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Opinion
After patiently biding their time through the sometimes frustrating first season of Network 10 and Paramount+’s broadcasting of Australian football, fans have been hit with the most disingenuous apology in the lead up to the 2022-23 season.
With footballing eyes around the nation desperate for more flexibility in the Paramount+ application, the platform has tweeted openly to customers that despite its promises, the frustration of subscribers and the ability of other platforms to provide what could be deemed as expected in the modern digital world, the service in season 2022-23 will be essentially no different to that dished out previously.
Just two days out from kick-off and the grand final replay between Melbourne City and Western United, Paramount+ Australia informed customers from their official Twitter account of the following.
“Dear football fans,
We want to be upfront with you, and unfortunately live pause and rewind won’t be ready for the start of the 2022/23 A-Leagues season. We understand your frustration and we’re continuing to work on this feature. As soon as it is ready, we will let you know.”
Thousands of Paramount+ subscribers were frustrated by the service provided to them after taking out subscriptions for the 2021/22 A-League season.
Most were reasonable in their acceptance of teething problems that they were promised would be addressed by the provider after concerns were raised.
Yet Wednesday’s tweet flies in the face of those supposed efforts to get things right for the upcoming season.
What was provided to customers in 2021/22 was far from perfect, clunky and along with the 10Play streaming service that was often impractical when it came to providing a fluent, consistent and controllable means by which to watch Australian football, proved nothing but a frustration for fans who had hoped for so much more.
Streaming content is vastly different to watching programs on commercial or subscription television that can easily be recorded, paused, re-winded or fast forwarded when required.
Slick streaming services provide flexibility and functionality that please the consumer and allow for a pleasant experience whilst using them.
What Paramount+ threw up last season was far from ideal and saw paying customers frustrated by the inability to rewind and review key moments, pause in real time in order to attend to life outside the game itself or catch the game soon after its completion should life have simply thrown far too many things towards them at the time the actual match took place.
In light of the far superior functionality of other applications available to consumers, the view that customers should expect the same from a service so critical to Australian football hardly seems to be unreasonable.
However, despite the promises made during the off-season and the providers’ insistence that things would be vastly improved for the second year of their involvement in the top tier of the Australian game, the tweet suggests that we are simply in for more of the same.
Moreover, the wording A-Leagues, suggests that the problem could well be solved, if ever, long after the launch of the women’s competition in late November.
I would love to be a fly on the wall when Paramount+ Australia executives meet Football Australia powerbrokers in regards to exactly what is stalling their provision of a quality and state of the art streaming service; something we were all promised, expected and should demand.
Most alarming was the utter silence greeting the expressions of concern and disappointment of customers on Twitter; people told that things would improve and those now shattered that the company has simply dodged responsibility by offering a rather lame and paltry excuse at the eleventh hour.
On the official thread, just one customer received a response, as they sarcastically enquired as to when the NCIS series might be available in Australia.
Those in control of the Paramount+ Twitter account jumped all over that, yet ignored the hundreds of subsequent queries from people wondering why they had been lied to and when exactly the streaming service would be catching up with the others they use most days of the week.
As of yet, I am unable to find another response from them, as the provider simply hides behind a pathetic excuse.
We should all be disappointed and Football Australia CEO James Johnson should be leading the charge to demand answers. The notion of investing significantly in a sport in order to acquire broadcast rights and then not doing everything in one’s power to make it a success is nothing but absurd.
That does appear to be the case with Paramount+ and fans of Australian football stand to be the losers.