Neil Leyden, Head of RTÉ.ie, looks back at the evolution of RTÉ's public service media website, thirty years after it first launched.
It is hard to imagine a world without the internet now. But thirty years ago, we lived in an age where broadcast television was king and everyone tuned into the 6 o'clock and 9 o’clock news religiously on RTÉ television.
Satellite and cable TV gave us access to hundreds of channels from around the world – or as Bruce Springsteen lamented at the time, "57 channels and nothing on".
People still bought newspapers on a daily basis. Video stores were booming with people renting the latest films on VHS tapes and DVDs. Music stores like Tower Records and Virgin Megastores were stocked with the latest CDs as vinyl seemed to be resigned to the dustbin of history.
It may have seemed to many then that we had media in abundance but in reality, this was a time of scarcity compared to what was to come.
On 24th May 1996, RTE.ie quietly went live. Back then, it was called RTÉ Online and it allowed users access to several RTÉ Radio programmes, news, sport and entertainment text.
The majority of the content suddenly made available to the then 80 million users of the World Wide Web was previously only available to Irish users via the closed network of RTÉ Aertel over teletext-enabled television sets.
RTÉ Online was also a broadcast pioneer, streaming the Late Late Show via the internet. These early origins were far from earth shattering, with a small RealPlayer application gently buffering Gay Byrne to the rest of the world, but it was a foreshadow of where broadcasting was heading.
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RTÉ News goes live online
RTÉ News came online on February 1st 1999, offering users a full multimedia experience of radio and television bulletins and online articles on demand, a truly impressive multimedia experience for the time. Then RTÉ Director General Bob Collins said:"This website represents RTÉ's serious commitment to the Internet as a delivery medium. The future of broadcasting will be hugely influenced by technological innovations, and RTÉ News Online is a key component of our strategy to maintain and develop our position as market leaders into the digital future."
This was followed by the launch of RTÉ Sport Online in August of that year. Over the next few years, RTE.ie cemented its place as the number 1 news and media website in the country.
The next major innovation seen on RTE.ie, was the launch of the RTÉ Player on the 21st April 2009, just two years after the BBC launched their own ground-breaking iPlayer. Billed as a 7 day catch up service, the RTÉ Player gave Irish broadband users the opportunity to watch their favourite RTÉ television programmes for up to 21 days after broadcast over the web.
Whereas up until this date, the world wide web was the mainstay for access, the launch of the Apple iPhone on June 29th 2007 meant that users increasingly began to want access to RTÉ services via mobile applications - either through the Apple iOS or Google Android operating systems and their corresponding app stores. The ubiquity of mobile phones and increasing network bandwidth (4G being introduced in 2013), meant that media access was frequently becoming a mobile proposition.
The launch of the RTÉ Radio Player across web and mobile on the 17th October 2011, allowed users anywhere in the world to listen to live radio from all of RTÉ Radio's services: RTÉ Radio 1, RTÉ 2fm, RTÉ lyric fm and RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, as well as RTÉ’s Digital Radio stations. This included, for the first time, mobile applications that users downloaded from the iTunes Store or Google Play Store.
On the 22nd December that same year, the RTÉ Player officially launched its iOS app on iPhone and iPad as did the RTÉ News app.
At the time, RTE.ie had an average of 55 million page impressions per month and 2.3 million unique users. The common view held at the time was that mobile applications would supersede the website and that homepages would decline as users opted for mobile apps instead.
But that didn't happen. In fact, both boats rose.
Thirty years later, RTE.ie now has over 100 million pageviews per month and averages 8 million unique users, coming from home and abroad. Over the years, it has developed extensively from those early, primitive beginnings. Now, RTE.ie is very much a gateway to all the content created by the organisation – television, radio, news, sport, entertainment, culture, lifestyle, and much, much more.
The website is continually innovating as it tries to meet the audiences digital demands. An extensive RTÉ Archives section curates over 100 years of content on a daily basis from radio and television. In 2017, we launched the RTÉ Brainstorm section, a unique partnership with Irish academic institutes, where the academic and research community contribute to public debate, reflect on what's happening in the world around us and communicate fresh thinking on a broad range of issues. Our Gaeilge section caters for a growing Irish language audience who are increasingly embracing and celebrating our rich heritage and culture. For the recent centenary of Ireland's independence, we launched a dedicated History section which details the foundational events that comprise the establishment of Ireland's nationhood. More recently, RTE.ie launched a Games section to cater for an audience increasingly looking to their mobile phone at all times of the day for distraction and entertainment.
In many ways, RTE.ie has always been a reflection of RTÉ as an organisation - and the design and development of the website is simply a mirror of that. On a daily basis, our aim is to curate the best of RTÉ for our daily audiences with a team of curators, led by our homepage editor, Martin Crummy, working from 7am to 11pm at night, 7 days a week, curating the best information, entertainment and educational content that the organisation offers.
From breaking news to the latest sporting headlines, from the latest fashion on the catwalks to what to watch on television, the website - like all our services - caters for all tastes and interests for the Irish public.
And as long as the world wide web is still there, so will we. Here's to another thirty years.
