V Festival: 'Festival Buddy' mobile app = complete rip off...

Along with around thirty thousand other people, I attended V Festival on Saturday.

It was an awesome day with a great line up, great atmosphere and great weather.
The only three things that pissed me off on the day were the following:

1). Huge queues (up to and over an hour long)at the beer tents stemming from not enough beer tents!
2). Scheduling ERROR by not putting Snow Patrol on the main stage
3). The 'Festival Buddy' mobile application

I am unfortunately unable to make suggestions regarding Beer Tents and Line Ups because i am not an Event Organiser, but, may i suggest that next time around you increase the alcohol accessibility and do not make us walk 15 minutes from one stage to another to see equally brilliant bands which results in us missing some of the performances.....that sucked.

However my real gripe that i can whinge about was around the 'Festival Buddy' mobile application.
When i first saw this on the map print outs & line up guides i was so excited that they had finally utlised the mobile device in the perfect way.

The application allowed festival goers on any network to find line-up information, create a personal schedule, find site-specific information, and download free V Festival related content including ringtones, wallpapers and videos by simply texting a shortcode to get the download.

Sounds great right?

Wrong.

'Festival Buddy' is marketed as a 'FREE' downloadable tool which is easy to use - but what they neglected to widely promote is that fact that each update text you recieve throughout the day will cost you 55 cents PLUS there is no cap on how many of these texts you will recieve as updates are unlimited!

To add to this if you are not with Virgin Mobile (the majority of the Sydney population) then you will be charged data costs for any downloads you perform.

Perfect! So i can keep up to date on what's going on and who is on which stage but at the same time i'll be rinsing my mobile bill!

My first thought on having discovered this: 'you tight bastards....'

Every single person there (not including freebie tickets of course) had shelled out circa $140 for a ticket which is alot of money, so i don't think i'm alone in thinking that the Festival Buddy service really should have been free for each & every attendee as an added benefit within the ticket cost.

How hard would it have been to have a quick chat with the main mobile carriers and have the WAP site, data downloads & SMS zero-rated? Honestly?

Paul Shulver, music sponsorship manager for Virgin Mobile said “The Festival Buddy offers the chance for V Festival attendees to completely tailor-make their festival experience.”

Well Mr Shulver, the 'Festival Buddy' left a slightly sour note to my experience because in my view it was total rip off.