• by Wayne Friedman , August 10, 2007

DirecTV can no longer run commercials that claim: "For an HD picture that can't be beat, get DirecTV." Cable operators says it is of equal quality.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower ruling that banned the nation's largest satellite provider from airing two TV spots that Time Warner Cable deemed false and objectionable. The ruling concluded: "There is no dispute, at least on the present record, that the HD programming provided by TWC [Time Warner Cable] and DirecTV is equivalent in picture quality."

The two spots included commercials starring William Shatner and Jessica Simpson that originally aired in October 2006. This also included revised commercials that DirecTV aired, which the court also ruled against. "It would be obvious to consumers that DirecTV's claims of superiority are aimed at diminishing the value of cable," the court said.

DirecTV's argument was that the revised Simpson and Shatner commercials "were not literally false because no single statement in the commercials explicitly claimed that DirecTV HD is superior to cable HD in terms of picture quality."

But this doesn't mean that DirecTV can't continue to air some Internet TV commercials, starring Eli Manning, quarterback of the New York Giants. Those spots are more generic comparisons to cable.

The ruling said: "The Internet advertisements simply purport to compare the picture quality of DirecTV's programming to that of basic cable programming."

Time Warner Cable had filed a false-advertising suit against DirecTV over its ads in December.