Regional viewers angry at loss of Foxtel service

It’s shaping up as the worst week of the year to be a regional TV viewer.

Yesterday regional Foxtel subscribers bombarded social media platforms to protest at a loss of signal on MyStar boxes.

Angry subscribers took to Foxtel’s Facebook, Twitter and Community forum to complain they had lost TV show and were waiting for hours on hold to Customer Service.

On the Foxtel Community help board a spokesperson apologised for the “Unplanned Service Disruption” and advised to reset the box, but warned it would mean losing stored shows:

We’re incredibly sorry for the temporary outage affecting some boxes and are working on getting all affected customers back to watching their fave shows as soon as possible.

“If your box presents channels with a blue/black screen or, is in a continuous scan state, you can attempt to fix the problem by restoring the box to factory settings. The downside is that any recorded programs, series links or scheduled recordings will be lost. Any personalised settings will also be deleted. We know this is super frustrating and apologise again that it’s happened.

“We will keep working until we get this fixed and will update you again once the issue has been resolved.”

It’s not clear if the problem was related to the change in Free to Air affiliates in regional Australia.

But subscribers awaiting an outcome (or even a customer service assistant to talk to) let rip:

It’s Friday night football. No foxtell service!! Not happy.

This is absolutely ridiculous Foxtel. Here we are, paying for a premium service (I personally get the platinum package) and getting a substandard product, and why? Because we live in regional Australia (as identified.)

It’s now 18 hours in and we still have not had any updates as to what the cause of the problem was, and what engineering is doing to fix the issue. A ‘Factory Reset’ is in my view a lazy solution and does not help the customer in any way – not having suffcient staff available over the phone to re-setup Local channel content does not help either.

This is just the icing on the cake for me, poor internet speeds, given a phone number that is constantly bombarded with telemarketers, my iq box goes hay wire constantly, now this, and no offers of compensation except to ell me things ‘may’ get better. I’m really disgusted, don’t think i will be a customer much longer, I’m over it.

Try offering a service commensurate with what’s offered & paid, pathetic Foxtel!!!!!

Yes lost it all, and my local channels are gone too

I have just completed the hard reset to get my Austar back – it worked BUT I now don’t have any local channels.Please advise what needs to be done to get them back.

If we are happy to wait can we retain saved programmes. It is very disheartening to lose what we have paid for.

Customer service Nik, you people are kidding, what a joke, I am about to have an unplanned interuption to the direct debit to Foxtel from my bank account and will be demanding compensation for the loss of content and the inability to use the system.

Came home from work to no foxtel have the mystar box. Called tech support them done the master reset. Still not working. Now they are sending me out a new box. If i was to upgrade my box it was at my expense. They are sending a new box and which i have to install myself and stil have to pay for my service even though i have no foxtel. NOT IMPRESSED at all considering i have 6 kids all of which are on school holidays. Thanks for NOTHING FOXTEL

On a brighter note, some Telstra customers were happy with the news they were getting access to Foxtel Movies for 2 weeks while others welcomed new English Premier League coverage.