ITV vows to continue phone votes

Eh, what about all the other premium rate phone competions run in magazines, newspapers and commercial radio ?

Do these all not make profits from these ventures whilst selling advertising on their own medium ?

It was text votes wasn't it? They were delivered to the production company by the company that delt with the text votes after the result was announced, and therefore were not counted.

Well I notice there's no red button voting on I'm a Celeb this year.

It seems to be phone votes, and phone votes alone. Not risking it I suppose.

On a red button note, ITV's new Interactive portal has now launched called ITV interactive, not much has changed, just a logo to fit into the branding and a new bar with the featured programmes.

And no online voting option? That says it all.

Rather like Jeremy Kyle not offering an e-mail option for would-be guests whereas Trisha always did.

As far as i'm concerned, if people want to waste their money phoning up television shows, then ITV are perfectly entitled to rake it in off them. I mean if after all these phone scandals, people are still phoning television shows, then frankly they deserve to lose their money.

Does that absolve ITV of the duty to act responsibly though? Of course not. They're only raking in the millions they do through preying on people's gullibility.

People are old enough to make up their own minds, you might say. Unfortunately, some people are only too likely to be tempted by one of This Morning's "dead easy" phone-ins thinking the £1000 will be the answer to all their problems so they phone and phone again. I've nothing against competitions, so long as there is a reasonable competitive element to them (not the sort of questions you get on This Morning) but ITV should be encouraged to look to the good old postcard as a means of entry.

Don't think it was SMS texts as used by mobiles, as Sky boxes don't have access to mobile phone networks. They use the normal phone network. My understanding was that the problem was along the lines of the application running on the Sky box being at fault so dialling the wrong premium rate numbers - and thus costing the user money but not registering the vote.

AIUI most of the Sky box interactive services that cost money charge by the box dialling premium rate phone numbers.

(I know that it is possible to send texts without a mobile phone - but I don't think this is how the X Factor voting worked - though I may be wrong)

Yes - either X Factor or I'm a Celeb or both I think. Not so sure on the technicalities there - you'd expect interactive votes to be delivered without much trouble really.


Online voting has never really been used as it's difficult to charge people for it without them having to set up some kind of account. The only thing I can recall using online voting was the first series of Celebrity Big Brother back in the dial-up days, when they disconnected you from the internet, connected you to their server to vote and then disconnected you again to dial-up your own provider.

Over the ident into Family Fortunes, STV viewers were told that "There was a problem with a small number of votes cast in the 27th October Family Fortunes viewer competition. To find out what action ITV is taking to address this issue, visit stv.tv/familyfortunes".

Being nosy and having the PC on, I checked - seems to be the usual cock-up. The thing I want to know is why STV referred to ITV as being behind the problem but directed viewers to the STV site. In addition, ITV have nothing about any of this on their own site. Any ideas why?

ITV1 mentioned this last week and there was info online then

I have to agree 100% on this one.

People now now the chances of winning these compos. They know how bent many of them have been (and don't try to tell me that they won't go back to their profiteering ways once all this has died down), and they know how patronising most of the questions are.

This whole thing falls squarely into the "tax on the stupid" category, which I have no problem with whatsoever.

If people are thick enough to run up huge bills on tut like this, after all the bad publicity, more fool them.