Legal Information

This legal information page is published by starryel. It explains who operates this website, the legal form that operator takes, the registration and tax identifiers that apply to it, the rules that govern access to and use of the site, the way content and intellectual property are owned and licensed, the limits of the operator's responsibility, and the routes available to any visitor who has a question, a complaint or a legal concern. It applies to every page, tool, form, feed-free resource and downloadable file made available under this domain, and it should be read together with the separate policies named below. Last updated: 3 November 2026.

1. The Operator of This Website and Its Role

The website you are reading is owned, published and operated by starryel. starryel is the single point of legal responsibility for the site. It decides what is published, how the site is built and maintained, which third-party services are embedded in it, how enquiries are handled, and how any personal data submitted through it is used. Where data protection legislation refers to a “controller”, that role is held by starryel. Where the operator acts as a supplier of goods or services, it does so in its own name and not as an agent, broker or representative of any other business.

The site is a professional hub and commercial resource dedicated to live television production. Its material explores studio equipment integration, camera technique and movement, acoustic treatment and microphone placement, lighting design for studio floors, and the production processes that keep news programmes, interviews, panel discussions and live shows on air reliably and to schedule. Alongside that editorial material the site is operated on a commercial basis: visitors can make contact about equipment hire, production support, technical advice, integration work and related services.

The operator does not act as an agent for visitors, readers or clients, and nothing published on the site creates a partnership, joint venture, employment relationship, advisory relationship or fiduciary duty between the operator and any visitor. Editorial content is provided for general information and professional development purposes. Any commercial engagement is governed by its own written contract, quotation or hire agreement, and where those documents conflict with anything on this page, those documents take precedence for that engagement.

2. Legal Form, Registration Details and Tax Identifiers

2.1 Legal form and status

starryel operates as a private company limited by shares, incorporated in England and Wales under the Companies Act 2006 and the company law that applies in the United Kingdom. A company of this type is a body corporate with separate legal personality. That means contractual and other legal responsibility for the operation of this website, and for the goods and services supplied through it, rests with the company itself rather than with its directors, employees or shareholders personally.

2.2 Registration particulars

Registered company name: starryel
Company Registration Number: 13033970
Place of registration: England and Wales
Register of companies: Companies House, United Kingdom
Registered office address: MediaCityUK B4, Orange Tower, Salford Quays, Salford, M50 2HE, United Kingdom
Principal business activity: rental and supply of camera, lighting, audio and studio production equipment, together with related technical and production services for film, television and media production

2.3 Tax and administrative identifiers

The operator is registered for Value Added Tax in the United Kingdom under VAT Number: 494089156. Where VAT is chargeable on a supply, it is charged in addition to the stated price unless the price is expressly described as inclusive of VAT. Invoices, quotations and hire confirmations issued by the operator carry the company's registration details and tax identifier so that business customers can reclaim input tax where they are entitled to do so. Nothing on this website constitutes a tax invoice.

2.4 Responsible representatives

The company's director, and the individual with responsibility for the day-to-day operation of this website and for the content published on it, is Jon Howarth. Where a name is given on this page it is given so that visitors can identify the responsible persons within the meaning of the applicable trading disclosure rules; it is not an invitation to make direct personal contact, and all correspondence should be addressed to the company using the contact route set out in section 3.

2.5 Licences, authorisations and regulated activity

The operator does not carry on any activity that requires authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority, does not provide regulated legal, medical, immigration or consumer credit services, and does not hold itself out as doing so. Any professional or trade membership the operator may hold is not a substitute for any statutory licence or authorisation, and no representation of regulatory approval should be inferred from the content of this site. If the legal status of the operator changes in a way that must be disclosed to visitors — for example a change of name, a change of registered number, or the commencement of a formal insolvency or winding-up process — this page will be amended accordingly.

3. Registered Office and Contact Details

Correspondence intended for the company, including formal notices, complaints and requests relating to personal data, should be sent to the registered office or to the contact points below:

Registered office address: MediaCityUK B4, Orange Tower, Salford Quays, Salford, M50 2HE, United Kingdom
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: +44 161 295 5000

The site also provides a Contacts page with an enquiry form for commercial questions, technical questions and general correspondence. Messages submitted through that form are used only for the purpose of answering the enquiry and for any follow-up that is reasonably necessary. The operator aims to respond to correspondence within a reasonable period during normal working hours, but no particular response time is guaranteed except where legislation requires one.

Please note that email is not a secure medium. Do not send sensitive personal information, card details, bank details or confidential commercial material by ordinary email. If you need to send confidential material, ask first for an alternative method and wait for confirmation before sending anything.

