Goal posts are moving for telecommunications in Australia.
Optus want to extend their offering starting with the living room. This lead to the controversial move of purchasing the EPL rights from Foxtel.
The goal of the Optus Sport project was to create consistent cross platform experience that honours "the game" and pleased its strongest fans however they watched.
Research showed that fans of the game often consumed EPL content across several platforms often simultaneously.
This meant creating a suite of apps that leveraged each platform's strengths in a way that best served they way EPL fans watch the game
Big games, means big screen.
Due to the time difference, watching live often meant crashing in the lounge room of the one mate who had Foxtel!
This underscored the importance of having Live games prominent on smart TVs and streaming devices first such as Apple TV, Google Chromecast and Fetch TV.
Each TV platform had its own advantages we leveraged to provide fans with a richer experience. For example, on Smart TVs there was less UI constraints, so we were able to use more of the brand colours in the user interface's navigational elements, mirroring the brand identity seen on mobile platforms.
Apple TV by contrast, was more limited to a template like navigational structure but we were able to utilise a layered 3D parallax effect to make each match 'pop'.
Mobile was often used by fans as an accompaniment to the 'big screen' to review stats and highlights to understand how the teams compared and how their team fared.
Mobile was also a popular platform for watching smaller match replays or games that didn't necessarily involve their favourite team
Mobile added deep dive stats such as team & player rankings, table and match statistics. To avoid spoilers, a simple show scores toggle was created to conceal these facts before watching a game.
In addition to this, support for Chromecast and Airplay streaming were important additions to get this extended content such as match replays and news to the big screen.
Like mobile, web was the most common platform for finding out English Premier League Results and extended statistics.
The differentiation was that Laptop/desktop fans tended to use the platform to multitask, simultaneously analysing, placing bets, chatting on social media and even watching multiple games or highlights in different tabs.
A partnership with Vimmond allowed us to design picture in picture and 4 way streaming so that die hard EPL fans could do this all in the one player window.
The Optus Sport suite was launched on time in July 2016, ready the English Premier League season and was in high demand.
The platform was a success for Optus and has expanded to accomodate Cricket (The Ashes & BBL), the FIFA World Cup and the ICC Cup with more sports expected in the pipeline.