TV service is parked for now. Dunstone: “It would be foolhardy to deliver our own TV proposition against Freeview, Sky and Virgin [no mention of BT]. We have to accept our heritage is not in TV.

“We have a much better chance of succeeding alongside the PSBs with [Project] Canvas when it is ready... It would be much more foolhardy to go and invest money in a product I’m not sure we could make competitive.”

Looks like TalkTalk has learned a lesson from Orange, which abandoned its TV ambitions in November 2008 after saying it was “too similar to BT Vision” and not competitive enough against the likes of Sky and Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) and existing Freeview services

TalkTalk inherited Tiscali TV when it bought the operator in 2009. As of this month, it got rebranded as TalkTalk TV, but other than that the service will effectively be parked until there is more progress on Project Canvas (TalkTalk is a partner).

Dunstone: “It’s very early days…We’ve signed up to say if Canvas comes into being we would be a part of it. At this stage we haven’t made any decisions or commented on what we would sell, for example moving Tiscali services…We will update plans on Canvas as its future is more certain.”

Other highlights from the conference call…

—Messy integration. Incredibly, Dunstone said that Tiscali had 7,000 tariffs on their billing system when CPW acquired the company. He says that now all customers have now been “right-tariffed” to TalkTalk’s plans: “TalkTalk has a handful of tariffs and we’ve moved everyone to the ones that are most appropriate.” This is not the first (or maybe the last) of the glitches that CPW has encountered in the Tiscali integration: Last October, TalkTalk said that it would need to renegotiate the £236 million it paid for Tiscali because the operator had 160,000 fewer customers than originally advised. No info on what kind of a cost impact the right-sizing had.

—Still looking at ultra-fast broadband. Dunstone: “There’s an ongoing debate [on fibere] with both BT and Ofcom and all of the alternative carriers to BT (NYSE: BT). The political will is there for fibre to be rolled out in the UK…Fibre is a priority for both political parties. The momentum is there to make it happen. We’re just conscious to make it happen in way to allow new technology to be deployed…as new ways of delivering content and new protocols are invented and we’re not stuck in just one way of doing it. Ofcom are keen to ensure it’s an open environment, to promote technical innovation rather than just access…we’re actively involved in the debate.”