Optus Television
|
|
Optus Television is the cable television division of Australian telecommunications company Optus. Its chief rival is Foxtel, although the two are closely linked in an oligarchical arangement.
Its immediate predecessor was Optus Vision, a joint venture between its parent company, Optus, and the large local media companies Publishing and Broadcasting Limited and Seven Network. The Optus Vision joint venture was originally founded to handle residential cable television and local telephony, while its parent concentrated on corporate, long distance, satellite, and interstate communications. Optus Vision used a unique hybrid cable to connect homes to its network, and would later add broadband cable internet access to its network.
Unlike most countries, Australian local governments did not create local cable monopolies. This meant that when cable TV became legal in the early 90's, anyone with enough money could lay a cable network anywhere. Optus and Telstra were the two main telecomunications companies in Australia at the time, and both spent billions on hybrid coax and optic fibre networks in the major capital cities. Optus' network reached small parts of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, while Telstra's covered exactly the same territory plus more of those cities and tiny parts of Adelaide, Perth and the Gold Coast.
While the Optus network had Optus Vision, the Telstra network had Foxtel, a 50/50 joint venture with News Corporation. These competed heavily in the metropolitian areas. Both groups affiliated with another pay TV company, Austar, in the lower profit rural areas. Austar was effectively given a monopoly in it's territory.
Optus Vision had nearly total coverage of the country's popular sports tied up (thorough partially Seven Network owned Sportsvision and ESPN), a movie package equal to Foxtel, and exclusive rights to popular channels like Disney Channel and MTV.
One asset Optus had that Foxtel didn't was satellites. One of these satellites broadcast Austar to most of it's customers as part of a 50/50 joint venture. In addition, Optus broadcast it's channels nationwide on the easy-to-access Ku band. The crazy thing was, only a handfull of select businesses could subscribe to it's satellite service (known as Optus VIP). No matter how much someone living over-the-road from an Optus cable wanted their service, they weren't allowed to get it. Even people with an Optus cable going right past their door but living in a multiple dwelling building wasn't allowed to get Optus Vision by any means.
Optus proved that content isn't always king. If people can't get access to your content, eventually your content will end up somewhere that they can.
Fron 1995 to 1997, the Super League War waged between the two consortiums over lucrative rugby league rights. At the end of the war, Packer changed sides, becoming a 25% owner of Foxtel. Optus Vision was sold to Optus, and renamed "Optus Television".
Seven bought Sportsvision, which became Optus and Austar exclusive C7 Sport and progressively lost sporting rights to Fox Sports. Foxtel granted Optus an "NRL Channel", screening all of Fox Sport and Fox8's NRL games.
The Optus VIP service was axed and Austar bought Optus' share of it's joint venture. Optus started broadcasting Foxtel via satelite.
In 2000, Seven and C7 Sport lost the AFL rights to a Nine and Foxtel based consortium. The only half valuable rights C7 now had was the Olympics and Five Nations Rugby. In 2002, Optus and Austar both stopped carrying C7 Sport, which then died. Optus soon replaced this with Fox Sports, although it was renamed "Optus Sports".
Around this time Optus let go of some of it's exclusive content contracts. MTV, Disney Channel and ESPN all became available on Foxtel as soon as they were able.
In 2003, Optus Television finally gave up competing with Foxtel, in favour of being purely a carriage company. Optus sold nearly all it's remaining content rights to Foxtel, and leased them the rest. Both networks, as well as Austar now almost exclusively carried something known as the Foxtel Platform. This was a collection of channels found on nearly every pay TV box in the country, and controlled by Foxtel. For a time it was even advertised as "Foxtel on Optus" and "Foxtel on Austar", but later the carriage providers' names re-emerged as sole descriptors.
The ACCC decided to force some window dressing on the deal so that it didn't look like they were allowing a monopoly. So a small number of highly unpopular channels were denied access to Foxtel by the ACCC, despite the obvious detriment to them. Some soon died, and by 2005 all the others had migrated to the Foxtel Platform anyway.
In April 2004 Optus Television became an un-exclusive 3rd Party Retailer of Foxtel's 'Foxtel Digital' Satellite Service (as are AAPT, Primus, Telstra and others). This meant it could now broadcast the Foxtel Platform, branded "Foxtel", to it's metropolitan customers via it's own satellite.
Optus' television business went from being backed by two of the three largest media groups in the country and having the best content and best distribution system to just being the best distribution system. However, after Telstra completes it's first ADSL2+ rollout in 2006, this mantle could well go to Telstra as well.