After the debacle with Optus Sports, there probably won’t be any complaints from football fans about SBS providing coverage of the additional Group Stage matches!
I’m not sure if SBS will make any extra advertising revenue off the windfall of additional games but ratings wise, I’m sure the extra coverage will give SBS’ primetime/overnight ratings share a boost. Perhaps even record high shares for SBS VICELAND?
They used SBS2 for overflow in 2010 and 2014 and these aren’t in a great timeslot.
Surely SBS will not sell off Qatar 2022 and keep the rights for themselves. This has been a debacle.
Whichever game SBS choose as the match of the day. They still only stream one game per day, which is their preselected match of the day.
That’s really humiliating for Optus.
When the streaming debacle is even making news on commercial TV (hardly known for being the biggest supporters of soccer in Australia) news bulletins, you know Optus have screwed up their coverage badly!
Becasue the pay wall to use the Optus app has been removed a side effect is
That move would allow Australian sport streamers to also get the opening few weeks of the 2018-19 English Premier League season free through Optus.
Now anyone can download the Optus app and watch the exclusive (and non-exclusive) Optus World Cup content for free.
The potential exists for a flood of new users that will further tax their already overloaded system.
I suppose there is also a potential for some of these free users to continue to want the Optus app when the World Cup is finished.
The impression that I’ve got is that Optus’ web portal and app are the main ones afffected. Fetch TV appears unaffected by the congestion. Is that right?
Not really, anything soccer that puts it in a bad light is always reported by commercial networks
While it’s great that SBS will show the remaining group stage matches, don’t forget if they didn’t sell 39 games to Optus in return for just one EPL match a week (normally a Liverpool match), then this whole Optus World Cup streaming buffering debacle wouldn’t have happened in the first place, so SBS must take a small slice of the blame as well.
What happens with the rights situation now then? Will SBS have to pay more money or Optus reimbursed? Or because it was mutual, just Optus’ loss?
I suspect Optus will have to wear the loss.
Fair enough too. They promised a service and couldn’t deliver, so the only way they were able to fulfil the rights contract is if they aired the games via SBS.
Not necessarily…
When Abbott led the Coalition to victory in the 2013 federal election, he promised not to cut funding to the ABC and SBS. But, by the time the 2014 budget came around the following May, he had changed his mind and, for two consecutive years, SBS boss Michael Ebeid told Senate estimates hearings the broadcaster’s World Cup coverage could be at risk thanks to reduced funding.
Fair enough, forgot about the hopeless Abbott cutting funding to SBS, I suspect SBS will fight hard to make sure they have full rights to the 2022 World Cup.
Considering they have already secured the rights for it, SBS will again control what happens to them. Having said that, I doubt that they’ll sublicence the rights again after the backlash they received for entering into the Optus deal (let alone everything that has happened over the past week)
I still could see them selling it to Foxtel or another FTA network. Something which main way of distribution is traditional TV via DVB and not streaming.
I wouldn’t like to see the rights go primarily to a streaming service again, for any major sporting tournament - be it any kind of World Cup or say something like the Olympics. Free to air (and FOX) still needs to be main content providers
The infrastructure just isn’t there for it in Australia yet, and the lack of a consistent platform for TV viewing e.g. for Optus Sport, you need a Fetch Mini or Mighty to do that, but there’s no guarantee that any future IPTV based provider will be available on that.
And it needs to be a specific one too, the Optus variant, not the retail (which I have two of) or the iiNet one.
In Hong Kong, Now TV subscribers can stream World Cup matches on mobile devices with little problems, thanks to the city’s well established internet infrastructure. Australia is just catching up.
Though my point is more aimed at those who want to watch it on a big TV, and if it’s only available via streaming. I can’t really watch anything on those tiny mobile screens for long either. Things like the World Cup need the BIG screen experience.