Good article about Optus from the fin review
http://www.afr.com/business/media-a...ith-chief-executive-allen-lew-20161111-gsn6ni
For Optus chief executive Allen Lew, the English Premier League is just the beginning.
Sitting inside Optus Sport headquarters at the telecommunications company's offices in Macquarie Park, Sydney, surrounded by television screens bringing in live feeds of football, cricket and data across its distribution channels, the Arsenal fan outlines his vision.
"There is a saying 'the future of video is mobile' and I believe more than that, the future of mobile is video. That's where we have made a big bet. It is not the only bet we will make, next year we will be talking about other things we'll be doing," Mr Lew told The Australian Financial Review.
"Right now, we are very unidimensional, we're just focusing on soccer fans … this is the start for us. It was a sizeable investment, we wanted to prove to Australians that we can do it, we've now proved it, we've done cricket, next year we'll be going beyond that."
Mr Lew said Optus is likely to stick with niche content.
The investment was a big one; Optus swooped on broadcast rights to the EPL last year, agreeing to pay $189 million over three years, or around $63 million per year, understood to be more than double the $20 million Fox Sports was paying.
"When we look at the number of customers that we have got and people who are engaged with Premier League, it's way above our business case, or what we thought we would get to justify paying for the Premier League," Mr Lew said.
Investing in a signal
In the quarter, Optus added 107,000 of its own branded mobile customers, a record three-month amount for the telco. It added 91,000 consumer and enterprise business postpaid subscribers. Overall, it added 84,000 to its total mobile base, after churn in prepaid. Optus did, however, take a significant hit to profit in the quarter, partially related to the costs of launching Optus Sport.
Mr Lew said 6 million hours of EPL have been watched since the season began, each week more there are more than 1 million plays and there was an even spread across mobile, tablet and PC viewing versus big screen viewing – although longer viewing times where generally on bigger screens.
Optus has not been without critics in its approach to EPL and users have not been shy about sharing their problems on Twitter using the hashtag #OptusOut.
Mr Lew said Optus has put a lot of time into making sure the signal can be taken from ground in the United Kingdom, to Optus HQ and then out across a range of devices.
"We've managed to do that today, it wasn't an easy feat. We digitised the video signal to between 2 megabits per second and 5 megabits per second, depending on which type of carriage the network the signal is going through," he said.
"Depending on the device, we also use different types of encoding. Whether it's the modern day HEVC coding that you see on the Fetch Gen 3, or it's the older type of technologies."
Inside Optus Sport HQ, staff can see how feeds are working across devices, how many people are watching as well as the average time taken to fix a user's problem all live over a match day.
"When people have better and better internet, of which NBN is a big part of that on the fixed line, I think that will certainly allow our strategy to be executed even better than what it is today," Mr Lew said.
"Hopefully those people who are in areas that don't have NBN are able to get a reasonable signal, it may not be HD, but at least it's reasonably good. Obviously, with faster and faster broadband and the roll out of NBN it makes it better for us, so we can start to encode at higher rates and people can get a much better signal and we can talk about even going into 4K."
