LG’s HD TVs have been hit with a weird digital screen freeze problem in Australia. Despite LG’s awareness of the problem weeks ago, the television manufacturer has made excuses and blamed the TV channel involved for the problem. Meanwhile its PR team has played a hiding game with the media, selectively releasing information. It seems it’s hard to get good PR help these days. 

Television manufacturer LG has failed to determine the source of a glitch in some of its televisions, which causes them to freeze when screening Australian Nine Network programs, despite being notified of the problem three weeks ago.

An LG spokeswoman also admitted that the company was unable to trace the problem since it did not have any data streaming recorded.

The glitch first reported on February 26 by a Melbourne newspaper, The Age, where LG had blamed it on Nine.

But in yesterday’s statement LG appeared to have changed its story: “This glitch is software related, with either the digital transmission stream, or the decoding of that stream affecting the television’s operation.”

LG’s PR company, Burson-Marsteller had attempted to downplay the problem by saying it would only release a statement if it received a request from a journalist. Initially the PR company blamed Channel Nine when journalists from the Age first asked for information.

Instead of telling consumers about the problem via the media, Fabienne Guildhary, a consultant at Burson-Marsteller has admitted that they chose to hide the facts by firstly not releasing any information, and when the issue was exposed by the Age not releasing a general statement. They also admit that they engaged in selective media releases in an attempt to minimize the issue.

A full recall has not yet been ruled out, but Darren Goble, LG’s marketing manager, said that a software update would be a more likely solution.

As this developed, the manufacturer issued an advisory statement to customers experiencing problems that it should unplug their TV at the power socket, before turning the sets on again. “Once the TV is powered back on and re-boots, normal viewing should be possible,” LG said.

Goble said that LG hopes to be able to provide a solution “by the end of today or early tomorrow morning.”

The standard way of dealing with these kinds of issues is to be as open and as transparent as possible. We do live in the information age after all, where it’s difficult to sweep things under the carpet and hope that they go away (like they did in the good old days).

As I said, it seems that you just can’t get good PR help these days.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 11:52 pm under Technology.

Read more entries by Ruben Francia.
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