The spoofed Telecom commercial aka 'telecon'

, posted: 19-MAY-2006 15:59

The Telecon spoof commercial everyone's talking about

And finally... here's the embedded GoogleVideo player. Swearing toddlers warning still applies.

[Removed link to dead Google Video]



Update: here's another link for the clip.

Update II Youtube has DMCA'ed me thanks Telecom's mirthless managers filing a complaint :(




... but it's there again :)


Update III Second link

Update IV Telecom got Google to DMCA the video clip. :(

Update V But a brave PC World Press F1 poster listed a bunch of mirrors.







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Comment by cokemaster, on 19-MAY-2006 16:24

Having problems downloading the file, is it corrupt?


Author's note by juha, on 19-MAY-2006 16:30

Nah, just tried it from a different network and it downloads and plays fine. I'll try googlevideoing it with an embedded player.


Comment by Jimmy D, on 19-MAY-2006 16:34

The last half didn't play in QT on Mac.


Comment by sbiddle, on 19-MAY-2006 16:38

I hope you apologised to muppet - looks like he's a little annoyed with you! :-)


Author's note by juha, on 19-MAY-2006 16:44

I didn't realise it was *that* muppet...


Author's note by juha, on 19-MAY-2006 16:44

Jimmy, trying to get the blog to accept an embedded player. Stand by...


Comment by muppet, on 19-MAY-2006 16:48

I was annoyed because I was credited with something I didn't create!

Anyway, it's all good know, I've fixed my happy fun message :)

Tim


Comment by sbiddle, on 19-MAY-2006 16:53

I am aware of another site that had it today that has pulled it as well due to excessive numbers of requests that all seem to come from the same IP address as people at work with nothing to do on a Friday forward the URL to everybody in their address book! Lets see if you can bring down Google next!


Comment by cokemaster, on 19-MAY-2006 17:07

I was using Quicktime on mac. VLC seems to work fine. :)


Comment by sbiddle, on 19-MAY-2006 17:08

Wonder what Annette thinks since she now wants to be CEO of Telecom?


Comment by muppet, on 19-MAY-2006 17:18

Yea, the widespread popularity of the link has highlighted a bunch of misconfigured/broken proxy servers out there, sometimes requesting the same thing 10+ times all within a 1 second period.

Thankfully bandwidth isn't/wasn't a problem. Though having said that, I'm not serving it up anymore because my machine is hosted by a friend and I don't wish to be abusing what is a privilege.

Time for a beer!

Tim


Author's note by juha, on 19-MAY-2006 17:22

Muppet: if you're ever up in Auckland, beer's on me... :)


Comment by Jama, on 19-MAY-2006 17:36

Everyone including me likes a good joke, but seriously this is simply quite a poor effort. Bad dubbing and continuity aside it just isn't that funny.

Least we forget that communications prices have continued to drop whilst power pricing and interest rates do continue to go up.


Comment by blahbmc, on 19-MAY-2006 18:13

Oh come on Jama, leave your allegiances aside and enjoy the fun. It's Friday, lighten up with a drink :)


Comment by Nic Wise, on 19-MAY-2006 18:16

hehe - Loose change 911 mets Telecon. all good. Sounds like the folks from tmet.co.nz, who would have the capability to do it ;-)


Comment by cokemaster, on 19-MAY-2006 18:42

I can serve the file for those who want a direct download if you want.

Bandwidth isn't a problem here.


Author's note by juha, on 19-MAY-2006 18:44

Cheers, the more links the better.


Comment by cokemaster, on 19-MAY-2006 19:12

Feel free to link:

http://www.waipawa.com/media/telecon.mpeg


Comment by cokemaster, on 19-MAY-2006 19:14

Here we go: http://www.waipawa.com/media/telecon.mpeg

Won't let me post links.


Comment by sbiddle, on 19-MAY-2006 19:22

Does anybody have a higher quality copy of this clip?


Author's note by juha, on 19-MAY-2006 19:24

Yeah, the original isn't all that in terms of quality, and Youtubing it seems to make it worse.



Comment by yay down with telecom!, on 22-MAY-2006 21:37

yay down with telecom!


Comment by Andrew, on 24-MAY-2006 12:59

juha is the official creator of the telecon ad :-O


Comment by G, on 25-MAY-2006 08:13

What player opens the file? Media player opens but with no video, is there a codec i can download to get it to play?


Comment by Dane Hawker, on 25-MAY-2006 09:25

Lol, great ad. Makes me feel so better after what Ive put with this year with my net connection. Some upgrade going from 2mbs to 3.5mbs, more like a downgrade!


Comment by BT, on 25-MAY-2006 10:26

hi guys, does anyone know where there is a better quality version of this? cheers


Trackback by Cokemaster, on 25-MAY-2006 11:10

On our oh so favourite news site, Stuff has ran a story about the spoofed Telecom ad that has been making its rounds around the internet. Some of you will have seen it here on Geekzone in Juha's blog.

Apparently Telecom does not find the parody (not really since its just redubbed) of their ad, with the toddlers saying unfavourable things about Telecom. I'm guessing the now infamous quote from Th (more on the original trackback)...


Author's note by juha, on 25-MAY-2006 13:25

G: it's an MP4 file, so Apple Quicktime plays it. Cokemaster says it plays with Videolan too - www.videolan.org - a free player that's rather nice.


