alistairphillips.com

Telstra offer their BigPond Movies service on computers and supported Smart TVs with the premise that you're able to rent movies and TV shows and, with a supported Smart TV, watch 'em on the big screen. With support for Smart TVs you'd assume that you'd be able to register and rent movies directly from your TV. Unfortunately you'll need to head on over to your computer to register for an account. Easy enough and with that done you're able to login to the service on the TV. Except you're greeted with a wonderful error message telling you there's no credit card on file. What now?

Well you'll naturally head on back to your computer, login to BigPondMovies and select Billing Details only to have it notify you that "No credit card has been registered with this account. Enter the credit card details when prompted during your next purchase". Except you can't do that on the TV so you're going to have to purchase something on your computer. Now you start worrying whether or not whatever you purchase on the computer will be viewable on the TV and there's nothing on the site to allay that fear.

So you sigh and attempt to purchase something. And what are you greeted with this time - why it's the dreaded "Your system does not meet the minimum requirements" message. Telstra are sniffing for Microsoft Windows support and won't let you proceed unless you're running Windows XP/Vista/7/Media Centre. Seriously now, thats obviously not true as you're able to stream it using the SmartTV app so you do support other systems. But I can't do anything because the only way to proceed would be to haul out a Windows system to rent something in all just to enter credit card details.

Thanks Telstra. I'm even using BigPond Cable so they're able to know who I am and can't even offer me the option of adding items directly to my bill. So as a Mac user I'm completely locked out of your system and you've lost any hope you might have had of making (even more) money off of me.

I guess Telstra haven't heard of the Post-PC era.