TalkTalk's catch-up telly fib silenced by ad watchdog Budget telco TalkTalk has been barked at by the Advertising Standards Authority after the company wrongly suggested that a whole host of TV channels were available via its catch-up service. Two complainants griped to the watchdog about a telly ad they said had misled them by implying that content on television services was …
I don't think Talk Talk committed much of a crime with this one. The ASA ruling also stated as much, it was only a few particular semantics that meant the ruling was upheld.
Overall I don't think many companies really set out to push the boundaries of what will be acceptable but they do want to promote themselves in the best way possible. For instance a holiday company advertising the cost of its holiday as "from £250 per week" isn't going to choose to instead say "at the most £700 per week" because it is that price over Christmas. However if it is nearly always £750 and for one week in November it is £250 then that would obviously be a breach.
The rulings may seem to have very little clout but what they do is make a precedent and as nearly all ads have to go through Clearcast to be approved, Clearcast will now re-adjust to the new ruling and should reject ads that breach this ruling.
If an ad passes Clearcast (many get rejected and sent back to be re-done) then they will generally be of a fairly high quality with regards to the BACP code. However if a complaint is made then the ASA have a lot longer time to investigate, speak to technical advisers, gather statements etc.
In the case of this advert and some of the other recent rulings I don't think most advertisers would have thought that the ad breached guidelines and neither did Clearcast so it wouldn't exactly be fair to administer a massive punitive fine. The hassle of an investigation, having your card marked and possibly having to re-shoot ads is enough of a deterrent.
Indeed. I've been borrowing my neighbours TalkTalk internet while waiting for BT to stop fucking everything up WRT to my internet connection/phone line. his internet is fibre, but it'll barely stream Netflix.
And I don't mean in high profile HD, I mean at all. And youtube in HD was barely usable, and this is over a near carrier grade client router AP (the sort of thing you use to hop 20km valleys, with no problems) that has been connected to it at a rock solid 150mbps, routing it to my local 5ghz AP - so no local wifi problems that I could ascertain. Truly shocking, but then my new neighbour doesn't really use the internet, so he doesn't notice.
Had my IDNet connection hooked up today (after BT cancelled my simultaneous provision of phone and fibre, and only provided phone, two weeks ago - the pricks - the local subcontrated engineer, and IDNet, are faultless in this - it's all down to BTs core ops people, who are total arseholes - the guys in the exchange don't even answer the phone to engineers), I get a full 80mb (76mbps through speedtest.net to a geographically local server) and it's a revelation having actual bandwidth for streaming services and ISO downloads again, etc. Quality costs, mind. £30+vat per month. Totally worth it to stream Archer in HD though. Which TalkTalk could barely stream, period.
TalkTalk - borderline fraud that you pay for.
Steven R
Actually given how limited the number of shows not available on catch-up are, I do wonder if BT Vision or any of the hard-drive-based boxes could just be set up to passively record anything that wouldn't be available to stream later, then delete after seven days, thus providing a comprehensive service.
You View only has access to BBC iPlayer (BBC 1,2,3 & 4), ITV Player (ITV 1, 2,3 & 4), 4OD (Ch 4 and limited shows from More 4 & E4, not Film 4) & Demand 5 (Ch 5 and some of 5* and 5 USA).
Pretty much all BBC output is available on iPlayer straight after broadcast except MOTD, the commercial channels don't always have streaming rights to US shows so really there's nothing You View or anyone else can do about this, perhaps they need to make their small print a bit bigger with regards to lack of availability for some shows
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