The Late Late Gay Byrne Irish Television Thread

RTE One +1 is absolutely horrendous. "Oh, I missed eastenders at 3pm! I'll catch it at 4 on +1. Oh wait..."

Antecdotally I think it does get quite a bit of use by people wanting to watch the Six One or Nine an hour later. It’s easier to find than News Now (201 vs 521 on Sky) and is full screen. Yes, there’s live news on Be3 at both times. A lot of people really prefer RTE.

Looks like the plans to rename the TV3 channels to VM1, VM2 and so on are back on:

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/media-and-marketing/rt%C3%A9-struggling-with-unsustainable-dominance-says-tv3-1.3488383

Utter disaster waiting to happen. It would be like ITV being bought by Virgin Media and being renamed VM1, VM2, imagine how that would go down here in the UK? If it aint broke, don't fix it.

Be careful what you wish for... Liberty Global do have a stake in ITV, don’t they ? Not outside the realms of possibility that they might one day want to increase it.

Meanwhile though, that article is a bit odd. “Struggling to come to terms with an unsustainable period of dominance”? RTÉ have been the dominant broadcaster in Ireland since the day they were established nearly sixty years ago. It’s an odd statement to make.

I’m not sure the VM rebrand will ultimately happen. On air mentions of the Virgin brand have almost disappeared since February. Indeed I don’t see the point if the rebrand is to “VM” rather than “Virgin”.

At most they should just add a brief tagline "part of Virgin", similar to how UKTV treat things.

They had kinda been subtly doing that - the studios had become the “TV3 Virgin Media HD Studios”, with the Virgin Media logo on the endboards and there was a major campaign for the Six Nations and Ireland’s Got Talent that carried Virgin Media branding.

But then, all of a sudden, in mid spring, this was all quietly dropped.

"Studios" - they have only got two. TV3 Virgin Media HD Studios makes you think they have five or six studios at their complex, where as there are only two, one news studio and their 5,000 Sq Ft main studio.

So is the other studio redressed daily for Ireland AM and The Six O'Clock Show?

Yes, TV3 are masters at this. For a long time they had just one small general purpose studio and had to do the same thing.

Most complexes use some tricks to make them sound bigger than they are - Granada used only even numbers for example.

The original studio - where TV3 News is now - at one point, had all of the sets for all of TV3’s programmes standing simultaneously.