Can a major telecommunications company with up to 10 million Australian customers possibly survive if “millions” of those clients have given the telco the flick over recent days?
Surely it would have to be on life support at the very least given those circumstances? Those are the basic questions The Bug‘s Media Glass House compilers asked – and rather reasonably so – after Nine News Brisbane repeatedly promoted a segment earlier this week with those words – millions quit Optus – after the company suffered that massive outage early last Wednesday.
The MGH was keen to finally see the segment to discover who had “quantified” the result of understandable anger of Optus customers losing their internet for many hours, especially small business owners who relied on credit sales. And this column simply makes the point that while “millions” could theoretically be only two million that’s not what was clearly inferred.
It all began last Thursday when Nine News Brisbane declared a free data offer was unlikely to stop a “mass exodus” from Optus. Next night’s bulletin declared clients were “abandoning Optus in droves”. Examples were given of rival telcos doing very good new sales.
But it was the “millions quit Optus” plugs – or words to that effect – that particularly piqued our interest. Something stated as a fact should interest a news outfit interested in facts, we reckon.
We’re only unsure of the words used because, rather mysteriously, this column has been unable to find those promos on the Brisbane news service via 9Now, the network’s catchup service. Our compilers also lucked out when searching Nine News Brisbane’s Facebook page for the “millions quit!” plugs aired by the news channel over the segment.
And as it turns out, the now missing plugs might have been aired only during Monday’s Millionaire Hot Seat that we can’t access.
Those plugs in any case apparently were really only for a general story at the end of Monday night’s bulletin just before 7pm about “the best internet plans to slash your bills before prices skyrocket”. That’s right, all the telecom companies are hiking their prices come December 1, especially for lower-range budget plans! So shop around and save, okay! And that presumably includes Optus.
Goodness gracious! Is it at all possible that Nine just used Optus’s woes as a way of promoting that segment and the claim that Optus had lost millions of customers might have simply been plucked out of the air to tease that segment? Surely not.
Optus losing “millions” of customers was indeed a very big news story in the wake of the outage a week ago and deserved – cried out, indeed – to be treated seriously by any serious news organisation.
If it was wide of the mark, Optus would have been more than entitled to give Nine Entertainment Ltd chair Peter Costello a very short and angry phone call riddled with expletives.
Unless, of course, Optus hasn’t been spending anywhere near as much as it should have been with the network and has only itself to blame for the kick up the arse – or, put another way, having the plugs pulled while the poor thing’s in the IC ward struggling to survive – that Nine News appears to have given it.
Want to be alerted immediately a new blog hits Australia’s longest running and most offensive satire site? Simply click on the Follow sign or the link below to be emailed new yarns the moment they are uploaded! The very second we go far too far – and trust us we will – you can then quickly unfollow via the three dots!
The Bug Online 