Optus hopes to change the landscape of sports broadcasting with launch of EPL channel

WHEN Optus secretly outbid Foxtel for rights to broadcast the English Premier League, fans had so many questions. They’ve finally been answered.

OPTUS is on the verge of releasing its online English Premier League channel which the company hopes will shake up the Australian market and revolutionise the way people consume sport.

Optus scooped up the broadcast rights to the EPL competition last November in a silent bidding war, dethroning Foxtel which had held the rights since the late 1990s.

The surprise move by the telco led to widespread speculation about how, and at what price, the company would provide access to the content.

Initially Optus said its customers would be charged $15 a month for access to the service but following strong consumer backlash the company recently announced customers who signed up before July 31 will get the first season free. Those with Optus broadband packages above $85 a month will also have free access to the Premier League.

For everyone else, the cheapest price point to get access to the content is a $30 per month mobile plan on a 12-month contract. Customers will then need to pay an extra $5 a month to get a Yes TV mini set-top box device to allow them to use the service on the big screen.

Non Optus customers who happen to have Apple TV can also get access to the app for $30 a month.

It’s certainly not cheap but with the launch of the app just a few weeks away, Optus is keen to draw the focus towards the comprehensive offerings the online service will provide.

“We’ve obviously invested in the live rights, 380 games a year, but we’ve also bought the whole package so there’s a bunch of content that’s never been seen here before that we’re going to put into a 24/7 channel that is all Premier League,” Optus head of TV and mobile content Paul Rybicki told news.com.au.

The 24-hour channel will include “hardcore analysis type shows”, preview shows, highlight shows and discussion shows.

Users can register four devices with the service.

All the games will appear on demand immediately after the live broadcast finishes and a nifty spoiler alert feature means the scores to previous games won’t be displayed unless the user chooses so.

The channel will have a live news bulletin twice a day, every day, as well as a live studio show with a focus on user interaction through social media.

“You can Skype in, you can tweet in, you can email in, you can SMS in, you can send your own user generated content as ask questions and engage with the studio,” Mr Rybicki said. “All of that content will also be available on demand.”

Football fans can also expect to see some familiar faces with the likes of Arsenal legend Ian Wright, former Irish footballer Andy Townsend and BBC personality Manish Bhasin appearing as presenters on the Optus Sports channel.

When talking to customers about what they want from the app, Optus said simplicity and ease of use for getting to live games was the top priority. As a result, Optus has produced a simple and clean looking app.

“Their feedback was we want the least amount of clicks to get live games. So we’ve done one click to live,” Mr Rybicki said.

There is a split screen option for the die hard fans who want to watch two games at once. And thinking back to the glorious end of the 2012 season in which the competition was decided in the dying minutes of two concurrent games, it’s easy to see when such a feature would come in handy.

When logging on, the app will also render depending on whether a user is watching on mobile or TV in order to optimise the stream.

“More and more people are consuming video over the internet and we’re optimising our network both mobile and fixed to optimise for that because we see the traffic,” Mr Rybicki said.

For those in remote Australia with poor internet connection, Optus has a satellite solution which allows access to the channel without chewing up broadband data.

More than half a million Australians watched a game in the first few rounds of last season.

The app will go live on July 4 and will have some archive content from the previous season as well as a number of preview shows for the upcoming season.

Optus has also bought the rights to ICC competition which is a pre-season competition featuring teams from major European leagues. Those games will appear live on the app late next month.

Customers can register up to four devices — phones, tablets, laptops etc. — but are only able to access one stream at a time. However users who have a Yes TV box can stream on TV as well as operating a separate stream on mobile or tablet.

The Premier League season doesn’t kick off until the second week of August but Optus has high hopes in terms of customer subscriptions.

“We started selling the service last week and we’ve had really strong interest,” Mr Rybicki said.

“We know last season that 135,000 people watched a live game, Leicester versus United, 94 per cent of those watched it live. There were over half a million fans that watched a game in the first few rounds of last season, and that was with the limitation of one in three households having Foxtel.”

It remains to be seen how the public reacts to the new content delivery method and if Optus will succeed in drawing customers away from their rivals, but in any case it marks a pretty dramatic shake up for sports broadcasting in the country.

“I think this is a big step in the market in terms of how people consume sport,” Mr Rybicki said. “I think for Australia this is the beginning.”