Nigel Walley May 2012 – I came across an astounding article in today’s Times about Talk Talk with an interview of CEO Dido Harding. The article announced that TT are gearing up for a ‘major incursion into the television sector this summer‘. It has started hiring engineers so that it can start delivering TV over its broadband network.
You can imagine that this has all come as a bit of a surprise to those of us who are current, long-standing customers of their TV service. It is further evidence of Talk Talk’s bizarre attempt to ignore or deny the fact that they acquired a TV service when they bought Tiscali (who also acquired it, when they bought Homechoice).
If you go into one of their high street stores, or ring one of their standard call centres, they deny they even have a TV service. They won’t let us have any new set top boxes, or even take our existing boxes with us if we move home. So here we have a telecoms company, taking money off people for a TV service they would prefer to deny they have.
They may claim a technical point that the TalkTalk TV service runs over the old Homechoice broadband network, so isn’t technically a TalkTalk product. Well here is my message to Dido – ‘it has a stuffing great TalkTalk logo on it! It exists, and so do I’.
It may never have got more that 100k subs, but the TalkTalk / Homechoice service is still market leading in a number of functionality and design aspects. More importantly, there are still thousands of us who are still paying customers of the service.
I have had the Talk TalkTV service at home and at work for 10 years (admittedly, it has been rebranded at least twice through that period).
It would be nice if, in all their talk about improving your customer service, that they actually acknowledged some of their most long-suffering customers of a TV service that a few of us have quite a bit of affection for. As current TV customers we have not even been told about the implications for us, of the proposed launch of their new TV service. Are they going to turn the old one off? If so when? We deserve to be told. And anyway, we want to hold a wake for all the people in the VOD industry who did their time working there. It will be quite a party – email me if you would like to come. Nigel Walley
ps The article also said ”TalkTalk expects to launch its new TV product in the second quarter ahead of the launch of YouView, the Freeview upgrade’. What do they mean AHEAD of Youview? I thought it was Youview? And has anyone told the Freeview people that YouView is a Freeview upgrade? Confused? You soon will be…