The opening round of Optus’ English Premier League broadcast was mired in controversy, a path the telco has trodden ever since it usurped Fox Sports to the broadcasting rights last year.
Fans complained about outages, poor quality streams and delays compared to the simulcast on SBS. AdNews investigated the cause of the problems to determine whether it was right to blame either Optus or Fetch TV.
In one game (Manchester United vs Bournemouth) there was one outage that came from the source of the transmission, the host broadcaster that transmits the English Premier League across the world. This led to fans creating an #OptusOut hashtag on Twitter.
The outage, which Optus claims lasted only 30 seconds, but had the service down for several minutes in some households (including my own) affected all of Asia and could not be prevented – an unfortunate coincidence in the opening round of the competition. Optus told the Australian Financial Review that only 3% of its customers had reported problems, but in reality everyone was affected.
The second major concern was a delay in the transmission of about 50 seconds, which would be picked up by fans comparing the simulcast between the Optus Sport app and SBS terestial simulcast on Saturday.
This delay is caused by technology limitations of streaming data between devices via an ISP, and would occur if you watched cricket, baseball, NBA or any other live sport in this way.
It’s to do with the way data is transmitted, via IP packets in 10 second bursts that need to be encoded. To ensure a smooth transmission without bumpy buffering (the dreaded ring of death), there is a 30-50 second delay ahead of real time.
TV broadcasts, such as the SBS simulcast of Leicester City vs Hull game on Saturday evening AEST, do not have this problem.
Other problems that may have been experienced are due to the myriad technologies, bandwidths, devices, internet browser interfaces and other variables, which invariably will create some teething issues and fan frustration.
To blame Optus for all of the technical glitches, particularly when some are out of its hands, is harsh, but it follows a pattern of frustration borne as much out of poor communication leading into the season and forcing fans to convert sometimes costly broadband and mobile phone packages across to the telco.
While the technology fallout is harsh, Optus can certainly do more on the communication front by engaging with fans and the media in a constructive manner when these issues take place, rather than boilerplate statements that will leave people to draw their own conclusions.
If there is one lesson to be taken away from all of these EPL dramas, it’s the power and importance of good PR and creating goodwill with the customer base you hope to win over.
In terms of advertising, when AdNews spoke to Optus recently, the telco said plans were afoot to introduce key partners to the coverage, and boy does it need it.
Having Idris Elba on repeat plugging Optus Premier League coverage as you are watching Optus Premier League coverage tires pretty quickly, and having other Optus Olympic advertising looks very much like plugging a hole. It may even be better for the user journey if Optus plugged programs on some of its other Yes TV channels, a cross-promotion opportunity that would not be unwelcome among a litany of 'Yes' ads.
The quality of the matchday coverage is solid, certainly not Sky Sports UK standard in terms of pundits, matchday insight, strategy and analysis. But to expect that is unrealistic and they have enlisted some top level and familiar presenters/pundits that will hopefully lift this as the season progresses. What fans probably care more about is that it works and if there are problems they are given a quick and understandable response.
Hopefully, over time Optus will build out their offering and inject more of a local flavour to connect Australian fans with the competition they love.