English Premier League deal makes Optus a broadcasting player says CEO Allen Lew
Media player: Allen Lew
Optus CEO Allen Lew has not ruled out on-selling part of the English Premier League football rights to Fox Sports, but said the move was central to the telco’s transformation to becoming a content platform.
Optus swooped on the exclusive broadcast, broadband and mobile EPL rights, wrong-footing broadcast incumbent Fox Sports in securing the three year deal believed to be valued in excess of $100m, with reports suggesting as much as $45m per season.
Lew told Mumbrella the move into broadcasting and securing exclusive rights for a major global sport was a first for an Australian telco.
“No telco has ever talked about content from the perspective of broadcasting rights that are exclusive and linking it directly to that particular telco, so in that sense we are game-changing,” said Lew.
“For all these live games on broadband and digital and mobile we have a very important asset we can use for the next three years from August 2016.”
Whilst Telstra has been heavily involved in pushing out AFL and NRL footage on mobile devices through apps it has not made a play for main broadcast rights due to its half ownership of Foxtel.
He said the commoditisation of the telco industry meant Optus was now staking a claim as a content platform and the EPL announcement was its strongest demonstration of that.
“This gives us the opportunity to come out as really differentiated that nobody can follow,” he added.
However, Lew was not willing to reveal how Optus would use the broadcast rights, saying it had plenty of time before the EPL deal came into place to develop its offering to consumers across its Fetch TV, Optus TV, broadband and mobile.
“The world of broadcast is changing quite significantly and especially in a country like Australia where there is a high penetration of broadband,” he said.
“Broadband is going out to almost every single home. If you look at the landscape there are a multitude of ways we can get this valuable content to the big screen that people have in their homes, through their PCs, through their laptops, through their tablets and through their mobiles and we have looked at multiple options and developed an internal plan that allows us to optimise these strengths that we have.”
One possibility which has been floated is for a dedicated Optus sports channel on the Fetch TV platform. The company recently did a deal with Cricket Australia which would allow it to broadcast international cricket highlights as soon as a day’s play or match has finished on a platform like Fetch. It also now has the rights to CA’s archive.
Equally the company could create an app, similar to the NBA’s, which would allow people to pay a one-off fee for a season’s worth of access.
Lew said crucial to the decision by Optus to bid for the EPL was looking at the size and loyalty of the following in Australia.
“We have done a lot of work on the transactional front to make sure we can justify this financially, but more importantly as well there is also a huge strategic element.”
Lew declined to rule out on-selling rights to Fox Sports or another party, with free-to-air public broadcaster SBS among the likely candidates.
“I think we are looking at a lot of different options and at this stage. I don’t want to publicly announce what we are doing because there are multiple discussions which are ongoing at this time. We will make it convenient and make it easy for Australians to get access to this content,” he added.
He said Optus continued to look at other content, including the need to develop other exclusive Optus content. When asked about the possibility of bidding for rights to NRL games, Lew again declined to comment.
“If you look at it narrowly we are competing against telcos, but if you look at it broadly we are competing against all companies that are going for customer attention. At the end of the day whoever wins is the brand that customers feel is delivering the best multimedia proposition to them.”
Simon Canning
RIP Foxtel
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My take….
Optus could do a number of things now….
1. Start their own Optus EPL channel from scratch and maybe it back as an ‘access seeker’ to Foxtel as well as have it as a channel on Fetch TV, Foxtel who would then have subscribers ‘add it on’ to their package, that would keep the masses relatively happy and ensure broadcast quality production, TX and keep the existing quality of signal.
2. Go completely online, probably using NBN Multicast technology to get a HD or even 4K signal as a point of differentiation to their own broadband subs and offer the channel as a PPV or subscription service to other punters.
3. A hybrid of both. They have the ability to make money from being a Foxtel access seeker and on Fetch but also a big point of differentiation for their own broadband service and a standalone product for people who haven’t subscribed the Foxtel but would happy pay for a single EPL service. Hybrid would seem to be the way to maximise the reach
Either way, they now need to build a whole production environment, workflow and studio / guests / experts to use the rights a la BT Sport in UK…..Plus, now remember all the pubs and clubs that pay through the nose for ‘Foxtel Business’ to give them the rights to show all the games late at night and how much money that draws in. That business too is all now all looking different indeed.
Question is, will they (Singtel) risk a slam down by using at as their own personal subscriber battering ram or will they pass a nod to the hundreds of thousands of subs and thousands of clubs/pubs who get the EPL through foxtel. I think they only need to look towards social media today as the potential answer to that.
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Has anyone thought to ask Allen Lew if he has ever watched a Premier League match?
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