Comment by damn8v, on 25-MAY-2006 14:30

Bravo! I only just heard about it (now that they've managed to have it pulled off youtube), and was having difficulty finding a copy just to see what all the fuss was about... top notch work, whoever can claim this ad as their own work. Hats off to you... blardy Telescum! :)


Comment by Me, on 25-MAY-2006 15:26

What is the codec required for the http://www.waipawa.com/media/telecon.mpeg link?

The video won't play.


Comment by Hayley Watson, on 25-MAY-2006 20:21

The downloaded MP4's don't play for me either, in Windows. I'm 99.5% sure I have the codec, but there appears to be a chunk of stuff tacked on to the head of the file preventing any of my video players from recognising it as an MPEG stream. The resource fork, perhaps? There's lots of bits and pieces in there about file types and handlers and is that an icon? MP4 doesn't have any magic numbers associated so knowing where to cut is a mission in itself.


Author's note by juha, on 25-MAY-2006 23:17

Hayley, I just tried again with QT 7.1 on Windows XP and the file from juhasaarinen.googlepages.com plays back fine (although I wish the quality would be better of course).

The MD5 sum for the file I have is:

MD5 (telecon.mp4) = fe6f10ae085f42f8e2372aef65d3b989

and

#file telecon.mp4

telecon.mp4: ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 2


Comment by Hayden Peake, on 26-MAY-2006 10:58

Here's another link to a copy of the video host on my site. It's the Mpeg-4 version exported from Google video, so it comes in at about 7Mb, but it's not very good quality. If I find a better quality version, I'll post that.

http://www.wunderbear.com/pubjunk/Telecon.mp4


Comment by Felix, on 26-MAY-2006 11:35

This version's quality is somewhat better

http://telecon.somee.com/telecon.flv

If you can't get it download http://www.videolan.org/vlc/


Comment by Arowin, on 26-MAY-2006 12:37

I managed to grab it off google video before it went down and posted it on my site.

It's a wmv file and works fine

http://www.wolflight.net


Comment by Scott Miller, on 26-MAY-2006 13:03

Hey, Does anyone know where i can get a copy of the ad that works right now.

Thanks

Scott Miller


Comment by wal, on 27-MAY-2006 09:14

Great stuff-my sentiments exactly-what a bloody con telecom is-screwed us all for decades!


Comment by Nil Einne, on 29-MAY-2006 02:11

The stupidest thing is that Telecom is just drawing attention to the ad. They should have known the more they try to get it remove, the more it's going to appear in the paper and people are going to hear about it. I strongly dislike Telecom and do keep fairly up to date with telecommunications afairs, especially related to broadband. But if Telecom's genius lawyers hadn't drawn attention by getting it take off youtube and on to the Herald, I might have never heard about it. It was Telecom basically that told me that it exists. Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying Telecom may have a legal right since but it's a silly decision nevertheless.

BTW, Xvid and other such codecs are MPEG-4. However the MP4 files are MPEG-4 streams. You need a codec which can recognise MPEG-4 streams. The easiest thing to do may be VLC. Alternatively, you could get QuickTime alternative, Nero, and several other things I can't remember.

DO NOT assume you can play MPEG-4 stream video files unless you've done it before or really know what your doing. Being able to play MPEG1 files, MPEG2 files or MPEG4 video in AVI or other containers does not indicate an ability to play MPEG-4 stream files!


Author's note by juha, on 29-MAY-2006 19:54

Nil: yeah... Telecom doesn't seem to get it when it comes to PR.

Thanks for all the MPEG-4 info. Didn't have a problem playing back the file here on both WinXP with QT 7.x and on Mac OS X but some people had issues.

Not seen the real commercial for a while. Wonder if Telecom will dare to run it again? :)


Comment by mag, on 14-JUN-2006 01:22

asdfg, Synchro!


Comment by Nigel Nguyen, on 17-JUL-2006 14:39

This is absolutely awesome :) I like the word "telecon". Personally, I'd like to see Telecom save time and resources to improve their business service than mucking around with youtube :)


Author's note by juha, on 24-JUL-2006 10:12

Nigel: yeah... but, they're used to "hiding behind the legalistic argument", to quote Theresa Gattung.


Comment by ben, on 3-JAN-2007 12:51

not only do telecon make it hard when your with them they make it hard when your without them

seriously every telstra clear customer that has either moved there phone lines, net, etc etc or wanted phone lines.

takes 3 times as long as usually gets diked about with for ages.

so you cant live with them and you cant live without them its there game


Comment by merv, on 26-JAN-2007 16:27

great vid worked fine every new zealander needs to see this and get their heads out of the sand if we don't complain to telecon make a protest they will continue to play their mind games email them phone them do something the world knows we have the worst internet provider in the world is time new zealanders knew it fuck the shareholders they not kiwis


Comment by clown, on 25-OCT-2008 11:53

you love what these guys did :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8RjrA05I8w


Author's note by juha, on 28-OCT-2008 13:42

Clown: that's mildly amusing until it goes wrong... about the T3G stuff. The GSM isn't quite accurate either, but that's just me I guess.


Comment by jc, on 5-JAN-2009 01:23

Like we needed a humorous advert like this to convey the obvious, though it's appreciated nonetheless.

"June 30,2007: Theresa Gattung steps down with a reported leaving payment of $5.125 million in cash and 12 weeks annual leave owing."

-Now that's NOT funny, just sick.


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