When Telstra relaunched its Mobile Foxtel TV-channels-on-your-phone product last week, we noted that its limit of 30 minutes viewing a day and 200 total minutes viewing a month rendered it a terrible and pointless product. After we mentioned that, Telstra told us it never intended those restrictions to be included, and it has now altered the terms and conditions so that viewing via its Android and iOS apps isn’t subject to limits.
Telstra’s official line is that those restrictions were only ever intended to apply to the ‘WAP’ version of the service — that is, viewing via a browser on your mobile. However, that wasn’t stated anywhere in either its announcement blog post or the terms and conditions for the service — and those are what ultimately dictate what you can expect from the service.
Those T&Cs have now been updated, with the following sentence added to the section which mentions the time limits:
For clarity, the usage limits in this paragraph 12 (including Telstra’s FairPlay Policy) do not apply to viewing Mobile Foxtel from Telstra from within the Mobile Foxtel from Telstra App.
The installer has also been updated to point this out, as you can see in the screenshot above. Telstra says it will be switching off that browser-based version on June 30. We’d assume at that point the terms will be updated again to eliminate what will then be unnecessary verbiage. (And yes, we’ll be checking to see if that happens.)
Having no limits on viewing, and not having any data used for viewing counted against your download cap, does make Mobile Foxtel a more appealing proposition for existing Telstra customers. But the lesson remains clear: always check the terms and conditions carefully. On this occasion, Telstra itself clearly didn’t bother to do that until after we pointed out the flaws in the service as it stood.
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