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Above from left: Noel Curran, Dee Forbes and Martijn van Dam

~~Yes, you are~~.

Yesterday.

At the International Broadcasting Convention – the “world’s most influential media, entertainment and technology show” – in Amsterdam.

Director general of the European Broadcasting Union (and former Director General Of RTÉ) Noel Curran, Director-General at RTE Dee Forbes and Martijn van Dam, a member of Executive Board of the Dutch Public Broadcaster (NPO) were part of a panel in which they were asked about the future of public service broadcasting.

From the discussion:

Interviewer 1 (male): “Are you going to survive or are you dinosaurs, do you think?”

Noel Curran: “DINOSAURS? – dinosaurs who are leading the way in loads of technological developments? Dinosaurs that are restructuring, changing, dinosaurs that are following their audience? We are, all media organisations, are facing challenges.

This is unprecedented. We faced a lot of challenges before. We’ve changed, we’ve adapted. We know our audiences, our audiences trust us. We need big changes, particularly around younger audiences. But, yes, absolutely, we are going to survive, if we change and if we get support from Government.

“And if we maintain the incredible trust and the connection that we have with the audience.”

Later…

Interviewer 2 (female): “Dee, is that what was coming through in the session today? Cause I know you were very much looking forward to collaboration.”

Dee Forbes: “Yeah, I think, you know, what Noel said is absolutely right. We’re, you know, we’re fighting for our lives here because it’s important and the word I keep using and RTÉ is, we’re reinventing ourselves. And that’s actually exciting as well. Because, you know, every so often we all have to reinvent ourselves.

“And I think that’s where opportunity arises and challenge arises.

“So, as part of that, and I think this is something that all public broadcasters have done in the recent years is collaborate. We can’t do everything ourselves. We don’t have the money to – nor, quite honestly, should we anyway.

“Because collaborating is bringing, in its own right, great ideas, great partnerships, opportunity. Particularly, we’re seeing great opportunities in the content space. So we’re partnering with a number of public service broadcasters but other broadcasters as well.

“To bring, you know, drama to our screens, to bring other content to our screens. We’re partnering with our biggest sports organisation in Ireland to create a worldwide streaming service for the distribution of that content.

“We’ve created a digital lab at RTÉ, to find new voices, new talent, new ideas, new content.

So we’re experimenting, we’re changing, we’re partnering, you know, we’re doing a lot of things. And that is hugely exciting.”