For years Big Brother has been actively encouraging the audience to vote using SMS messages from the mobiles.
No more. They’re completely dropping the SMS voting, claiming “the mobile phone operators cannot process the votes within a time frame suitable for the voting procedures on the programme.”
When did this change? Is this a new development?
The failure of SMS voting is NOT news
I remember speaking to the tech wizards at the Australian Broadcast Company (ABC) back in 2004 at Broadcast Asia who told that they decided that they could not legitimately use SMS voting as the delivery of it was not reliable enough, especially if there was a need to do it within a certain time period – like gathering votes before a deadline.
They opted for another mobile-based technology, that although slightly more involved for the viewer to use, at least gave a truthful representation of what was going on.