Given it spent a frankly ludicrous $63 million a year for the coverage, it is understandable that it wants to try and recoup it or make good use of it, but this is an incredibly ham-fisted way of doing it.

No flexibility

Optus hasn't put in any provisions for people who would happily pay them to watch its EPL coverage, without also paying it for another, entirely unrelated products.

You're either with it for an ongoing mobile contract, or you have to have your home broadband with it. Effectively the most blunt of customer acquisition tools ... "we can't lure you across by quality of service, price or customer service, so we have kidnapped a loved one ... if you want to see them again cough up."

The social media barometer shows that nobody (except for existing Optus broadband customers) are happy.


Regardless of whether you can get Optus broadband at your home (many can't), regardless of how much it will cost customers to switch to Optus from existing suppliers (a lot), regardless of the reality that it is easy to source EPL content by unofficial means online (head to Google), the telco has effectively decided to put a gun to potential customers' heads.

Now, as I was told by an Optus spokesperson when I queried the wisdom and fairness of its decision, this is pretty much the same playbook used by Foxtel to get you to subscribe.

But it isn't actually the same thing at all.

With a TV service you decide to subscribe or you don't ... you don't subscribe based on the proviso that you have to cancel all these other contracts that you have already signed up for other unrelated services.

Ridiculously confusing and expensive

In addition the prices and offers available are far from being clear to the average punter (including journalists who are theoretically fairly expert in this area.)

As many football fans will have done I logged into the Optus website to try and figure out how the hell I was going to watch my favourite sport without unwanted upheaval and massive expense.

I am not an Optus customer for my home broadband (it only has roughly 20 per cent of the Australian market,) and I would have thrown my money at the company, if it had offered a season pass subscription.


Without changing home broadband supplier the only option is to sign up to a postpaid Optus mobile phone account (minimum $40 per month) and pay an additional $15 a month for the EPL coverage.

That's $55 per month, or $5 more than a Foxtel subscription for the basic package plus all of its sports channels. Hardly an option worth considering, let alone celebrating.

Not the real price

Therefore the only option seemed to be to try and escape from my existing home broadband bundle with another supplier to sign up for its "My entertainment bundle," which is listed as being $90 a month (if you also have a postpaid Optus mobile) or $110 with the Fetch TV box included.

But again I'm not in luck.

What Optus does not tell customers in its initial marketing (it is of course buried deeper in the documents,) is that the listed prices are only relevant if you happen to live in an area where Optus owns all its own equipment. Randomly I don't.

Where I live it resells its broadband services off Telstra's equipment, because it hasn't built its own. It therefore costs Optus a bit more, so it passes that on to its customers to pay.

That's right, you pay more if you happen to live somewhere that Optus hasn't bothered to build its own infrastructure ... it punishes you with higher costs.


More expensive

In the case of the "My entertainment bundle" that means an additional "start-up fee" of $125, and Fetch TV being an additional $15 per month on top.

I asked the Optus spokesperson what percentage of Australian broadband customers would be expected to pay over the advertised price due to this, and staggeringly it is 50 per cent.

Optus says it simply can't afford to cover its own costs in order to make its prices the same for everyone.

"Resale DSL costs more for Optus to deliver and it would be uneconomical for us to absorb the wholesale costs. However we do not pass the full Telstra wholesale cost onto our customers," the spokesperson said.

Quite frankly this is hugely disappointing. Like many EPL fans I was hoping Optus would pleasantly surprise us with a great step into a new era of sports broadcasting, but if this is the future of sports, then viewers are going to get the bum deal.

Rather than offering a new streaming over-the-top option, a sporting Netflix style option, it is using EPL as a weapon to force people into unwieldy and inflexible bundles.

Optus may well succeed in hooking plenty of new broadband customers, but for many it will be a shotgun wedding, and they will deeply resent their new spouse.

This is even before we get to see if the broadband infrastructure can handle the challenge of live streaming, without ruining matches with buffering.

Optus could well have a PR disaster on its hands.