'What I know about media you could spray on the back of a stamp'

THE MULTIMILLIONAIRE BEHIND Irish TV knows virtually nothing about the media.

In fact John Griffin, who sold his taxi company for £300 million two years ago, admits that his knowledge of the sector is probably about on a par with most people’s grasp of quantum physics.

“What I know about the media industry, you could spray on the back of a stamp,” he cheerfully tells Fora.

For Griffin it’s all about people, and Pierce O’Reilly was the right man in the right place at the right time.

O’Reilly slept on the floor of a friend’s apartment the night he went to England looking for funding. He was struggling to keep his business, a small regional television station called Mayo TV he ran with his wife Mairead Ni Mhaoilchiarain, afloat.

After borrowing money from friends and family, including both his and Ni Mhaoilchiarain’s parents, he was out of ideas.

“When we realised we were running out of money really fast, we said we had to get someone on board who was going to help us,” he tells Fora.

“In a last ditch effort I went over to London. I rang all the Mayo people I knew, all the Irish people I knew, and asked them to come and meet me, to give me 10 minutes to say what I was trying to do.”

O’Reilly gathered his motley crew in a pub called the Oxford Arms in the Camden Town district of the city, but it became apparent that GAA football, not money, was the preferred topic of conversation.

Griffin was in the bar by chance and he and O’Reilly got chatting. Griffin quickly realised that O’Reilly was in trouble.

“I could see that there was no chance. A pub in Camden Town, you could sit there forever and you wouldn’t get anything. Nobody would have had any of the real money,” Griffin says.

“I wrote a cheque out, slapped it on the bar and said, ‘Stick that in the bank and give me a ring’.”

O’Reilly took the cheque and walked out of the bar. “He didn’t know my last name. I thought it might have been £50, £100, I didn’t know,” he says.

“I walked out of the pub, opened the cheque and saw £50,000. I rang Mairead. We were in the last-chance saloon with three small boys at home. I was crying down one end of the phone while she was crying down the other knowing that we could survive for another while.”

That £50,000 later became €15 million and Irish TV was born.

What do you do and how long have you done it for?

Irish TV is a satellite television station pitched at Irish expats headed up by O’Reilly and Ni Mhaoilchiarain, whom both men describe as a “key element” of the business. With a crew in every county, the channel’s pitch is is that it brings local stories from Irish communities to a global audience.

The station’s genesis was in 2011 when journalists O’Reilly and Ni Mhaoilchiarain set up a production company to show a documentary about a friend with cancer after broadcasters were reluctant to support the project.

Irish TV founders Mairead Ni Mhaoilchiarain and Pierce O'Reilly

“We said if nobody will take it, we’ll create our own platform,” O’Reilly says. “After six months we had 2.5 million hits on our website. We knew from the interest that we had a business.”

The station grew steadily afterwards and started branching out into different counties, forming the seed of what would become Irish TV. However, money was hard to come by and it was kept afloat mainly through a mix of goodwill from friends and family and out of the couple’s own pockets.

However it was when Griffin came on board that the company truly began its growth spurt. The UK businessman had sold his own firm, taxi hire company Addison Lee, to a US private equity giant in 2013.

After sharing the £150 million he had pocketed with his sons as part of the deal, he was looking for something new to focus on. Born in London, Griffin maintains a strong affinity with Ireland having lived in Mayo as a child before returning to the UK.

This link and the station’s potential as a global brand convinced him to get on board and he began pouring cash into the business, which started to expand rapidly.

As well as purchasing a dedicated channel on Sky to show its content, Irish TV’s staff quickly swelled to 150 by 2014. Although the bulk of the total are based in Ireland, it also has bureaus in several other countries including the US and the UK.

What are your costs and how do you make money?

Irish TV produces dozens of shows every week based on Irish communities both in Ireland and abroad, broadcasting a mix of programmes such as a weekly profile of each of the country’s 32 counties.

It has two main sources of income – and a potential third. Like most stations, advertising has been the biggest revenue stream so far, followed by sponsorship. The firm will also have the power to charge for subscriptions after recently signing a deal with Indian conglomerate Tata that will make it accessible on smart devices worldwide.

O’Reilly doesn’t give away the split of the station’s sales, although he does say that its costs about €10 million annually to keep the whole show on the road. The station, as most companies tend to be during their early years, is currently loss-making as it pours cash into its expansion.

Irish TV backer John Griffin

Abridged accounts for 2014 show Irish TV made a loss of €2 million during the year and has likely burned through much more by now. However O’Reilly intends to turn that around as soon as possible, adding that he is confident the station will break even in 2016 “from an investment and a company point of view”.

“We have always had a three-year strategy; we knew that for the first two years we would have to do the heavy lifting, which is why John has been so important,” he says.

