Over the past six months, the RTÉ Player has become a bug bear of many people in this country who choose to watch live sport on computers and mobile devices. A major Irish sporting event hardly passes these days without a chorus of complaint about the Player's service on social media. Now it could be that the Player unfortunately only fails people who are also on Twitter, but there is certainly a growing impression amongst Irish sports fans that the RTÉ Player is an unreliable streaming platform during big live games. That sentiment was echoed on Twitter today during the Ireland-Russia game.

We contacted the RTÉ Press Office after today's game to enquire if there was a specific problem with the Player, and if there were any plans to remedy the problem. We received a reply saying 'a small number of users' had reached out to RTÉ about the streaming service today. Here's the statement.

This morning a small number of users watching Ireland v Russia in the Rugby World Cup on RTÉ Player contacted us regarding issues they experienced which affected their ability to stream. With any live event of this scale served over IP across 1000s of different devices, there are inevitably going to be some variances in user streaming quality. For the Ireland v Russia Rugby World Cup match there were 308,800 live streams on RTÉ Player.

It must said that 308,800 is a lot of live streams. And while the RTE Player twitter account was very active today chatting to disgruntled streamers and outlining a number of issues that could be at play, a more fundamental question remains: can the RTÉ Player, in its current iteration, handle the huge load required during live sport? Adding to many people's frustration is that the pre-roll ads will always play without a glitch. (We won't even get into the user experience of someone trying to watch Sunday Game highlights back.)


Hi Pete. I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience. The issues you experienced were likely due to a bandwidth issue. If you'd like to follow up with us, you can contact us at https://t.co/pto3D5GCzA, otherwise you may want to contact your ISP. — RTÉ Player (@RTEplayer) October 3, 2019

Everyone's experience is different. This writer can only speak to his frustrations trying to watch Spurs-Bayern Tuesday evening on the Player, when it crashed seven times across the game, before I gave up on it. Perhaps it was just down to 'variance'. Here's hoping that like the Ireland team, the RTÉ Player comes good at the business end of this tournament.