RTE Group Head of Sport Ryle Nugent has admitted that losing the Six Nations TV rights deal to TV3 from 2018 is "extremely disappointing" for the national broadcaster.
The RTE rugby commentator joined us on Off The Ball tonight to give his reaction to the development and also to discuss RTE's place in the competitive rights market for sport on the day that TV3 won the broadcasting rights to the annual tournament, having also gained the rights to this year's Rugby World Cup.
"There's no getting away that today's result is an extremely disappointing one for us," said Nugent as he spoke to Ger and Colm.
"It's important to say this is a loss and it's a significant loss and I wouldn't pretend otherwise but to suggest that it's the demise of RTE Sport is stretching the point."
However, he also discussed the competitive market in the sports broadcasting sector, both taking the domestic and international competitors into account.
"We are not and cannot be considered to be the biggest fish in the pond. Today's decision, if that already hadn't been firmly planted in people's minds, needs to be now. And secondly there is a limit to how far we can go," he stated, adding that he still has confidence that RTE can remain a "significant player in the sports rights market".
TV3 won the rights for the 2015 Rugby World Cup ©INPHO/Ryan Byrne
TV3 director of broadcasting Niall Cogley also joined us on the show and said: "It's a terrific day for us. It's the end of a long road for us in getting to this point where we joined the top table, if you like, of sporting events".
Cogley also responded to some of the criticisms raised about issues such as the length of the half-time ad breaks during the World Cup.
"I think we possibly could have been more elegant in how we rolled that out in the first place. Certainly it was a shock to the system for lots of people who were seeing ads where they'd never seen them before. We tried to compensate for that by first of all, getting a little bit more elegant in the way we did it and trying not to crash in as hard as perhaps we did in the first weekend and we also tried to concentrate our contributors in making sure that their points were very, very well made and very briefly made, succinctly at half-time so that we could still get the content through but make sure that our advertising supporters got their value for investment."
Listen to both interviews with Nugent and Cogley on the podcast.
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