RTE admits digital TV launch delay
July 10, 2009
The director general of RTE has now publicly admitted that launching Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) in September is no longer a “reasonable” prospect.
When the consortium originally charged with rolling out the commercial arm of DTT walked away from the project in April, it was said there would be no effect on RTE’s plans to launch public service DTT in September. But RTE DG Cathal Goan has confirmed it was his view that the new commercial player and RTE should “all jump together” into the new television frontier.
“We aimed for September in anticipation that whoever won the commercial contract was going to go live in September as well,” he said. “Clearly that didn’t happen. It wouldn’t be reasonable to assume you could have both public service DTT and commercial DTT up and running in September.”