RTÉ One channel controller George Dixon has left the broadcaster after less than a year to take up a position as global editorial director of BBC Worldwide. RTÉ Television managing director Glen Killane will act as an interim controller until a new appointment is made.

Mr Dixon, who has previously held senior positions at the BBC and Channel 4, joined RTÉ last March, after Mr Killane decided to appoint controllers to RTÉ One and RTÉ Two as part of a restructuring of RTÉ Television.

“I have had a fantastic time at RTÉ working with brilliant and collaborative people both on and off screen,” Mr Dixon said. However, joining BBC Worldwide was “an opportunity that was impossible to turn down”, he added.

Mr Dixon’s position will be advertised next week. The British television executive’s brief when he arrived at Montrose was to shore up the RTÉ One brand as a “blue-chip” channel and stop viewers drifting away.

At the launch of the broadcaster’s 2013 season, he described his job as managing the “reinvention” of television.

“In my job, you have got to always find the new, because people get bored very quickly in a market where other channels can copy what you do, and do it very cheaply,” he said. “And something that was special is no longer special, because there are 50 different versions of it.”

Mr Killane said Mr Dixon’s departure “further demonstrates the highly competitive media environment in which we operate”.

The appointment of the channel controllers last year was a key part of RTÉ’s strategy to carve out a stronger identity for RTÉ One and RTÉ Two in the competitive multichannel broadcasting environment.

“The schedule is already in place for autumn 2014 and into 2015,” Mr Killane said in relation to RTÉ One.

The controller of RTÉ Two is Bill Malone, previously commissioning editor of entertainment, who has concentrated on luring in more 15-34-year-olds to its prime-time programming in his first season in the job.