What, the same UK with a population of 60+million and TV budgets of ridiculous money, and the same Ireland with a population of 3 million? Hmmmm.
Fair comment, but I'm saying that if TV3, a fully commercial operation have enough resources and money to make from a Breakfast programme, why can't RTÉ?
Manchester's Local TV station, Channel M even has a 3 hour Live daily Breakfast programme, granted from a technical POV it isn't brilliant, but if they have the resources and money and a very small audience, surely isn't it possible for RTÉ?
Yes I'm with you, weren't TV3 previously owned by a familiar name here until recently though? Maybe they had a fair bit of financial backing from them.
What, the same UK with a population of 60+million and TV budgets of ridiculous money, and the same Ireland with a population of 3 million? Hmmmm.
Fair comment, but I'm saying that if TV3, a fully commercial operation have enough resources and money to make from a Breakfast programme, why can't RTÉ?
The resources TV3 put into their breakfast show aren't as great as you think.... it's called multi-skilling.
TV3 have various licence committments to a certain amount of home produced programming and a certain amount of news and current affairs. Running Ireland AM for 2 1/2 hours daily (and adding the weekend repeats) allows them to kill a massive amount of this quota in one go. Its a big incentive to run the show.
Not only that, but being a recent entrant and a private company, they simply don't have to renegotiate long-standing union contracts in the way RTÉ do if they want to run a breakfast show. Other than the journalists, who are NUJ, I'm not even sure if any other TV3 staff are even union members. RTÉ is fully unionised.
In this day and age I find if difficult to believe that the main problem regarding RTÉ breakfast programming is unions. It's an easy scapgoat for management to use ten years after its sell-by date. At the end of the day Breakfast offers increased opportunites for production, to the benefit of most staff, much of which (including personnel) is now outsourced anyway. The issue is simply cost, or at the very least is primarily cost.
Effort is the other factor. It's very much a case of rocking the boat when it comes to introducing 'proper' breakfast television to Ireland (as distinct from the TV3 fluff-fest). Morning Ireland on radio would be significantly affected, as would other breakfast radio on the floundering 2fm - especially 2fm. And then there's the issue of competing against TV3 as things stand. As easy as it may seem, competition is competition, and there's no way both can survive in the longer term; there's inherent risk - and we all know how print media in Ireland eats RTÉ alive.
And should Ireland AM collapse eventually (quite likely), all that home production will have to be channelled into other areas of its schedule, further generating problems for RTÉ in the longer term.
As an aside, Ireland AM is produced, as rdd mentions, soley for the purpose of meeting its licence commitments re home production - hence the mind-numbing three hour marathon every morning. I very much doubt the production is even remotely profit-making, let alone breaks even. It's purely there to satisy the BCI, whilst making use of its established newsroom as a further handy time-filling measure.
Whereas I'm not pushed either way about RTÉ doing breakfast television, it is a farcical situation that Seoige & O'Shea is duplicating the content and format of The Afternoon Show directly following it in early evening, when morning television is left barren and ironically being ideally suited to S & O'S-like format, especially coupled with the enormous resources of the News Division. It would make much more sense for these early evening resources to be diverted to Breakfast, instead of merely creating more of the same for the same audience as things stand.
I agree. S & O'S should be scrapped. Its just a copy of Richard and Judy (a bad one at that) and like RTÉ 1 says, there's no need for it directly after The Afternoon Show. Seoige would be a perfect candidate to host a new breakfast programme and I suppose they could keep O'Shea but to be honest I wouldn't. They should move their show to morning time. And its really not an issue of cost in my opinion. RTÉ is well out of the red now for the past few years. Surely they could conjure up enough funds for a measly 2-hour show - even if it is just "Morning Ireland on TV". And if TV3 can get such people to go on air and talk about utter rubbish then RTÉ shouldn't have any difficulty.