Optus Sport says it has fixed issues with streaming service and will not repeat mistakes

OPTUS is hoping true football fans have a short memory and can forgive and forget as it vows not to make the same mistakes again.

OPTUS has vowed not to repeat its mistakes and insisted customers would be able to stream the remaining World Cup matches without any dramas.

The under-fire telco told news.com.au the problem with its streaming service affected less than a quarter of those watching the World Cup games online and that the complaints had almost ceased.

News.com.au was invited to the Optus Sport broadcast studio in Sydney last night to watch the highly anticipated Australia-versus-Peru match.

Optus head of TV and content Corin Dimopolous used the opportunity to stress that the problem had almost been fixed.

“It’s frustrating for us because it’s such a small thing and it just gets in the way of the work we are doing,” Mr Dimopolous said. “But we are not going to make the same mistake again.”

Optus lured the exclusive rights away from SBS in an $8 million deal that put games behind a paywall in Australia for the first time. It was then forced to give up its exclusive broadcast deal last week and hand cash back to customers.

Optus chief executive Allen Lew announced the embarrassing backdown via a phone conference with reporters last Wednesday following a weekend of outrage from fans unable to watch games due to streaming problems.

That’s not a football pitch.

Football fans were furious at Optus and it didn’t take long for venting on social media to reach hysterical heights.

A frustrated member of staff working at the telco’s broadcast studio compared the shambles to the “sinking of the Titanic”.

“It was that bad,” he said.

He said production staff felt as if they were doing a good job, but this was tantamount to rearranging the deckchairs on the sinking ship.

He told news.com.au there were three agonising days when staff were left wondering what was going on and what would happen, while outrage skyrocketed.

Even Karl Stefanovic joined the chorus of outrage, slamming Optus on the Today show.

“It’s the biggest show in town. Instead of watching the World Cup, we are watching ‘playback error’ on our phones,” Stefanovic said.

“Optus is hopeless. If you can’t deliver the product you’re selling, you go out of business. The only problem is no one else can sell it, they don’t have the rights, Optus has the rights.”

But the telco staffer said “sensationalist” media outlets had made the streaming issues “seem like the end of the world”.

He said he believed true football fans had forgiven Optus and forgotten about the streaming issues because of the quality of its coverage.

The Optus Sport broadcast team of Mel McLaughlin, Sydney FC’s Alex Wilkinson, and Socceroos greats John Aloisi and Mark Schwarzer at the broadcast facilities in Sydney. Picture: Optus Sport/Twitter

Socceroos legend Mark Schwarzer was also optimistic about Optus’s streaming future, telling news.com.au the debacle may prove beneficial in the long-run as the telco removed the $15 paywall to win back World Cup fans’ favour.

“People can now look at what we’re doing and what SBS are doing without having to pay and they can make a choice about what kind of coverage they want based on that,” he said.

Schwarzer joked that he had not been personally affected by the streaming issues and said the team in the broadcast studio had been focused on delivering quality content.

“It was out of our hands in the studio,” he added.

This sentiment was echoed by production staff for the World Cup coverage at the Sydney hub, which is manned 24/7 by more than 100 staff.

One staff member in the control room told news.com.au the problems had stemmed from Optus’s operations at Macquarie Park in Sydney’s northwest, while the production side of the network’s coverage had been close to seamless.

You would imagine an abundance of expletives, yelling and cups of coffee being flung across the room, in the midst of the chaos.

However, Mr Dimopolous said the atmosphere, in the TV studio at least, was remarkably “calm”.

Another sleep-deprived telco worker said the streaming system used to broadcast the wall-to-wall coverage would “never be perfect”, but believed Optus had shown there was an appetite for in-depth sports coverage in Australia.

The Optus app and sport streaming services will remain free and open to everyone in Australia for the remainder of the World Cup and through to August 31.

The telco said Australians who had already paid for the service would receive full refunds. Football fans will also get the opening few weeks of the 2018-19 English Premier League season free through Optus because of the fallout from the streaming issues.

Mr Dimopolous said he hoped Aussie sports fans could look past the whole saga and give Optus a go.

“We hope that people will give us a go because it’s free, so people can compare us to SBS and decide for themselves which coverage they prefer,” he said. “At the end of the day, people can vote with their feet and if they don’t like it they can leave it.”