The Late Late Gay Byrne Irish Television Thread

I doubt Virgin would move their TV3 channels from Saorview. If anything, they'll keep the HD versions exclusive as they do now.

Only Be3 HD is exclusive to Virgin. TV3 HD and 3e HD are both also on Sky and afaik TV3 HD is on Eir and Vodafone too.

They could hand back their television programme contract, sure, and go for a cable or satellite contract. That would remove their PSO and also they being subject to Must Offer/Must Carry. But if they go off Saorview, they are no longer a qualifying broadcaster for the purposes of the major events coverage legislation. That limits what Sports rights they can bid for. It wouldn’t effect the Six Nations (save that they’d have to sublicence highlights) but might bar them from going for any competitive international football involving the Republic of Ireland in the future - though at the moment they only have rights to England games.

As for the branding, I don’t think it should change. I’m not a big fan of either 3e or Be3 as names but I think they’d be unwise to ditch the well known TV3 brand.

Saorview Connect is launching in Ireland from tomorrow; November 14th.

Here are some details I got from an email including one important detail highlighted in bold.



The first set top box from Saorview Connect is being made from Powerpoint. There is an update available for recording programmes with an external hard drive arriving from mid 2018; but for now it has no internal hard drive available at all. So recording programmes through other ways with this box will be useless at the moment. The box was offered to consumers on Power City's website for a price of €220 each; but it got pulled down weeks before the launch. This could quite be an embarrassing start for Saorview Connect. Many consumers of Saorview who may not know about it beforehand will not initially buy this box within a heartbeat if they weren't lucky.

What's the deal with all the spare capacity on Saorview? Are there any plans to put it to proper use? Not sure why 2RN bothers putting out those testcards and radio channel sound on some of the spare space - is there are technical reason for that? Surely the capacity could be reallocated to the existing live channels - or are these testcards on completely unused muxes? I'm not familiar with the Saorview mux set-up.

There are two multiplexes involved to run Saorview Connect & Saorview. The bandwidth on these transmitters broadcast used & unused bandwidth because of a deal with 2RN & TV3. There are plans to sell off the 700mhz frequency band in Ireland from the 4th of March 2019. The frequencies will be realigned to reflect the selling off of these frequencies through an open government tender for use on the 5G mobile broadband spectrum.

Met Éireann Head of Forecasting Gerry Fleming retires today, he resumed his old weatherman role for one last forecast after Six One today.

Anoraky question.
Are the RTE One post-news tv weather forecasts presented from RTE HQ, or are they broadcast live from a small pres studio at Met Eireann's HQ over the road from the Botanical Gardens, like the RTE Radio One weather forecasts are?

The late weather forecast shown on RTE One are recorded around 10.30pm from the RTÉ weather studio in Donnybrook.

The forecasts this week have been coming as an OB from the Botanic Gardens as part of a “Weather Live” event.

The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland have given approval to TV3 to rebrand their channels to a possible name of Virgin last Friday.

Regulators tune in to TV3 brand switch to Virgin

Tony Hanway of Virgin Media opened up the possibility of rebranding TV3 under the Virgin moniker in a recent interview. "There's nothing to say there wouldn't be a Virgin Media station at some stage," he said. It seems that plans to drop the TV3 name are actually quite advanced, however.

The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) approved the rebranding of the TV3 Group at its monthly meeting on Friday. Perhaps it should be expected given that Hanway's background is in telcos, a sector that seems to love rebrands more than any other. Broadcasting insiders are sceptical about a change at TV3, however.

Electronic programming guides (EPGs) are now full of UK channels like Discovery, Universal and Dave. But as RTE has been trying to tell the powers-that-be, most Irish viewers flock to Irish channels. And to TV3's credit it has built up a powerful brand. Virgin was an improvement on UPC but will it be an improvement on TV3?

https://www.independent.ie/business/...-36332192.html

Interview from Irish Times

Irish broadcaster TV3 could be rebranded using the name of its parent company Virgin Media under a plan being considered by the cable TV and telecoms groups.

In an exclusive interview with The Irish Times, Virgin Media Ireland’s chief executive Tony Hanway confirmed that it was considering a name change for TV3.

“It’s definitely something that we’re looking at,” he said. “It has been on the agenda for quite some time. We look at the equity that we’ve built up in TV3 and wonder what it would look like as Virgin Media. There’s nothing to say that there wouldn’t be a Virgin Media [television] station at some stage.”

Mr Hanway said any rebranding would happen in 2018, which would mark the 20th anniversary of TV3 first going on air

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/...edia-1.3285959

Exactly how you should celebrate your 20th birthday..
.. By ditching the high recognition name and brand you've just spent the last 20 years building up..

For one you don’t own and are licensing from someone else (at a fee) at that.

However, if it’s gone to the Board of the BAI, and approved at that level, I suspect it’s rather more than a possibility now but a done deal.