Irish TV’s core cost is its staff, with the company spending big to keep a spread of reporters across Ireland and in Irish communities in the UK. The station has had to spend on new offices, most recently opening a new outlet in Dublin, and on equipment.

The firm has also splashed out on infrastructure, such as buying its channel on Sky. “I didn’t know what the cost would be,” Griffin said. “In the end we bought the 24-hour (rights) for £1 million.”

What is your market?

The channel’s core target market is the Irish diaspora, wherever they may be. That puts its potential audience, in its broadest sense, at as many as 70 million people worldwide who claim Irish ancestry. The two biggest markets for the station are the UK and the US.

Singer Jimmy Buckley performs at the Irish TV Country Music Awards

The recent deal with Tata has also seen Irish TV expand its potential audience wider still. The agreement will make its programming available to viewers worldwide on smart TVs and across devices running Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android system.

In the US, it is broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Service, while it is shown on Sky in the UK, where O’Reilly claims it has a weekly audience of 1.6 million.

What is the competition?

Internationally, Irish TV has few direct competitors. Although others have looked at setting up a station for Irish expats, at the moment there is really only one other game in town: the state-funded broadcaster RTÉ. And the mere utterance of the three syllables is enough to get Griffin a bit riled up.

“There is a competitor that has the advantage to discriminate against us,” he says, in reference to RTÉ’s government backing.

O’Reilly also takes up the point, noting that part of the broadcaster’s remit is to maintain a connection with the diaspora.

“We feel that we are doing that job and we feel eventually we are entitled to some of the TV licence being paid which goes in one direction – to RTÉ.”

However comparing RTÉ and Irish TV’s traffic is difficult. The Mayo-based station is currently relying on polls from research agency Red C to gauge viewership, which means figures on audience share have not been audited by Nielsen, the company that provides data for the Irish industry. O’Reilly says it’s a situation the channel is working to fix.

In Ireland there is little doubt that RTÉ dominates. According to Kantar Media as many as 2.6 million people watch RTÉ One at least once a week, while O’Reilly says his station is viewed by 800,000 people a week here.

However, as Irish TV is aimed at expats, comparing international viewing is a better barometer. Although it has no breakdown for individual online services such as live streaming, O’Reilly says the company’s website averages between 300,000 and 500,000 unique impressions per month and could see as many as 100,000 people tune into live streams of high-profile events.

RTÉ Player International, which allows overseas viewing of the station’s programmes, was launched in March 2015 and is probably Irish TV’s single biggest rival. RTÉ claims that the service received over 4.3 million streams during 2015, averaging out at almost 360,000 per month.

Irish TV garners another large cluster of eyeballs through its terrestrial channels in the UK and US, while RTÉ also has additional international reach through its website and radio apps.

Both O’Reilly and Griffin are quite bullish about Irish TV’s chances against the state broadcaster, with the latter saying: “The great blessing is that our main competitor has the worst name ever.

“If you walk the streets of any big capital city in the world and asked people what they knew about RTÉ, they wouldn’t have a clue. Many of the opportunities that we have to date have been brought about by the fact that people you’re talking to (understand) Irish TV.”

What is your vision for the company?

No one can accuse Irish TV of being short on ambition. Ask Griffin and O’Reilly what their aims are and the two see the sky as being well shy of the limit.

Griffin foresees the station becoming a juggernaut, creating a huge amount of spin-off employment in areas such as the tourism sector by selling Ireland abroad.

“My ambition is that we will create employment for young people in Ireland, not just in Mayo, but in several counties,” he says.

“We will have a spread all over Ireland. I think that we could put 10, 20, 30 thousand people into work in the fullness of time.”

O’Reilly is a bit more reserved, but only slightly. In the short term, the focus is on breaking even next year, but the two are hopeful that Tata will set up a media operation in Ireland in partnership with the station.

If that comes through, O’Reilly says that there is the potential to create “5,000 jobs with Irish TV powered by Tata”, although he is reluctant to give more detail as “a few things still have to fall into place”.

However, Griffin says it’s not about numbers. For him, keeping the company going in the right direction is the main thing, and if an industry springs up around it, so be it.

“It’s a phenomenal company this is, and it’s grown at an enormous rate. I’m enjoying it,” he says. “It couldn’t have happened without me, there’s no question about that. The money I’ve put in, nobody else in the world would have done it. It was because of the timing and because it was Ireland.

“If all you want is money, it doesn’t work, it’s not like that. You need a passion, you have to believe. And that’s where we are, there’s a lot of passion and belief in Irish TV.”

This article is part of our weekly series examining the nuts and bolts of businesses. If you would like to see your business featured please email news@fora.ie.