Rai towards renewal, an external or an internal next to?

An internal CEO, who will not have to learn all the pieces of the Rai puzzle in the running, or an external one, freer from consolidated ties and, therefore, to open a new course, starting from the economic health of the Company? The main choice to be made at the moment seems to be this unlike when, a few weeks ago, qualified sources said that the choice of an outsider seemed obvious, as well as the absence of a negotiation on the ticket. In short, today the game seems to be really all open and it is difficult to imagine that there could be a clear division in the choices, as some say, and that is that Draghi does what he wants on the CEO, while the parties decide the president especially since then. , without a two-thirds majority in the Rai Parliamentary Supervisory Commission, there is really no president. It is therefore difficult to imagine that there will not be some overall agreement given that, trivially, if Draghi were to choose a woman as CEO, the parties would be oriented to choose a man for the presidency and vice versa. In short, the negotiation seems an obligatory path, but the point is: will it lead to pluralism or to subdivision? Will it serve to give Rai the wings it needs to turn at high altitude among the Over The Top or will it risk, as at other times, putting lead on its wings? Let’s stay ashore for the moment. And let’s talk about concrete priorities for Rai. Which ones are they? Surely the rebalancing of the accounts and even, daring, a small treasure to make investments, a crucial thing for a publishing company that cannot ignore the race for technological progress and the increasingly close competition with the Ott. This, therefore, is certain and , apparently, it seems to be the premier’s number 1 thought on Rai, but there are many other priorities. And conversing with those who have worked for a long time in the largest Italian cultural company – as we keep repeating at times to enhance it at times to underline the inability to sustain such an honor – the accounts are indeed an absolute priority, but easily solved if everything the fee paid by the citizens returned to the Rai home. A chapter, that of the fee, which for some time has, however, been divided because although the collection has been secured with the inclusion in the electricity bill, it continues to discuss the deviation of a part of the fee from the Rai coffers and Upstream, according to some, the use that the Public Service makes of this money is not efficient enough. And here the cahier de doléance opens up slowly, between a chat and the other in the building. Why, ask some veteran who points to a Rai fair, in the last three years has there been no internal audit that identified pockets of inefficiency, waste, distortions in the chains of command? It would have helped, he remarks. Because, once and for all, the high rate of internal competition has not been brought to light which seriously slows down production processes, cuts the legs of those who have many ideas but few political protections, and makes Rai’s communication towards the outside? Why hasn’t we intervened on the exasperating economic disparity that exists in the Company? This too would have been useful to make Rai a more efficient, agile and light publishing company, they point out. Before the relationship with politics which, according to the observations collected, is sometimes only an accomplice and not the only one responsible, there are other nonsense that can be listed in a flash by those who know the company well. The first: very high budgets for the three generalist networks (around 70 million media between Rai1, Rai2, Rai3), great discretion and, on the other hand, low internalisation, little innovation and low propensity to keep the majors on a diet a bit and also to choose small production companies, although giving them more space would open healthy competition to the advantage of costs and innovation (again this key is struck) and also would allow to respect one of the indications of the service contract. The second: transparency still too low not only towards the outside, but also towards the inside. And we could continue further, because there is no lack of in-depth observations by those who live and observe the life of the Company from within and who are now anxious to understand if the CEO will be an outsider, if he will be an outsider all numbers and tables. who, therefore, will delegate the editorial part to the general manager (introduced again by the current one to Salini) or if it will be, instead, an intern like the current distribution director Marcello Ciannamea (for whom the heart of the leaguers seems to beat) or as the ‘CEO of Rai Cinema Paolo Del Brocco (appreciated by most) Or, again, as Chief Technology Officer Stefano Ciccotti (former CEO and president of Rai Way) who is not considered close to any party but who is considered a profound connoisseur of the company machine as well as a true technology expert and who would, therefore, also be able to cope well with the game of the fundamental technological infrastructure in the next three years. However, there are those who, on the other hand, consider it lacking on the editorial part. In any case, what technological game are we talking about? Key word: refarming, a process yet to be completed which also involves relations between Rai, Mise (which coordinates the refarming road map) and Confindustria TV (which includes all TVs, including private ones). Immediately a first consideration: with the sale of the 700 MHz band, starting from 30 June 2022, the television service will find itself with 12 fewer channels on the 40 currently in use. Basically, to keep the channels that now occupy the 700 band (and which will have to leave it definitively to the advantage of the telephone companies), it will be necessary to move them to another (lower) frequency space through new compression and encoding technologies, keeping as much as possible unchanged. the quality and also hosting ultra HD channels (4k), that is in a more than very high definition. Yes, but what does it all translate into for citizens? In the need to buy a decoder or to renew the range of televisions by purchasing Dvb-T2 (second generation digital terrestrial). Change currently rather uphill both for the pandemic and for the stagnation of the electronic market and the economic crisis, not lightened for individuals even by the bonus-TV which is not particularly helpful if we take into account the fact that often in the homes of Italians there are multiple televisions and the bonus is for a single decoder. And the most recent reference data published by Mise in the verification report on the diffusion of reception equipment confirm this: in February 2020 only 42.4% of households were equipped with a DVB-T2 television, while the forecasts for September 2021 estimate that about 6 million families, corresponding to 27.1% of the total, will not yet have a DVB-T2 receiver available. Two, in particular, are the key dates for the next Rai Board of Directors: 1 September 2021, when the transition from the old Dvbt-Mpeg2 system to the Dvbt-Mpeg4 system will take place with the risk that, although Rai is ready, hundreds of thousands users or entire areas in the country may not receive the Rai signal, as they have not been able to renew the TV fleet; and on 30th June 2022 when the refarming process will be completed with the technological change to insert more and quality channels in a lower frequency space through the introduction of the Dvb t2 Hevc encoding (more efficient than the previous Mpeg4), always with the risk of a considerable percentage of users still without an adequate TV. The technological game of the next three years has other significant chapters: the towers and more. Rai currently uses the towers for linear TV and broadband (web network) for RaiPlay which uses a server platform (Cdn, Content Delivery Network) distributed throughout the country. It is a platform that helps to minimize the delay in loading web page content by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user. By doing so, in essence, users around the world can view the same high-quality content without slowing down loading times. What, however, is the problem? That Rai does not have its own CDN and must rent the service from third parties, spending several million a year. Millions that in all likelihood will increase because distribution costs will progressively rise, given that the demand for data to be sent on the network will be ever greater. Content distribution is increasingly moving to the web platform and Rai must, therefore, decide whether to go straight to the heart of the problem, facing the transformation of the world over the air and therefore moving quickly to broadband distribution (network), also in view of the shift in the use of devices, from stationary with tuners to laptops with internet subscriptions. At that point it would then remain to be understood whether Rai will continue to invest in the towers or, instead, divert investments to the proprietary CDN. And even if it is already studying, naturally in a comparison with the institutions, a fee whose collection (considering that the use of the contents moves on the web) will no longer be based on the possession of TV, but on something else. To put salt on the tail of the Public Service there is then a small but significant detail that some experts in Rai are aware of: in the European document ‘European barriers in retail energy markets’ (study commissioned by the EU for the national ) appears on page 44, the chapter ‘regulatory disincentivation’ in which, among the practices to be discouraged, there is the obligation to collect tariffs other than energy for third parties. And it is indubitable that the fee, currently in the bill, is ‘foreign’ to energy. Will it remain the chapter of a document? (By Veronica Marino)