Digital

RTÉ Player

Drama, Live Sport and Factual Entertainment were the most popular genres on RTÉ Player in 2021. Live coverage of Champions League, GAA All-Ireland Championship, Euro 2020, Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games and Paralympic Games delivered 6.5 million streams, with live streaming making up almost half of all streaming numbers in summer 2021.

Drama and Comedy box sets accounted for 28% (18.5 million) of streams in 2021. Crime drama was the most popular sub-genre and audiences engaged with the new series, Kin (2.5 million streams) and Hidden Assets and binge-watched the hugely popular Line of Duty (2.5 million streams) series. Six episodes of Kin featured in the Top 25 programmes of the year. Irish formats like Special Forces Ultimate Hell Week (350,000 streams) and First Dates Ireland (565,000 streams) were consistently popular on-demand as the nation rooted for contestants to do well.

Over 465 minutes of RTÉ Player Original online content were published last year, showcasing new faces, new voices and new talent and delivering over 860,000 streams. Audiences engaged with a variety of themes from comedy to documentary, and there were over 30 new faces showcased online, including Fionnuala Jay, Malaki and Nico Reynolds.

I’m Fine, the RTÉ Player Original documentary series that follows four brave and inspiring young men who share their struggles with mental health, won the Mental Health Broadcasting category at the 2021 Mental Health Media Awards.

In The Talk, four young Irish people talk to a loved one about social issues that are affecting them. The pilot episode of the series launched in 2021 and focused on racism. Friends discussed their personal experiences of racism in Ireland and the effect it can have on dating, social media and work.

RTÉ.ie

2021 saw RTÉ.ie extend its position as the number 1 news and entertainment website in Ireland, being used by 41% of adults.

Compared to 2019, visits to RTÉ.ie were up 53% per month, or 39 million monthly visits, while monthly page views grew by 48%, or 98 million page views. In another great result, the average time spent per visit was 8 minutes 12 seconds which is up 3% compared to 2020, or 1% compared to 2019.

Top stories were dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but lighter stories also drew huge traffic such as the rescue of a dog on the Wicklow mountains, the ‘untouched’ tomb found on the Dingle peninsula and the answer to the perennial question, ‘When are the clocks changing this year?’

Sport made a lively come back (up 3% on 2020) with the GAA All-Ireland Senior Football Final against Mayo and Tyrone being the top story. Brainstorm, Lifestyle, Culture and Gaeilge have also seen continued growth with page loads for rte.ie topping 1.175 billion at year end. Our recently installed history section finished its overview of the Great Famine, turning to the centenary events surrounding the Civil War. 2021 also saw the successful re-vamp of our radio section and the launch of a new RTÉ Kids section.

RTÉ Archives

The RTÉ Archives continued to provide a rich source of inspiration and materials for creative storytelling and new programming in 2021, continuing the 2020 upward trend in the demand for and interest in storytelling from audiovisual archival source material across a range of social, historical and cultural topics.

Highlights for audiences in 2021 included the Dear Gay documentary on television which drew upon the wealth of letters and recordings aired by the broadcaster on the Gay Byrne Show in 1980s and 1990s, bringing these stories and the social impact of this era of broadcasting to new audiences.

New series of Reeling in the Years, Scannal and the weekly Nationwide programmes also featured a range of historical archival recordings and stories. Other factual and documentary productions supported by the archives included the Centenary production, Gunplot, The Missing Children, Keys to my Life, The Way We Were and Daniel at 60.

The public continued to engage in large numbers with the RTÉ Archives website, rte.ie/archive with 3,989,147 visits, 2.19 million video and 79,410 audio plays in 2021. One thousand additional stories from across the collections were added to the Archives Daily section of website, for audiences to search, discover and share.

RTÉ Archives also continued to deliver on its programme of work for the digitisation and preservation of its legacy archive collections. Planning and development of the next phase of the audio and video digitisation projects progressed while an important radio archive collection on Digital Audio Tape 1988-2008, supported by the BAI, Archive Funding Scheme, was completed.

Marking the 60th anniversary of RTÉ Television on 31st December, the National Library of Ireland and RTÉ came together to put on ‘Ireland on the Box’, a free exhibition of photography curated by RTÉ Archives celebrating six decades of television at the National Photographic Archive in Meeting House Square, Dublin. The images in the exhibition – many of which feature on the cover of this Annual Report – chart of the changing styles of television production and presentation from the 1960’s to the present day, covering themes of news, sport, drama, entertainment, children, and educational programmes. The exhibition provides entertaining and informative insights into the presenters, performers, people, shows and behind-the-scenes moments that contributed to putting Ireland on the box.