Foxtel on the ball for entertainment push

Foxtel is confident that next-generation technology will give it an advantage in the streaming battle against Netflix and Disney+.

Julian Ogrin, Kayo Sports CEO Picture: John Feder

Foxtel is gearing up for the launch of an entertainment-focused streaming product next year, and its top streaming executive is confident that next-generation technology will give it a crucial advantage against the likes of Netflix and Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+.

First flagged in a News Corp earnings call this month, the unnamed upcoming entertainment streaming product will leverage what Kayo Sports CEO Julian Ogrin describes as a world-class video subscription platform.

“The Streamotion platform has been built and designed for a multi-vertical approach,” Mr Ogrin told The Australian. “It’s been built from scratch, legacy free, meaning everything is architectured around a single view of the customer.

“With the entertainment service we’re launching next year, you will be able to sign up very simply if you’re already a Kayo customer, it will be absolutely frictionless.”

Mr Ogrin, who joined Kayo following a stint running challenger telco Amaysim, said Kayo’s tech capabilities would easily handle other types of content such as entertainment, given it had proved itself with live sports, which is laden with complexity.

Twelve months after launch, Kayo has reached 402,000 paying customers, and Mr Ogrin said the company also has far more registered users. Customers are watching seven sports and streaming an average of five hours and 20 minutes a week.

“We are doing 790 hours of live sport on a weekend, and 300 live games, and the logistics of that is far more complex than building a subscription video-on-demand library,” he said. “We’re excited to go into entertainment, and naturally we’re very confident about what we’ll be bringing to the market.”

This week marks the highly anticipated Australian entrance of Disney+, Disney’s entertainment-focused streaming service.

Mr Ogrin said Disney brought with it a phenomenal portfolio of content, but said he was confident Kayo’s entertainment offering would more than hold its own against Disney’s service, as well as Stan and Netflix.

“Customers will ultimately be driven by what it is they can watch and engage with, and each of the services will be looking for that content edge,” he said. “We think we have such a strong advantage due to our understanding of our customers.”

The executive and his team are this week at the world’s largest technology conference, Dreamforce in San Francisco, run by software giant Salesforce. Mr Ogrin said Salesforce was a key partner for Kayo, given it powered the artificial intelligence that kept the need for human support to a minimum.

Kayo on Wednesday released statistics showing 95 per cent of customers who need support get it through “self service”, having most of their issues addressed through Salesforce’s Einstein Bots, which handle cases through automation and escalate more complex ones to service agents.

“We worked closely with the Salesforce team to design and build an innovative customer service strategy; a strategy that was implemented in under 16 weeks from scoping to execution. Now it is helping power a world-leading OTT service,” Mr Ogrin said.

“Our developers are working day in, day out to optimise for each of the devices and make sure the quality is there. We have streaming latency of less than 10 seconds, and we’re finding that our competitors have a delay of up to 30 or 35 seconds.

“We’re doing that with 300 games, a delay of less than 10 seconds really is pretty amazing.”

Kayo Sports is owned by Foxtel, which is 65 per cent-owned by News Corp, publisher of The ­Australian.

David Swan travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.