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English Premier League returns to Optus Sport

Manchester City take on Arsenal and Aston Villa play Sheffield United.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig9v_3KUrdk

English Premier League returns to Optus Sport from Thursday when Manchester City take on Arsenal and Aston Villa play Sheffield United.

The Premier League was suspended on 13 March due to the COVID-19 pandemic and will return with new kick-off times and matches played behind closed doors.

“The Premier League’s return is a huge moment for live sport and we’re thrilled to reconnect our passionate Optus Sport customers to what they love,” Optus’ Head of TV and Content, Corin Dimopoulos, said.

“We have re-built our app from the ground-up to give football fans the best possible experience when streaming live or on-demand. The new app design is bursting with more content, archives and competitions, two round-the-clock football channels, personalised content feeds and a new ‘Match Centre’, which combines all the coverage and stats in one place.

“Optus Sport is the exclusive Australian home of the world’s most watched football league and we can’t wait to bring every game live and on-demand to our customers from 18 June.”

Highlights include:

Optus Sport will show all 92 remaining live games when the 2019/20 season provisionally restarts.
Viewers have the option to experience games with virtual crowd noise to replicate the unique, vibrant atmosphere of each stadium, meaning grounds such as Anfield will sound like Anfield.

Optus Sport has launched a new mobile app with innovative new features and an improved layout to engage fans and provide an even more immersive experience.

Optus Sport recently became the first Australian broadcaster to resume live major football after landing Australian rights to K League, which started streaming on May 8.

5 Responses

  1. Even Match of Day with extended highlights of the best game and a longer wrap of the others would be better than just showing the goals on The World Game. The ABC and then SBS used to show that. Optus wants a monopoly on premium European football. The major clubs were worried it would narrow the audience and reduce merchandise, but seem to be happy enough with the increased revenue now Optus started selling passes to non-Optus subscribers. They announced they were going after some of BEin’s games when their contracts expire before the pandemic.

    1. @ Roger – sport costs a *hit load of money.
      We can’t live in the cocoon of FTA expecting to have sporting rights to everything for you to watch “free”
      Every other country has pay tv paying for sporting rights in some form – Australians expect to be able to watch sport for free and cry because they don’t want to pony up a month fee…….
      if you go to the game – is that also free?

      1. European Soccer was cheap, because it was foreign. SBS was able to buy up a lot of it, and keep one PL game a round when they did a deal with Optus over the World Cup. That’s hardly everything for free. In the UK Match Of The Day has been on FTA since 1964, as the FA and PL realise that it is beneficial in maintaining soccer’s place as the number 1 sport and creating future generations of fans. Since Optus stopped forcing people to take out phone plans to get access it’s more reasonable and Optus Sports had 825k subscribers before the Covid shutdown.

        1. Good points.
          Optus do need to decide how their sports channel is going to develop for the future.
          Is Optus going to compete more with Foxtel for future sports broadcast rights, especially if Foxtel restructure their Pay TV / SVOD services to save money.
          Optus’ former C7 Sport in partnership with channel 7 didn’t end all that well, but Optus was using its then new cable service to expend its phone/ internet network and it succeeded.

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