Beware of the red button on Sky TV

Schnitzer

I have just received by BT phone bill, my normal quarterly bill is around £50 i think, hardly use the home phone. When BT direct debited £120 I thought I should have a look at the calls made. The same premium rate number appeared throughout, 25 secs = 60p !!!! looked on google and found that the extra £70 was due to my 5 year old pressing the red button on one of the kids TV channels.
I called Sky and was advised that there is nothing they can do, the bills and service is from whatever channel you are on such as NickJR for example and there is nothing you can do with privacy settings either. So in short unlucky ! I am writing to SKY making a complaint and have also emailed BBC watchdog.
If you think that SKY has around 6,000,000 customers, if just 100,000 customers kids do the same as mine they would nett £24 Million a year.

jimbms

First of all did you have the parental lock turned on and the setting set to bar these calls without the pin code. If not then you can only blame yourself.

Phantom_Flan_Flinger

Bit late for you now, but as jim says, you need to go into the parental controls and set the PIN to be requested for any transactions, i.e. anything over £0.00.

Schnitzer

According to Sky the parental lock will not be any good ! whilst it will keep the kids from viewing the adult stuff it will not stop anyone pressing the red button if it appears on the screen, i was expecting them to say here is the pin code do this this and this on the parental lock. But NO ! Sky say that there is nothing they can do, unlucky. Sky also say that the red button is not anything to do with them, it is down to the actual channel provider, whether this be NickJr or whoever. They are the ones taking your money. But if you guys know better than Sky will try when I get home. Cheers

jimbms

We never said it stops them pressing, what was said is the parental lock will stop the dialing out, failing that a simple 3 solutions are 1. unplug the phone line when child is watching. 2. For the one off price of £8 so cheaper than premium calls, buy an extra remote and remove red button and glue a bit of plastic over then give to son when watching TV. 3. Put TV on channel and take away remote.

ka7e

Not sure if you have HD but the SkyHD guide states the facility to enable parental control prevents the use of interactive services that demand a call charge.

It's different from the restricted viewing PIN, in that it bars the remote from allowing the user to go online and/or imposes a spend restriction.

Phantom_Flan_Flinger

With the charge set to £0.00, a press of the red button for a chargeable service, whether it be for kids games, Sky Box Office, or anything else will bring up a prompt to enter the PIN.

No PIN, no charges.