4. Purpose, Scope and Intended Audience of the Website

The purpose of this website is to act as a professional hub for people working in, or training for, live television production, and to present the operator's commercial services to those people and to the organisations that employ them. The site is aimed at a professional and semi-professional audience, including camera operators, sound engineers, lighting technicians, vision mixers, studio managers, producers, directors, technical directors and the production companies and broadcasters that engage them.

The site is intended for use by adults acting in a professional or business capacity. It is not directed at children, it is not designed as a consumer-facing entertainment service, and it is not intended for use in any jurisdiction where publishing it or making it available would breach local law. Visitors are responsible for satisfying themselves that their use of the site is lawful where they are located. Content about equipment, workflows, rigging, electrical work, acoustics and studio practice is descriptive and educational; it is not a substitute for site-specific risk assessment, manufacturer instructions, employer procedures or competent professional advice.

5. Access to the Website and Acceptable Use

5.1 General rules of access

Access to the public areas of the site is permitted free of charge on these terms. The operator may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the site, add or remove features, or restrict access to particular content or services, at any time and without notice. The operator does not guarantee that every part of the site will remain available, and some areas may be restricted to users who have entered into a separate agreement.

5.2 Permitted use

You may read, view and print material from the site for your own personal, professional and internal business reference, and you may quote short extracts in professional discussion or internal documentation provided the source is acknowledged and the quotation is fair and proportionate. You may not charge others for access to material taken from this site.

5.3 Prohibited conduct

When using the site you must not:

copy, scrape, harvest, republish or systematically extract substantial parts of the site or its content, including for the purpose of training, tuning or building machine learning or generative systems, without prior written permission;
use automated tools in a way that places an unreasonable load on the site's infrastructure or interferes with its normal operation;
attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the site, its servers, networks or connected systems, or probe, scan or test the security of the site without written authorisation;
submit false, misleading, defamatory, abusive, discriminatory or unlawful material through any form or message channel;
introduce viruses, trojans, worms, logic bombs, ransomware or any other malicious or harmful material;
use the site or its content to misrepresent your relationship with the operator, or to suggest endorsement, affiliation or certification that does not exist;
use the site in any way that breaches applicable law, including consumer protection, copyright, trade mark, privacy and computer misuse legislation.

Breach of these rules may result in the operator blocking access, cancelling services, retaining records for the purpose of legal proceedings, and reporting conduct to law enforcement or a regulator where appropriate.

6. Intellectual Property, Content Ownership and Trade Marks

Unless stated otherwise, all content on this site — including text, technical notes, diagrams, photographs, illustrations, layout, graphics, code, database structure and the selection and arrangement of material — is owned by or licensed to starryel and is protected by copyright, database and related rights under the law of the United Kingdom and under international conventions.

The company name, the trading names used by the operator, and any logos or brand features appearing on the site are trade marks or protected business identifiers of the operator or its licensors. No licence to use any trade mark, company name, product name or logo is granted by implication, estoppel or otherwise. Product names, manufacturer brands and equipment references that appear in editorial content remain the property of their respective owners and are used only for identification, comparison and descriptive purposes.

You may not reproduce, adapt, distribute, communicate to the public, rent, lend, sell, sublicense or commercially exploit any part of the site or its content without prior written permission, except for the limited permitted uses described in section 5. Any permitted copy must retain all copyright notices and acknowledgements. Requests for permission, for licensing of content, or for commercial reuse should be made using the contact route in section 3.

7. Accuracy, Availability and Limitation of Liability

7.1 Accuracy of content

The operator prepares content with reasonable care and keeps it under review, but the technical field moves quickly and equipment, firmware, standards and working practices change. The site is therefore provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. Nothing on the site is a warranty that a particular technique, configuration, device, setting or workflow will be suitable for your production, compliant with an applicable standard, or free from error.

7.2 Availability and interruptions

The operator aims to keep the site available but does not promise uninterrupted or error-free operation. Access may be interrupted by maintenance, updates, network problems, hosting failures, security events or circumstances outside the operator's reasonable control. The operator may also withdraw or change features at any time.

7.3 Proportionate limits of liability

Nothing in this notice limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for breach of the terms implied by sections 12 to 16 of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 or by the Consumer Rights Act 2015 where that Act applies, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded. Subject to that, and to the extent permitted by law, the operator is not liable for loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of anticipated savings, loss of business, loss of opportunity, loss of goodwill, or for indirect or consequential loss arising from use of, or inability to use, the free information published on this site. Where liability does arise in connection with free editorial content, it is limited to the extent permitted by law, and the operator's total liability in respect of paid goods and services supplied under a separate agreement is governed by that agreement.

