Optus Sport’s FIFA World Cup woes continue, but promise they’ll do better

Sadly, Optus Sport’s broadcast woes with the FIFA World Cup 2018 continue, with many users complaining Sunday night that the match between Costa Rica and Serbia was virtually unwatchable. Again, we found this to be the case, opting instead to stream from a 3rd party website which – unsurprisingly – went off without a hitch.

On Sunday, Optus CEO Allen Lew was all apologies and promises, which – come Sunday night – amounted to nothing.

“I apologise unreservedly to all Australians,” Mr Lew told Fairfax. “We should have done better, we can do better and we will do better. “

According to the media release, Lew didn’t leave Optus’ production studio in Redfern, in inner Sydney until the early hours of Sunday morning. He said Optus did plan for an increase in viewership but claimed the “unprecedented demand” was even greater than it expected.

“Australians can be assured that this has my personal attention, and the entire network’s team’s attention, and we will solve it. We will solve this problem by the end of this evening,” he said.

This morning, Optus continues to assure us that it’s working on the problem, seemingly without acknowledging that last night the problems persisted, despite the CEO’s assurance that they would be resolved. An Optus spokesperson told Ausdroid this morning:

Regrettably Optus experienced technical issues during the Costa Rica v Serbia match of the FIFA World Cup on Sunday night which affected some customers.

Fortunately, we were able to improve the viewing experience for customers for the remaining two games overnight.

We apologise to those customers affected and reassure them our team is working around the clock to ensure that we are delivering an excellent broadcast service to all Optus Sport viewers regardless of the platform they are using to enjoy the tournament.

We know that the majority of customers are having a good broadcast experience during the World Cup.

Given the individual nature of some customer issues, we are working with customers directly to address their concerns and ensure that we deliver an excellent experience.

I’m not sure how much faith I have in Optus’ continued reassurance that they’ll do better, as the CEO’s own promises weren’t able to be kept. However, we’ll wait and see – one can only imagine the only way is up – it’s hard to imagine how Optus could do a worse job of delivering the FIFA World Cup to thousands of paying customers.