RTÉ Online

RTÉ.ie

Screenshot of RTÉ.ie on 7 November 2012
Type of site	Portal
Available in	English Irish/Gaeilge
Owner	Raidió Teilifís Éireann
Created by	RTÉ Publishing
Website	http://www.rte.ie
Commercial	Yes
Registration	None
Launched	26 May 1996
Current status	Active

RTÉ.ie is the brand name and home of RTÉ's online activities, located at the URL http://rte.ie. The site began publishing on 26 May 1996. According to RTÉ, it operates on an entirely commercial basis, receiving none of the licence fee which funds much of RTÉ's activity. The site, it says, is funded by advertising and section sponsorship. However, RTÉ has had to defend itself from allegations of anti-competitiveness brought about by licence fee support.

As of 2010^[update], it is among the top 4,000 most visited websites globally, by Alexa rankings, and among the top 10 sites in Ireland with certified impressions of over 75 million per month and over 4 million unique users. A redesign of the website's home page, news and business sections took place on 13 October 2010.

A revamp of the website is due late 2014.

The site provides an array of content under the different banners (IBD's) that it operates, such as Radio, television, News, Business, Sport etc. These sub-sites, are interlinked and offer streaming of sound and picture where appropriate, with a huge archive for certain programmes going back to 1998.

References

The following figures were issued by RTÉ as part of their Annual report 2012

Income

Total Costs

Profit and Loss

Breakdown of Irish Productions

The table below outlines RTÉ.ie's total in-house and commissioned programming by genre in 2008 and 2012:

The News and Current Affairs Independent Business Unit is branded online, as on radio and television as RTÉ News. The news site was launched in 1998, with its own dedicated journalists. RTÉ News Online (later RTÉ Interactive News and now simply called RTÉ.ie News) was the first major site in Ireland to provide a rolling online news service with content written for the web. This section of the site offers access to all the news programmes broadcast by RTÉ on Radio and on Television. The huge archive offers streaming, in various quality back to 1999. Currently the site employs sectioning of news items, poll features, numerous microsites such as for General Elections, Referenda, and throughout the National Budget. The online news service had been operational 0700-2300GMT every day with the exception of Christmas Day, when it was replaced with a message wishing everyone a very merry Christmas. It has now begun operating from 0600GMT daily.