Tiscali TV's Italian cousin gets whacked

Nothing but static in the UK

By Christopher Williams, 30th December 2008

Tiscali has told subscribers it will close its Italian IPTV service, raising questions over the future of its apparently unpopular UK equivalent.

The firm told its about 50,000 Italian TV customers in a letter that broadband channels will go blank at the end of December and the final month's subscription refunded. No reason was given for the sudden closure of the service, which was launched in mid-2007.

Tiscali UK bought into IPTV with the £100m acquisition of Homechoice in 2006. Just over year ago, Tiscali's UK boss Mary Turner said it would have 200,000 TV subscribers by the end of 2008. At the time we thought she was very ambitious, as the signs were already poor for IPTV in the UK and Tiscali was starting from a falling base of 36,000.

Since then, no new numbers have been made available. Tiscali UK's overall broadband subscriber base has been falling however, which would seem to cast significant growth in TV take up as very unlikely.

Tiscali UK's drop in subscribers in 2008 is in part due to successful entries into the ADSL market by Sky and O2, but also to lengthy attempts by its Italian parent company to sell it, which has seemingly put strategic and marketing efforts on hold.

The still-on auction is also likely to forestall any decision over the future of Tiscali UK's IPTV service. The service seems vulnerable whether Italian executives are able to cut a deal with any of the potential buyers (Sky, Carphone Warehouse, Vodafone) or not, however.

Tiscali UK's press representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ®

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Posted Monday 5th January 2009 15:58 GMT

R J Tysoe

crap service, worse customer service

I was happy with Homechoice but Tiscali have just been a nightmare. Our internet connection went down for weeks and therir customer "service" representatives just kept lying to us. We still have Tiscalil, mostly because I can't be bothered to change and I don't want Sky, but when we move house I will probably go with Virgin.

Posted Wednesday 31st December 2008 17:38 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Tiscali TV is appaling

Great news!

Tiscali is, without a doubt, the worst company on the planet. We were customers of homechoice (fantastic company), which unfortunately was taken over by Tiscali.

Some of the problems we had:

- 4 migration appointments 'dissapeared' due to teething problems

- STB fried - twice

- Non-existing account - our account dissapeared from their database for a week

- Appaling customer service in their call centres, one based in the Philippines (Account issues) and the IT call centre in India.

- PVR service didn't work at all for the first two months we were migrated to Tiscali

- Account suspended for two weeks for no apparent reason (we left for this). Spoke to both call centres (Philippines-Accounts and India-IT support) for several times... they both stated it was the others responsibility. They couldn't determine what the fault was.

- After the account was credited £20 pounds (as compensation for the above) and after it was unresolved for a couple of weeks, the £20 pound credit dissapeared. The cheque would have been issued (they said) after we canceled the account, and their system wasn't designed to do that.

We had so many problems with them we had them on speed dial. :-(

Hope they go under. Good riddance. If you work for them, run for your life.... they won't be able to sell, look for something else before they go under. Their proposed sale price has dropped by more than half since they started looking for a buyer.

Homechoice was fantastic. Never spoke to them after they installed the STB.

Posted Wednesday 31st December 2008 14:22 GMT

James