Where’s RAI

How public broadcasting services are changing – in Italy and Europe.

The issue has held centre stage for weeks: RAI, Italy’s public service broadcaster founded in Rome in 1954, is about to undergo a reform. Topics currently under discussion include governance and efficiency, which is to be improved through a structural rationalisation.

For example, RAI has 11 newsrooms that feed the constant news cravings of 24 daily newscasts, three of which are regional, for a total of 2,400 hours of annual programming. By contrast, the UK’s BBC – the industry standard-bearer – has only one newsroom. “As audience figures demonstrate, the BBC offers extremely high quality information”, said Mary Hockaday, head of the BBC multimedia newsroom, according to Corriere.it. At RAI, on the other hand, “our channels were born to compete with each other, not to cooperate”, RAI Director General Luigi Gubitosi told The Economist. 

This issue, however, does not apply to Italy alone, but to the whole European Union. Indeed, as stated in a protocol added to the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, “The system of public broadcasting in the Member States is directly related to the democratic, social and cultural needs of each society and to the need to preserve media pluralism”. Moreover, as today content aired by any national broadcaster can effortlessly cross domestic borders, it raises the question of territorial jurisdiction in case of a dispute over what is being broadcast, both within the EU and the Council of Europe.

A prime example is the media battle currently underway in Ukraine where the warring factions are using radio and television as bridgeheads to voice their propaganda. But back to RAI. While many Italians complain about its costs and content, most people lack the objective information to assess its current performance. For example, the indicators used by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) – a Geneva-based alliance of public service media entities with 73 members in 56 countries – are little known. According to the EBU data, with respect to the number of domestic channels available across national territories, RAI ranks top in Europe. In fact, it operates 14 channels compared to 11 German public television channels, the nine of the BBC and five in France and Spain.

Conversely, the Italian broadcaster ranks last in terms of the number of channels for the international market. Besides being a member of the Euronews consortium (a pan- European, multilingual news and information channel), RAI only operates two international channels: RAI Italia, for Italians living abroad, and RAI World Premium, featuring the best of Italian television fiction. In this category, the UK (BBC) leads with its 16 international channels, followed by seven in Germany, four in Spain (RTVE) and three in France. To a certain extent, these numbers reflect the different distribution of the respective languages across the five continents.

One curious fact is that RAI lacks an international radio station due to signal power restrictions imposed at the end of World War II. Luckily for Italy, television did not exist at the time.

Another relatively unknown fact is that “the broadcast standard for video distribution via satellite, known as DVB-S, was invented by RAI and is used everywhere today”. EBU Director General Ingrid Deltenre made this point at a hearing before RAI’s Supervisory Committee, adding that RAI invested “over €400 million in the digitization of information in Italy”, a process completed in 2012. What is more, RAI boasts a multimedia library that is second in size only to the BBC archive. The Italian company is, in fact, the European leader for its audiovisual cataloguing system, and its Library Department (Direzione RAI Teche) – with over 70 million documents, more than a million and a half hours of radio and TV programmes and much more – has been included by UNESCO in its Memory of the World register.

What will be the effect of the cuts envisaged by the reform? It is too early to say with certainty, but the company seems oriented towards boosting fiction production with the aim of exporting it to promote Italy’s image abroad. The national broadcaster is already carrying out this objective through its channel RAI Italia, the cross-media project RAI Expo (designed to report on the 2015 Milan World’s Fair) and its acquisitions-productiondistribution arm RAI Cinema, which won a Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Film Festival for Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Holy GRA.

Last but not least, the anticipated overhaul will resonate significantly across foreign media and must therefore be more than just a superficial makeover if the intent is to enhance Italy’s reputation.