Live from the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup: Optus Mobilizes in Big Way to Serve Australian Fans

Live from the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup: Optus Mobilizes in Big Way to Serve Australian Fans By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Thursday, August 10, 2023 - 5:53 pm

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Optus Sport, the Australian OTT football-centric service, is the only place for Australian football fans to capture every FIFA Women's World Cup match (Channel 7 is broadcasting 15 matches) and the service, launched in 2016 when it acquired the rights to the English Premier League, is putting a lot of production resources and effort into making sure subscribers not only don't miss a second of match coverage but also get plenty of wraparound coverage.

Josh Hanson, Optus Sport, associate director, projects, creative, and content technology, recalls when Optus first landed the rights to EPL in 2015 there was no infrastructure at all to launch the service the following season: the team literally had to go out and buy laptop to create content with, it was a complete start up. That's not the case this month as around 200 people will be working for Optus on the event.

We have around 100 people across field operations, the studio crews, and our stadium operations as well as our social and digital teams who are amplifying the tournament across our channels he says. And then we have over 100 Optus staff working on the tournament here at our headquarters from different teams.

Optus coverage begins at 8 am with Daily Kick Off, covering all the football news from around the world and a preview of what lies ahead.

The Optus studio for Daily Kick Off has been extra-busy during the Women's World Cup. (l-to-r): Niav Owens, Tanya Oxtoby, Chloe Logarzo, Thomas Sorensen

We have more World Cup content than we can handle but we're also combining our other football rights into the show plus and reporting on the latest news from around the globe, says Hanson. That show runs for an hour each morning, and generally we will go to air about half-an-hour before the first match each day, although for some matches, we have started with hour pre match. And then we try to roll the coverage post match as long as we can.

All matches, apart from the Australian matches and the final, are hosted from the Optus facility in Macquarie Park, about 20 minutes north of Sydney and 15 minutes from the IBC where Optus also has a small presence. There are also five talent and production teams, comprised of talent, a camera operator, and a producer, travelling around Australia and New Zealand and being onsite for matches.

We also have a presentation platform in the stadiums where we will have four presenters and then we have sideline positions using LiveU, says Hanson. We also have a community team that's going to the fan festivals, community gatherings, pubs and clubs and just being amongst the fans and really capturing that energy. The field operations are extensive.

Helping improve those field operations has been Ethernet lines which HBS is providing at both the presentation platform and pitch side.

We like to go live on multiple platforms, says Hanson. If we've got a reporter who goes live into the broadcast, we might pop up five minutes after that and stream them onto TikTok or YouTube or Twitter. It works well for us, and we are really excited when FIFA and HBS told us we would have the ability to have the Ethernet drops at the stadiums because it allows us to tell more stories and that's what we want to do. We're looking forward to the Euros 24 where hopefully those facilities are also available.

The Optus Sport social team is in full swing, tapping into the FIFA Max server as well as the FIFA social media Interface. The FIFA Max allows the team to get access to more footage of team arrivals, departures, training, and other events that would otherwise be hard to cover.

We can send our crews to training and focus on having our talent do their part and tell the story on camera and then we have the actual B roll come in via FIFA Max, he explains. That has been really helpful for us.

FIFA Max has also allowed for much more content to be delivered via social media channels.

There is lots of content that comes in from FIFA and HBS that we can leverage, says Hanson. We basically have a model where we pull in as much content as we can, and we publish it out into our platform and let the customers decide what they want to watch. But the more we publish, the more they watch.

Content is being created 18 hours a day, every day, including rest days. That's a change from past tournaments when the team would take a break. But with social demands and the tournament being on home soil there is a ton of demand for content whether it is a rest day or not.

We've decided we're gonna push through and really make sure the social channels and the morning programming capitalizes on the energy and excitement of the tournament, says Hanson.

At the center of the content creation are a team of 25 Adobe Premier editors creating content for everything from social media, the studio programs, and more. If a goal happens the team can spring into action and publish it out to the social channel, that they are responsible for.

If a goal happens it's really frantic in here because someone will grab it and publish it to TikTok and then someone else will publish it to Twitter, adds Hanson. And then someone in craft editing will include edit it, ready for the studio coverage. But everybody is focused on the same thing at the same time, and they cross communicate. The coolest thing is the social guys can clip up something and pump into the studio and the guys who are working on studio support, can clip up something and publish it into the project for the social team. It's a small operation but it's very efficient.

Another key deliverable a

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2023/08/10/live-from-the-2023-fifa-womens-...
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