Distribution, Digital, Delivery
Digital
RTÉ Player
In a year like no other, audiences turned to RTÉ Player for content that informed and entertained. The availability of drama box sets, RTÉ Player Originals, live news and sports coverage, RTÉ Home School Hub and uniquely Irish documentaries and entertainment shows led to 36% growth and over 67.5 million streams in 2020.
Irish box sets, acquired drama and soaps accounted for approximately one third of RTÉ Player’s total streams in 2020, and audiences spent more time than ever binge-watching their favourite shows. In response to the change in audience viewing habits, over 20 drama and entertainment box sets were made available across the year through exclusive online rights and extended broadcast rights. Normal People set a new record for Irish drama on RTÉ Player, with over 5 million streams. Love/Hate continued to attract huge audiences, delivering 3 million streams in 2020. New exclusive titles were added, including the complete box sets for The West Wing, Frasier, ER and Seinfeld.
Throughout the year RTÉ Player Originals were developed, produced and published, meeting demand as audiences transitioned to being at home, including Sinéad Quinlan’s new comedy show Seriously, Sinéad?, Doireann Garrihy’s Reeling in the Fears, which was co-written by Joanne McNally, and Go Outside and Play: Local Adventures with Carl Mullan.
Live streaming was an important part of the RTÉ Player experience in 2020. The GAA Championship games recorded 955,000 streams and RTÉ Does Comic Relief was streamed over half a million times in 100 countries. RTÉ Player also welcomed Irish people from around the world home for the most special night of the year, when Ryan Tubridy presented The Late Late Toy Show. The Toy Show recorded over 500,000 streams in over 138 countries, while RTÉ Player recorded the highest ever weekly streams in the first week of December, with 688,000 unique views and 2.34 million streams.
The roll-out of an improved playback experience across RTÉ Player platforms allowed for improved technical delivery of subtitles and audio description. Irish Sign Language (ISL) live streams were made available for critical Government Covid-19 updates, and the most accessible Toy Show ever featured live in-vision ISL and audio description options.
RTÉ Home School Hub was made available everywhere kids and families watch – on TV, on RTÉ Player and on RTÉ YouTube. It was the most successful kids’ show of the year, with over 100,000 hours watched and 700,000 streams.
Covid-19 VoicesRTÉ Player responded quickly to the pandemic and associated restrictions with a range of online-first productions. Letters from Lockdown – a series of short films, each featuring a letter from one person to another – was a reflection of the situation we all found ourselves in. Love Is in the Air looked at dating al fresco, the only way to meet someone in 2020, while Love in Isolation was a brand-new online dating show created for the lockdown. In Throes, Academy Award winning director, screenwriter and novelist Neil Jordan explored the depths of Dublin’s lockdown with a moving portrait of a paralysed city. The Big House Quiz saw Ireland’s favourite celebrities take on the role of quizmasters from their own homes. In Kevin Paints, TV presenter, comedian, actor and now artist Kevin McGahern added a splash of paint to a good old-fashioned conversation. From the Same Cloth took treasured items of clothing and transformed them into emotional and sustainable keepsakes, while Marty in the Shed presented the one and only Marty Morrissey live from the backyard of his West Clare home. In Owen Colgan Around the Fire, Colgan, best known for his role as Buzz McDonnell in Hardy Bucks, brought his original brand of humour to the chat-show format. Agony OAPs, RTÉ Player’s brand-new six-part series, saw six of Ireland’s sassiest senior citizens answering Gen Z’s most pressing problems. |
RTÉ.ie
2020 was an unprecedented year of growth for RTÉ.ie as the focus on curating the best of RTÉ content from across our platforms and genres continued. Page views increased by 73% on 2019 and unique users increased by 56% to an average of 13.5 million per month.
The site also saw an 85% increase in videos served, to 28.2 million streams over the year. New, younger audiences were introduced to the website through the RTÉ Home School Hub on rte.ie/learn, which provided activity sheets and other resources for primary school children during lockdown.
The top stories for the year were Covid-19, the election results and the sad news of the passing of RTÉ journalist and presenter Keelin Shanley. Highlights from other genres included Imelda May’s spoken work poem ‘You don’t get to be racist and Irish’, ‘Why are Russian military aircraft flying in Irish airspace?’ and ‘8 things you never knew about dogs’.
RTÉ Archives
2020 was a significant year for RTÉ Archives, as interest in audiovisual archives and cultural heritage increased online and across all media platforms. Television and sound recordings, as well as photographic images, document and textual records and associated research materials, were widely sought by content creators for use in new productions locally and globally.
A wide range of titles from across RTÉ’s collections, both independently produced and from in-house programming, were sourced for audiences to enjoy on RTÉ television, radio and online platforms, including much-loved series such as Killinascully. Despite limited on-site presence, RTÉ Archives staff ensured that a full service for all broadcast-critical production was maintained throughout the year across in-house services and for external productions. Archives featured strongly in major productions including After a Woman’s Heart and the acclaimed tribute to Marian Finucane, broadcast in January 2021.
Keeping our staff safe was a key priority throughout the year, while ensuring that core archiving of RTÉ output across all services was achieved on a daily basis. News archiving provided a full seven-day-a-week operation, working on-site and remotely, for all news and current affairs broadcasts, including regional services. A total of 1,074 hours of video news reports was archived and catalogued during the year, an increase of 193 hours from 2019. The keyword term ‘Covid-19’ was entered into the catalogue 3,515 times, a record for a single keyword in any one year.
Work on the planning and implementation of RTÉ’s strategic commitments for digital transformation of the archives across a suite of projects progressed, including the completion of a major news-on-film digitisation project, 1961–1969, part-funded by the BAI Archive Funding Scheme.
Engagement and visits by the public to the RTÉ Archives website, www.rte.ie/archives, grew by 46% year on year. There were 2.6 million video plays, up 28% on 2019, and 106,010 audio plays, up 31% on 2019. 1,119 archive stories were newly published on the Archives Daily section of the website. Publication of the RTÉ Archives News Collection grew by 12,530 reports to a total of 18,110 video records, providing full searchable online public access to continuous news reporting from 1985 to 1990.
In October, RTÉ Archives led the hosting of the first ever virtual joint conference of the two leading professional associations in broadcast media and sound archiving, FIAT/IFTA (www.fiatifta.org) and IASA (www.iasa.org). Supported by both RTÉ and BBC Northern Ireland, the four-day conference had more than 1,500 professional delegates with interactive participation, papers, video and workshops from experts across the global media and wider audiovisual archive sector. Director-General of RTÉ Dee Forbes gave the opening address to the conference, which also marked the end of a four-year term as President of FIAT/IFTA for RTÉ’s Head of Archives, Bríd Dooley.
