Live From FIFA Women's World Cup: Optus Mobilizes in Big Way To Serve Australian Fans The Australian OTT service is deploying 100 people in the field, 100 at headquarters 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, associate director, projects, creative, and content technology, Optus Sport, recalls that, when Optus 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 laptops to create content with. It was a complete startup. That's not the case this month: about 200 people will be working for Optus on the Women's World Cup.
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 from different teams working on the tournament here at our headquarters.
Optus coverage begins at 8 a.m. 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. At the desk: (from left) Niav Owens, Tanya Oxtoby, Chloe Logarzo, Thomas Sorensen
We have more World Cup content than we can handle, says Hanson, but we're also combining our other football rights into the show, plus reporting on the latest news from around the globe. 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. For some matches, we have started with an hour pre-match, and we try to roll the coverage post-match as long as we can.
All matches, apart from the Australia National Team 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 has a small presence. In addition, five talent and production teams - each comprising talent, a camera operator, and a producer - are traveling 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 we have sideline positions using LiveU, says Hanson. We also have a community team going to the fan festivals, community gatherings, pubs, and clubs and just being amongst the fans and capturing that energy. The field operations are extensive.
Helping improve those field operations has been Ethernet lines, which HBS is providing both at the presentation platform and pitchside.
We like to go live on multiple platforms, notes 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. We were 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 offers the team access to footage of team arrivals, departures, training, and other events that can 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 we have the actual B-roll come in via FIFA Max, Hanson explains. That has been really helpful for us.
FIFA Max has also allowed for a lot of content to be delivered via social-media channels.
Lots of content 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 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.
Ways Hanson, We've decided we're gonna push through and make sure the social channels and the morning programming capitalize on the energy and excitement of the tournament.
At the center of the content creation is a team of 25 Adobe Premier editors creating content for social media, the studio programs, and more. If a goal is scored, the team can spring into action and publish it out to the social channel that they are responsible for.
If a goal happens, Hanson notes, it's frantic in here because someone will grab it and publish it to TikTok and then someone else will publish it to Twitter. And someone in craft editing will edit it 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 it 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
