Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seeks World Cup assurances from Optus

Outrage over Optus Sport’s World Cup streaming issues has gone all the way to the top, with Malcolm Turnbull involving himself.

Optus’s World Cup streaming fiasco has prompted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to seek answers from the telco’s senior management.

“I have a call into Allen Lew at Optus — I hope to speak to him later on today — to seek his assurances that the failure in the streaming service has been rectified,” Mr Turnbull said in Canberra at a press conference on Monday.

I have spoken with the Optus CEO, Allen Lew. He assures me he is giving the World Cup streaming problems his personal attention and he believes it will be fixed this evening.

— Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) June 18, 2018

“I have spoken with the Optus CEO, Allen Lew. He assures me he is giving the World Cup streaming problems his personal attention and he believes it will be fixed this evening,” he clarified in a tweet sent out later on Monday afternoon.

The Optus Sports app has not worked for a number of users for three successive nights, with consumers unable to watch the match between Costa Rica and Serbia on Sunday night, because of disruption to the live stream.

The issues on Sunday night were in addition to the two separate problems that affected the use of the app on Friday and Saturday nights.

Fans on Friday were unable to watch the game due to the Optus Sport app crumpling under the pressure of a heavy load of customers logging on to stream the Egypt-Uruguay match.

Meanwhile, Saturday night’s buffering problem, which affected hundreds of customers, were ascribed to poor traffic management on a number of networks.

While the scope of the initial fault was limited to Apple users and non-Optus customers signing on to the app, Sunday night’s outage affected a much larger user base, including Optus customers.

There are significant question marks around why Optus’s purpose-built app has failed so comprehensively in withstanding traffic load and delivering the content stream.

Many users over the weekend were able to work around the failing app, by logging on to the SBS app or relying on the pay TV operator Fetch to see the games.

However, the workarounds meant that Optus customers had to cut into their data quotas to stream the games while non-Optus users of the Optus Sport app were paying $15 a month for an app that delivered poor service.

Optus CEO Allen Lew. Picture: Supplied

This 2018 World Cup marks the first time Australians have had to pay to see the full tournament, after Optus bought the exclusive rights from SBS in 2016.

SBS boss Michael Ebeid told radio station SEN that it was ready to step in and pick up more games from Optus if needed. SBS currently has the free-to-air TV rights to one game a night.

“I think if Optus continues to have problems, then we might have a conversation about how we can help them further in terms of putting some of those games on our channels,” Mr Ebeid told SEN on Monday

“We are able and willing to do that.”