The Irish General Election

I actually think that UTV Ireland's Saturday strategy is half right, as RTE will sweep the boards, I doubt any other broadcaster could compete with them on TV. Where they get it wrong is not having a half hour bulletin on at lunchtime Saturday. On the other hand Sunday might be a big day this time around and dropped the ball there. A lunchtime and teatime bulletin are needed if anyone is to take their service seriously. Their 10pm bulletin has been decent over the last few weeks.

UTVI have a third bulletin at 2300 on Saturday. It's not a bad effort since about 2 and a half hours of their Saturday night schedule is dictated by ITV.

I'm surprised BBC Parliament aren't taking any of RTE's coverage this time as they did in 2011.

Do UTV and TV3 not have a weekend news service as standard?

TV3 has a magazine show called Saturday AM and Sunday AM, which will cover the election this weekend. UTVI has no news at weekends normally.

No, UTV Ireland at the start were hinting that their news service would expand to weekends but never has. TV3 used to have a decent enough service at the weekends with News bulletins every day plus A hour long political chat show of one sort of another and a review of the week on Sunday Nights, but Doughty Hanson bought the station in 2006 and made cut after cut. There was a threat that the station would close entirely if they weren't allowed make cuts (and to be fair the station has lost between 180 million and quarter of a billion since it started). For years the last bulletin used to go out at 5.30 on Friday and no more new news then until Monday Morning.

Since the soaps left TV3 lost appox 40% of it's audience (if you exclude the world cup month) All their new shows tanked or never appeared, so they introduced the 8.00pm bulletin which usually is just the same bulletin as 5.30. The funny thing is that their News at 5.30 was their most watched show for most of 2016, more resources might have meant more ratings. All this is now history as Liberty Global now own the station and their plans aren't very clear, but it does appear that they might use it as a loss leader and maybe News will be beefed up.

They have recently introduced a Saturday and Sunday Breakfast type show between 9 and 12 which now does include limited news but the champion of those two shows was fired last week.

To be fair to UTV Ireland they do have a 7 day News Service on their Repubic of Ireland Website. TV3 doesn't update it's news and sports site a lot of the time. For example right now there are only 2 stories posted on their Sports news website from this year.

Irish TV (Sky 191 and various other platforms) Have election coverage from 2pm to midnight (with a two hour break between 6 and 8. ) It'll come from the Mayo Count Centre. Past efforts at covering elections were hosted by Alan Cantwell but since he's returned to the TV3 fold it's going to be Ken Murray. It's not a great channel (not great at all ) but it's more PSB than UTV Ireland and TV3.

Shame at the moment that there is no way to view either regular edition of Ireland Live, as it no longer seems to be on the UTV Ireland Player, and even on the website most of the videos aren't viewable in the UK. This is very poor considering that TV3 and RTE News programmes are viewable online in the UK.

I'd agree with that, there's a market in the UK for Irish TV news, perhaps a few pounds/euros to be made, for very little effort. That's the major problem for Irish TV on Sky191, it seems to portray a Ireland that never existed and the audience it seems to be aiming at is the over 65 year old person who left Ireland at 18 and never came back! When they actually do something half decent like election results, it's lost between beauty salons opening and Country and Irish Music.

RTE provide an RTE Player International online subscription for a few euro a month. It is not worth your while to get that to give you some Irish news and current affairs coverage as well as other programmes from RTE?

http://www.rte.ie/playerinternational/

http://www.rte.ie/player/ie/international/faq/

No need to pay as the News and Current Affairs are free as is the Late Late. Anything else worth watching on RTE is almost always rights blocked.

I don't watch Ireland Live but I don't think you're missing much.

RTÉ is much better at domestic news than TV3 and UTV Ireland. Furthermore, ITN is much better at world news than TV3 and UTV Ireland. UPC (now Virgin Media) customers were annoyed that they lost UTV (Northern Ireland).

You don't even need to pay that to get RTE News. The free version of RTE Player and the RTE News Now app will give you all that. But that's not the point.

The point is that in a market like Ireland's, where you have the British broadcasting behemoths overlooking you, you need to make sure that at least some of your content is available to the widest possible audience. Now, considering how much ITV programming they use, it should be relatively easy to get their news coverage available in the UK, even if that's all they can do. But, either they've significantly underestimated what the impact would be for making sure some content is available on a larger scale, or they're afraid of the cost, but since it seems that they're bulletins contain mostly Irish news, from everything I can tell from the website's limited availability, the increased cost shouldn't be high enough to cause that significant a problem.