New television shows are fine and everything, but there is something comforting about knowing where, at any given time, Mad Men is streaming. Is it Netflix this year? Prime Video? Back to Sky/Now maybe?
Actually, it’s on the RTÉ Player at the moment. Yes, indeed. The best television drama of the 21st century is on … RTÉ Player.
There he is, the silhouette of Don Draper, reclining mysteriously under the “box sets” tab, a Lucky Strike dangling from his hand.
What else might be on there? Weirdly, it has quite a decent selection now. I say weirdly because whenever RTÉ used to promote the idea of box sets on the player, it meant The Clinic, plus a smattering of other RTÉ shows from the early noughties that were not as good as The Clinic.
Now when RTÉ says it has “a growing catalogue of prestige box sets” on the player, it isn’t exaggerating.
RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst says the broadcaster wants to “raise consciousness” of the range of programmes on the player for free.
“Obviously the core of that is RTÉ and Irish content, but the number of international box sets that we have now is quite extraordinary, because it’s part of our BBC deal, it’s part of our deal with some of the American studios,” he says.
“It’s highly unusual to get that range of international content available.”
This is an evolution that began a few years back when acclaimed BBC shows such as Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, James Graham’s Sherwood and Steve McQueen’s Small Axe started popping up.
If you’ve not seen BBC-CBC mini-series The North Water (2021), starring Colin Farrell, and you’re in the mood for a good harrowing, well, it’s on the player.
Then Disney started selling the rights to shows that initially would have been exclusive to Disney Plus subscribers: Fleishman is in Trouble, The Dropout, Dopesick, which is so harrowing the soundtrack succumbs to a slice of Mazzy Star all of 13 minutes into the first episode.
Add some of the top current Australian shows — 1980s period piece The Newsreader, romantic comedy Colin from Accounts — to the menu, and that’s the anglophone bases covered.
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Pretty much all of these acquisitions will have been shown on RTÉ's linear channels, but often late at night, and often before word-of-mouth has circulated widely enough to put them on viewers’ radar. Others require a subscription to a streamer or are otherwise only available on-demand on the BBC’s “not available in your location” iPlayer.
The RTÉ Player, therefore, has become a bona fide repository of high-quality international series, both “classic” like Mad Men and freshly made, alongside which its own scripted content can seamlessly sit.
And it’s technically free — as it stands, users who access the RTÉ Player through a device other than a traditional television set are not liable to pay the licence fee.
Meanwhile, RTÉ has uploaded “Player Originals” before, but it doesn’t usually place them front and centre of its new season launch materials, as it did last week with Good Boy, a Player Original sitcom starring comedian and “social media sensation” Tony Cantwell. It has no scheduled linear broadcast planned.
As scripted content generates two-thirds of streaming on the player, developing a catalogue that mixes international and Irish dramas and comedies is a key route to annual digital growth, which both RTÉ and Virgin Media Television have been locking in, repeatedly, for some years now.
Last year, the RTÉ Player attracted a record 105 million streams, more than double what it had five years earlier. It has already surpassed 100 million streams for 2024.
There’s a similar pattern for Virgin, which yesterday launched a new player, branded Virgin Media Play, reflecting a bid to strengthen its position in the age of streaming.
Certain shows on Virgin, including reality stalwart Love Island, are consumed in large part by younger viewers who don’t even think about linear channels enough to know they are shunning them. Virgin Media Television, like other broadcasters, knows that eventually, over time, its app will become the main point of access for its audience.
Virgin’s previous player attracted 39 million streams in the year to date, it said late last month, which likewise puts Virgin on track to exceed the 48 million streams it racked up last year.
Virgin Media Play has made some functionality improvements, including the ability to restart a live programme, rather than having to wait for it to become available in their entirety on-demand.
Live restart is also one of the improvements earmarked for future upgrades to the RTÉ Player, according to Bakhurst’s New Direction strategy for the organisation, with this feature pencilled in for 2026.
Before that, in 2025, RTÉ hopes to expand personalisation features including cross-device “continue watching” features, parental controls, relevant recommendations and the ability to create watchlists and rate shows. It would not be surprising if RTÉ, at some point, required users to sign in — at present, that’s optional.
These features will sound basic to users of global streamers, but then those platforms aren’t free — and they aren’t Irish.
Catching up with the kind of functionality viewers now expect as standard doesn’t come cheap. That’s why RTÉ cited necessary technical upgrades to RTÉ Player as one of the reasons it needed the multiannual funding deal it recently secured from the Government and why politicians, familiar with the phenomenon of player haters, were at least partly swayed by the argument.
All the functionality in the world won’t matter, of course, if there’s nothing on there to watch — or, in the case of Mad Men, rewatch.
Season one, episode one, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Press play. Mature content: you must be over 18 to view this content. Continue.
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