Published on the 20/06/2018 | Written by Pat Pilcher

Spark, and TVNZ, should be taking note of the Optus World Cup debacle…

What should have been the most significant marketing opportunity for Optus in 2018 turned into a nightmare last weekend as Optus found themselves flooded with complaints from subscribers around their streaming coverage of World Cup Soccer.

Optus secured World Cup rights for Australia, inking a deal with broadcaster SBS after outbidding Foxtel for English Premier League rights two years earlier.

Initially, only World Cup games were available free-to-air via SBS which was broadcasting the Australian games and finals. Football fans wanting to watch other matches have to pay an A$15 per month subscription fee to Optus Sports. Now paying fans are fuming in the wake of error messages and frozen video footage.

The streaming issues saw Optus CEO Allen Lew encamped at Optus’ production studio in Sydney until Sunday morning.

In statements to Australian media, Lew attributed streaming issues to significant increases in viewership, claiming that unprecedented demand was behind Optus’ problems. It is likely that making World Cup coverage available to subscription viewers instead of limiting streaming access to Optus customers played a big part in Optus’s streaming woes.

What is equally baffling is that Optus has experienced similar issues in the past. English Premier League streamed subscribers complained of glitches when Optus first launched the service in 2016, yet it appears that Optus has learned little from this.

Spark recently switched their Lightbox platform to Brightcove but have yet to announce which platform they will use for Rugby World Cup streaming.

The current World Cup streaming issues have attracted so much attention that Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull stepped into the fray after the situation was raised in the Australian parliament. Optus has since announced that SBS will air all World Cup games for the next two days with Turnbull saying the 48-hour SBS window exists because Lew is adamant Optus will have streaming issues resolved within the day.

Optus’ streaming issues have happened at a particularly awkward time for Australian broadcasting. Debate rages around the privatisation of Australian state-funded broadcaster ABC, so having Optus’ streaming issues raised during Parliamentary question time is akin to pouring petrol on an already raging bonfire.

Politics aside, Spark is likely to be watching Optus’ situation with growing levels of unease given their successful bid for the streaming rights to the 2019 Rugby World Cup.

Spark have until September 2019 to put any learnings from Optus’ situation into practice, ensuring a similar debacle doesn’t happen in New Zealand. The Kiwi telco recently switched their Lightbox platform to Brightcove but have yet to announce which platform they will use for Rugby World Cup streaming.

So, will Spark’s choice of platform work? In 2015, 2.5 million Kiwi viewers watched the All Blacks win the Rugby World Cup. Tablet and smartphone ownership has grown considerably since then. Can Spark’s infrastructure cope with significantly more viewers? Adding to an already complicated situation is the fact that broadband in New Zealand is made up of many different technologies, meaning there’s plenty of complexity.

Either way, the dollars paid are probably sizeable. In 2011, NZ media paid massive royalties to Ireland-based Rugby World Cup Limited for rights to broadcast the last World Cup. While exact figures never got revealed, Statistics NZ said that in 2011 royalties and license fees increased by NZ$81 million compared to monies exchanged for the rights to the previous World Cup. It is fair to assume that vast amounts of money are at stake.

Having spent a considerable sum of money to outbid Sky TV, Spark is expected to implement a combination of advertising revenues and subscription fees for access to streamed Rugby World Cup content to recoup their investment.

While the focus is very much on Spark and streamed content delivery, TVNZ should also be concerned. Avoiding an Optus-like disaster isn’t just a matter of technology, it’s also one of experience.

Live sports coverage is a notoriously tricky thing to get right. Just look at the recent grumbles around TVNZ’s shambolic coverage of the Commonwealth Games. Blunders such as Joelle King’s gold medal squash match being relegated to the TVNZ website while non-New Zealand events got live coverage, attracted flak from many irate viewers. TVNZ haven’t covered live rugby in any meaningful way for quite some time. It is a safe assumption that they’ll be learning as they go.