Broadcaster Foxtel has lost its longstanding exclusive broadcast rights to English Premier League football in Australia to Optus after the multimedia company agreed an exclusive three-year deal to show all 380 matches from next season.
Optus will take over broadcasting from August 2016 in a deal that includes digital rights for broadband and mobile. Foxtel, whose parent company is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, has been Australia’s sole broadcaster of the EPL since 1997.
Allen Lew, Optus’s chief executive officer, said the move was part of a strategy towards becoming a mobile-led multimedia company.
“With 930 million followers worldwide, the Premier League is one of the most sought after sports properties for content providers,” Lew said.
“Today’s announcement is a great win for Optus and will ensure that Aussie football fans can watch all the action from the world’s most popular football league.”
The Australian Financial Review reported that Optus had lodged a $50m-plus bid to secure the rights to show one of the world’s most valuable sporting commodities, substantially more than that offered by Foxtel and Qatar-based beIN Sports.
How Optus will bring the EPL to Australian fans remains unclear, with several distribution options open to the telecommunications giant. It may choose to offer coverage as an online-only subscription package, create an entirely new viewing platform or sell on the rights to an existing broadcaster.
“Our goal is to make this content available to as many fans as possible but we’re not going into to detail about distribution platforms at this stage,” said an Optus spokesperson. “We’ll have more to say about this in due course.”
The deal means Optus will now add football to its sporting portfolio, which already includes cricket after a sponsorship deal was struck earlier this month to be Cricket Australia’s mobile streaming partner.
The latest deal comes as a huge blow to Foxtel, who pride themselves on their sports coverage and have six dedicated sports channels.
Fox are yet to agree to another pay-TV deal with the NRL, having been surprised by free-to-air channel Channel Nine, who snapped up live rights to the sought-after Saturday night game.
It has, however, signed a deal to continue broadcasting the AFL.
