Not exactly that way it was way more complicated than that, it had to do with several things;
1: Optus Vision funding the ARL Competition in 1995 through 1997 to the tune of $240 million
2: Kerry Packer^ withdrawing support for Optus Vision company Sports Vision (which provided Sports Australia) however Optus Vision retained the pay TV rights as they paid for them till the end of 2002 as part of the funding ARL deal, that explains why there was a pay TV channel called NRL on OPTUS in 2001 (the 1st dedicated pay TV channel of NRL) and why Optus was able to get Fox Sports re-branded as Optus Sports 1 & 2 in 2002 though I believe the end of 2003 for the Optus TV analogue & Digital Cable iTV service.
3: Kerry Stokes control of then Seven Network also took Optus Vision & Sports Vision to court over the AFL pay TV rights, he was complaining that the previous management of Seven (before he took controlling share of Seven) , that ended Sports AFL (again the 1st dedicated pay TV channel of AFL), Optus Vision did a deal with Seven which allowed Sports Australia to do AFL games live into Sydney & Brisbane.
4: Optus Communications owners wanted to go public (ASX) and beat Telstra to that game in late 1998, with all that was going on at the time the company made the decision to bring Optus Vision fully into Optus (at the time Optus only owned I think 45%, Packer through PBL owned 20%, Stokes through Seven owned 15%, ESPN owned 5% and CCV (which went on to become US West) owned the rest.
In short Sports Vision was liquidated around early 1998, OPTUS (now in control of Optus Vision outright) did new deals with ESPN (which was allowed to make a deal with eventually Austar) for provision of service and also & also other sports including with Seven for AFL, they also re-did the NSL deal and many other sports & drop the 1998 Commonwealth Games broadcasting, around mid 1998 Optus & Seven made a deal for Seven to provide 2 non-exclusive sports channels to Optus TV, they would end up being C7 Sport 12 (Gold) & C7 Sport 13 (Blue) they were not exclusive to Optus TV and would end up on Austar, C7 launched March 1 1999.
Chris Anderson (C&W Optus CEO) around mid 1999 started the road of âConsolidationâ by restructuring the exclusive output deals with Walt Disney (Disney & ESPN), Movie Network & MTV Networks + several other deals that had plagued Optus Vision, most of those channel would end up on AUSTAR and eventually Foxtel from 2002 when the original CSA (content sharing agreement) between both companies and again in 2005 with the DSCA which is probably the reason why Optus wonât be bothered to trying to get this in-carnation of âOptus Sportâ onto Foxtel platform any time soon*
*More on that later.
^ Packer in either late 1996 or early 1997 via PBL have given a big loan to Australis-Media which allowed them to keep Galaxy going but should it fail also gave Packer the right to buy the company, if you remember there was at 1st a Foxtel / Australia Media media merger, that was rejected by ACCC and then there was a Australis-Media / Optus Vision merger which was approved by ACCC then rejected on appeal, in the end Galaxy went belly up, Packer via PBL got control of the satellite licence and then made a deal with Foxtel which is why Packer got out of Optus Vision (mentioned above).
As for Optus TV, the end in terms of Optus actually still operating the analogue system (Digital iTV ended March 2003) was March 2004, which is when Foxtel moved into the North Ryde facility which used to be the Optus iTV facility, Optus TV featuring Foxtel Digital started in November 2005 some 18 months after Foxtel Digital (cable since satellite was digital since the Galaxy era in 1995) started, officially Optus TV analogue was shut down June 30 2007 however not all exchanges switched off the FTA analogue signal, in short the FTA channels were still being pumped to the âjerrolds hot boxesâ till about early 2008.
I have recently found a box of tapes from the 1997 to 2002 era, all I have to do is now find where my old VCR is and the old analogue capture card and re-learn how to use Descaler program to digitize / edit and then upload somewhere.
Apologies for going into deep history.
