Financial Penalty over SMS Voting Complaints

The UK's remium rate services regulator, ICSTIS has ruled that Channel 4's Big Brother voting service breached its Code of Practice by misleading viewers watching this years television show. ICSTIS received 2,635 complaints from members of the public after it was announced that contestants who had previously been evicted by SMS and telephone voting, were being given the chance to return to the house.

ICSTIS' ruling follows a detailed investigation involving Channel 4 and the two premium rate service providers concerned - iTouch, which provided the 090 telephone voting facility, and Minick, which provided the SMS shortcode voting facility.

In reaching its decision, ICSTIS accepted that Big Brother was an editorially-inventive show, and that the programme's much-publicised statement that "Big Brother reserves the right to change the rules at any time" clearly indicated to viewers that they should expect twists and turns in how the show developed.

However, the unprecedented number of complaints for this type of service, combined with the undoubted strength of feeling shown by the complainants, clearly indicated that voters genuinely felt that they had been misled over this twist.

Given that the publicly-available terms and conditions on the Big Brother website stated that: "Once a housemate leaves they forfeit any claim to the prize money", ICSTIS concluded that the editorial change had indeed caused people to feel misled. Channel 4 acknowledged that this had been an oversight and ICSTIS accepted that Channel 4 had not intended to mislead its viewers.

While ICSTIS decided against fining the TV show, they did levy their administration fee for the investigation into the complaints. iTouch and Minick paid administrative charges of £36,000 (US$68,700) and £12,700 (US$24,000) respectively."

Posted to the site on 6th October 2006