Optus under fire after World Cup streaming leaves fans frustrated

Optus Sport, which has the rights to broadcast every match of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, was at the centre of a social media storm after its live streaming service encountered problems on Friday night, leaving football fans fuming.

The telco, which purchased the rights to show all 64 games at the tournament in Russia live and on demand, had promised that “Aussie viewers will be able to experience every emotion of the tournament”. But after the second day of action, the overriding emotion viewers were experiencing was anger.

During the Group A game between Egypt and Uruguay, users complained of the streaming service dropping out and constantly buffering, making viewing difficult and leaving fans frustrated.

Robbie Slater, the former player and Fox Sports pundit, labelled the poor service an “absolute disgrace”, while the Matildas player Sam Kerr said she was “furious” for all Australians who were unable to watch the game.

Complaints poured in to the Optus Sport Twitter account late on Friday night before a short statement was made on its Facebook page, apologising for the technical difficulties and directing customers to its website to continue watching. That website appeared to be available free of charge.

An Optus spokesperson later told Guardian Australia: “Some Optus Sport customers experienced a disruption to their 2018 Fifa World Cup viewing experience on Friday night. This was due to an extremely high number of viewers logging into our platforms just before kick-off causing some systems to overload.

“While most customers on most platforms were unaffected, we apologise unreservedly to those customers who were, and are continuing to investigate the cause of these systems issues.”

Optus also holds rights to the Premier League, having successfully outbid previous rights holder Fox Sports. The opening weekend of its coverage of the 2016-17 season suffered similar technical glitches – and outrage.

Before the World Cup began, Optus Sport executive producer and presenter Richard Bayliss told Guardian Australia that “the technology is now is light years ahead of where it was a year or two ago”.

“And there are scores of people whose job it is to make sure everything goes off without a hitch and having seen how hard they’ve been working in the lead-up to the World Cup I don’t think people should be concerned at all,” he added.

Free-to-air broadcaster SBS has rights to show 25 of the 64 games, including all three of the Socceroos’ group stage matches, but fans who want complete coverage have to go through Optus – for a price. At the beginning of May, Optus announced it was launching a subscription service for non-Optus customers for a monthly fee of $15.

The later game between Iran and Morocco appeared to stream without problems.