Saorview hopes priests can spread the word

SAORVIEW, IRELAND’S digital terrestrial television service, has written to parish priests to enlist their help in spreading the word on DTT ahead of the analogue switch-off date of October 24th.

“We know that some priests mentioned it from the pulpit,” says Mary Curtis, director of digital switchover for Saorview, a unit of RTÉ.

Saorview has had a presence at the National Ploughing Championships, the Charleville Agricultural Show, the Tullamore Show, the Young Scientists’ Exhibition, the Ideal Homes Exhibition and the Bloom festival in the Phoenix Park, as well as holding “clinics” at regional electrical outlets.

It has also signed up voluntary organisations Macra na Feirme and Muintir na Tíre and the fuel poverty charity Energy Action as outreach partners.

The focus on religious services and predominantly rural organisations springs from the demographics of Saorview’s core target group.

Some 70 per cent of “analogue households” are located in rural areas, while half have a head of household who is 55 or older. Two-thirds of the group, estimated at just shy of 300,000 homes, are based outside Leinster.

These households “like their TV”, according to Curtis, “but they’re not avid TV consumers”.

And yet with seven in 10 of the households in the core target group made up of one or two people, the television set may serve as a human company substitute for some.

“To lose that would not be good,” she says, adding that with less than 50 days to go until switch-off, it is now “sleepless nights time” for the campaign.