numbers of pairs of ears in the weekday morning drive slot - so faced with that - is a tightly budget controlled public service tv broadcaster really going to spend 4-5 million euro on developing and then producing their own breakfast programme, when most of the available audience is either on TV3, or (where viewable) Good Morning Britain, BBC Breakfast and Sky News or it seems, the multitude of radio stations available in all parts of the country.
Plus, if we are talking about finance - the 45 min block of 'commercial paid presentation' programming at 7am, must bring in a few more cents into the RTE piggybank than a blank screen or testcard would do.
I don't know it this 'abmomoly' still goes on these days, but I seem to remember that you had RTE One and TG4 both putting out Euronews at the same time. Could never quite see the point in that. Yes, if the TG4 one was dubbing the soundtrack into Gaelic, but they weren't.
One wonders what would happen if a major news story of Irish importance breaks before 7am?
Would RTE switch to domestic studio/location presenter led news coverage, or patch across RTE News Now (and therefore the Morning Ireland studio 'snoop' cameras) over to RTE One, and let the radio news team do the coverage, until normal programming resumes?
Thing is though, is breakfast a real priority for RTE Television?
Looking at the latest radio listening figures published last week, most radio stations put in some serious numbers of pairs of ears in the weekday morning drive slot - so faced with that - is a tightly budget controlled public service tv broadcaster really going to spend 4-5 million euro on developing and then producing their own breakfast programme, when most of the available audience is either on TV3, or (where viewable) Good Morning Britain, BBC Breakfast and Sky News or it seems, the multitude of radio stations available in all parts of the country.
Plus, if we are talking about finance - the 45 min block of 'commercial paid presentation' programming at 7am, must bring in a few more cents into the RTE piggybank than a blank screen or testcard would do.
I don't know it this 'abmomoly' still goes on these days, but I seem to remember that you had RTE One and TG4 both putting out Euronews at the same time. Could never quite see the point in that. Yes, if the TG4 one was dubbing the soundtrack into Gaelic, but they weren't.
One wonders what would happen if a major news story of Irish importance breaks before 7am?
Would RTE switch to domestic studio/location presenter led news coverage, or patch across RTE News Now (and therefore the Morning Ireland studio 'snoop' cameras) over to RTE One, and let the radio news team do the coverage, until normal programming resumes?
Breakfast has never been a priority. The audience before 8am is very, very small. Ireland AM just about breaks even but it's basically product placement for 3 hours and most of it's audience appears after 8.30am.
At one point Euronews seemed to be everywhere at 7am where for a short time It was on RTE 1, RTE2 and TG4. However, TG4 made the clever move of rebroadcasting France 24 overnight. You can still see Euronews on RTE1, RTE2 and RTE News Now at about 5.30am for around an hour.
Usually, if there's something very important Happening A TV News special will be broadcast but the Starting time for that is usually 8am. It's possible the next one of these will be the morning after the UK general election. The last time I remember RTE TV news being on overnight outside of elections was for the Gulf War in 1991. They had hourly headlines for a few nights and rebroadcast CNN the rest of the time.
Just to add that RTE did use the 1984 Olympics to do a test run of Breakfast TV. They had a Morning programme with a mixture of Olympics, plus News, Sport and features from around Ireland. Between costs and low viewing figures at the time they dropped the idea after the trial 2 weeks. At that time they were so cash strapped they hadn't sent an entry to the eurovision the previous year and they were thinking of closing RTE2 during the week or for a few months over the summer.
Last edited by chinamug on 30 April 2017 5:13pm