You are responsible for the decisions you take on the basis of material on this site, including any decision about equipment selection, rigging, electrical supply, acoustic treatment, camera placement, crew safety or the suitability of a workflow for a live transmission. Professional judgement, appropriate insurance and a site-specific risk assessment remain your responsibility at all times.

8. External Links and Third-Party Content

The site may refer to third-party manufacturers, resellers, publications, standards bodies, training providers or other external resources, and may include links or references to websites that the operator does not control. Those references are provided for convenience and identification only. They are not an endorsement of the third party, its products, its services or its accuracy, and the operator has no control over the content, availability, security or privacy practices of external sites.

When you follow a link away from this site, you leave the operator's environment and become subject to the terms and privacy notices of the destination site. You should review those documents before providing any personal data or entering into any transaction there. The operator accepts no responsibility for loss or damage arising from your use of a third-party website, product or service, and any complaint about a third party must be directed to that third party. Where third-party content is embedded in or displayed on this site, it remains the responsibility of the provider of that content, and the operator's liability in respect of it is excluded to the fullest extent permitted by law.

9. Data Protection, Cookies and the Policies That Apply to You

The operator processes personal data in accordance with the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation, the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR). Where you submit information through the Contacts page form, by email or by telephone, the operator acts as a controller of that information and uses it only for the purposes for which it was provided, for related administrative purposes, and where necessary to comply with legal or accounting obligations.

Under the UK GDPR you have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, objection to processing, portability of data you provided, and the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that produces legal or similarly significant effects. You also have the right to withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on consent, and the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office. The operator retains enquiry correspondence only for as long as it is needed for the purpose for which it was collected, plus any period required by law.

This site uses a site-wide cookie banner. Cookies and similar technologies that are not strictly necessary for the operation of the site — including analytics, embedded media and any advertising or measurement tools — are set only where valid consent has been given, and consent can be withdrawn or changed at any time through the banner or through your browser settings. Strictly necessary cookies, which support security, load balancing and the functioning of the consent mechanism itself, may be set without consent because PECR permits them. You can block or delete cookies in your browser, but doing so may affect how parts of the site behave.

Further detail is set out in the operator's separate policies, which form part of the terms on which this site is made available and should be read alongside this page: the Privacy Policy (how personal data is collected, used, stored, shared and retained), the Cookie Policy (the categories of cookies used, their purposes and how consent is managed), the Terms and Conditions (the rules governing use of the site and any services supplied), and the Payment and Refund Policy (pricing, invoicing, cancellation, refunds and your statutory cancellation rights where they apply). Where a service is supplied under a separate hire agreement or written contract, the terms of that contract apply to that supply in addition to these documents.

10. Applicable Law, Jurisdiction and Consumer Rights

This website and this legal notice are governed by the law of England and Wales. Subject to the paragraph below, the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or in connection with the site or this notice, and the operator and the visitor submit to that jurisdiction.

Nothing in this notice removes or reduces any right that you have as a consumer under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 or any other mandatory consumer protection rule. If you are a consumer resident in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may bring proceedings in the courts of your own part of the United Kingdom. If you are a consumer resident in another country, you may be entitled to bring proceedings in the courts of your place of residence where mandatory local rules so provide.

Before starting formal proceedings, the operator asks that you raise the matter directly so that it can be considered and, where appropriate, resolved informally. Complaints about goods or services supplied under a separate contract should be sent to the contact points in section 3 and will be acknowledged and handled under the procedure set out in that contract. Complaints about the handling of personal data can also be made to the Information Commissioner's Office, which is the United Kingdom's supervisory authority for data protection.

11. Contact Route, Changes to This Notice and Last-Updated Date

If you have a question about this legal notice, want to exercise a data protection right, wish to request permission to reuse content, or need to notify the operator of a legal issue, please use the Contacts page form or write to the operator using the details in section 3. Please include enough information for the matter to be identified and answered, and state clearly whether you are writing as a consumer, as a business customer or on behalf of someone else.

The operator may amend this legal notice from time to time to reflect changes in the law, in the services offered, in the way the site is operated, or in the operator's own legal details. The current version is always the one published on this page, and the date of the most recent revision appears at the top of the page. Material changes will be reflected in that date. Continued use of the site after a change takes effect indicates acceptance of the revised notice, so you may wish to review this page periodically.

Last updated: 3 November 2026.

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