The Late Late Gay Byrne Irish Television Thread

I would have thought that Virgin Media Ireland would have avoided this because 6 hours of live broadcasting every day 7am to 1pm will cost them a lot more money rather than spending money on playing something from their ITV deal. They broadcast some live content from Virgin Media Sport output which increases the costs more often along with their current live news programmes including the Tonight Show & The Six O'Clock Show. Maybe VM do have the resources now to keep pouring in money into the business to cover the costs of their live programming every day. How does anyone else look at it?

I think Virgin Media One’s new schedule is a mistake. Four hours of Ireland AM is way too much. Elaine is a trashy programme with no redeeming features. I don’t watch This Morning or Loose Women but there is an audience for both programmes in this country. I think there will be complaints when that audience realises they’ve been dropped. Why not air them on Virgin Media Two or Three. My concern is also their dropping may be the thin end of the wedge. What’s to stop them dropping other ITV shows and dramas. People rely on Virgin Media to show ITV shows now that we don’t officially get ITV/UTV anymore.

It all depends on how much they were paying ITV for This Morning and Loose Women. I would think they're saving all that because the staff are already in for Ireland AM... They have to provide no new content as such, just go over the same news and papers and other features again, much as they do now. Elaine at 11 will cost no more than Elaine in the Afternoon. The hour-long news will cost not a penny more as such. So it's a saving whatever they're paying ITV. They must have done the figures and Ad revenue might not drop too much if not at all.

There have been a lot of complaints in various places about This Morning being dropped. It's fine for the 60% of houses that have Freesat/Sky or Freeview. (A lot of those houses don't watch on Virgin Media One anyway) It's the 40% stuck with Virgin Media that will have a problem, and they're mostly in Dublin, the one place in Ireland that Ad Agencys pay attention to.

Can't many in Dublin not get Freesat/Sky? I am sure there are also other means online of receiving ITV?

It is mainly due to cable being the historical “incumbent” - Sky didn’t carry BBC/C4 in ROI until 2001 and cable was around since the 1960s and Dublin was the first place cabled. At one stage Cablelink had take up rates of 85% of homes passed and Sky never ate into that until the mid-2000s.

Only a minor observation but, I was in Dublin a few weekends ago and when the coach was driving through the suburbs to the airport passing a lot of houses, I did not see one single rooftop TV aerial, saw a handful of Sky dishes, one would naturally assume that Cable penetration is high, and I also assume that this means ITV/UTV isn’t available to a good chunk of the audience now right?

ITV/UTV isn't available to probably 80% and more in the Dublin area. If it were the 90's there were still some Aerials up. I stayed in a good few houses that were getting UK TV off an Aerial, but most of those are gone now. It's a complete switch around to the 1970's when rural areas in the west and south couldn't get HTV/UTV and almost all of Dublin had ITV. Now it's common to for people in Cork or Waterford to be watching the rugby World cup free and mostly in HD on ITV while Dublin houses need a subscription for the majority of matches.

6am is way too early for Ireland AM to start. There is little to no people watching tv at that time in this country.

I see what your doing with placing Elaine at 9:30, something like Lorraine on ITV.

What exactly is Live at One? Is it another news show? What’s the point of having it right after the News at 12:30?

I think the new schedule will do alright, but their massive loss will be This Morning and Loose Women.

Bill Malone has said that in the past few years Virgin Media has invested much more in state of the art broadcasting technology meaning they can put out more home produced live TV everyday, so why not put it to the test?

Fair play to them though for making this move, there’s only one way to find out if it works or not!

How about loose women this morning on vm2 or vm3

Live at 12 is the proposed new lunchtime show for VM1, I suggest they move it to 1pm, hence the name change

So Dublin could pick up ITV signals from UTV in Belfast or HTV from Wales? Do we know how good the signal was?

The aerials needed to pick up UTV/HTV were giant, so tall that Dublin was allegedly officially an air navigation hazard (I am not sure to what extent that is an urban myth). Regardless Dublin was cabled very early and ironically RTÉ was one of the major driving forces in that, through its RTÉ Relays subsidiary which evolved into Cablelink. It’s hard to explain now just how dominant Cablelink was in pay-TV in Dublin. If you lived in Dublin in the late 1980s or 1990s, and your area was cabled (and most estates of any length established were), chances are that you had Cablelink and so did practically all of your neighbours. It’s why Sky One probably had a greater penetration in Ireland than it did in the UK in the analogue era - it was practically treated as the fifth UK terrestrial over here in a way it wouldn’t have been in the UK itself.