Interesting ideas. It will be interesting to see how RTE adapt over the coming months.

Well they probably have little choice with respect to live streaming but with respect to archived material they are definitely walking with dinosaurs at the moment. I really hate the iPhone but if one was forced upon me at least I could watch the six-one news if it was on youtube rather than looking for clips of monkeys dancing. That’s of course not the greatest of examples, being a small market segment, but the home pc and mac market is massive and Real just doesn’t cut it for me, nor a great many other posters on this comment thread. Mechanisms such as youtube are far more involved, permissive, and subscriber orientated meaning that RTE could leverage the existing youtube infrastructure to offer a much richer end-user experience. At the moment I go to the main site, click to TV shows, click to the archive and then click to the viewer and watch the Flash ad before the show starts. Alternatively I could be subscribed to the six-one channel and be notified of new clips when available instead of checking back for them. For archived footage it’s definitely a must whether it be youtube or some bespoke implementation that suits RTE, things need to change and fast!

In that context it’s not silly. in the context of live it is. So do you reckon RTE should use Youtube for archived material and continue to use real and Windows for Live? – curious

Why on earth is that silly John? Why should I be forced to have to use Real through RTE’s built-in viewer when it’s plainly not necessary for archived material? What’s really irks me however is that they insist on embedding ads prior to the archive video in Flash and then switch over to Real for the main event forcing me to have both plug-ins. There is some reason that RTE is sticking with Real for all their material and it’s not because of the need for live streaming – I’d love to know the answer but I don’t think that I’ll ever learn the pointless necessity of why they do such. Plenty of other progressive TV stations and video production houses have moved with the times for non-live material and it’s about time that RTE did also. Their inertia is starting to look like they’re just afraid of a little work rather than anything else.

#justin
“yep! For me to use those WMP codecs on Linux is a violation of the terms and conditions. ”

The WMV decoders were reverse engineered a long time ago. No need to use the binary MS ones.

# Jonathan Brazil Says:
“Why oh why do they continually stick with Real. ”

Now that’s just silly. Youtube is progressive download only.