‘Don’t leave RWC till kickoff time’

Spark is appealing to rugby fans not to leave it to the last minute to sign up and test the performance of its Rugby World Cup coverage.

Based on overseas experience, about 40 per cent of the fans who would pay for its streaming coverage of the tournament were likely to sign up during the fortnight before the event kicks off on September 20, Spark Sport operations head Rob Berrill said.

But he warned that people who wanted to watch the tournament live online could not be sure they were ‘‘Rwc-ready’’ until they took the final step of trying the service.

Spark is streaming archive footage, player interviews and replays in the run-up to the tournament. Until people had tried to watch that ‘‘we don’t know if they have got an issue with their broadband connection or home wi-fi, or whether there might be an issue with the device that they wanted to stream it on’’, he said.

‘‘We would much rather those issues were flushed out early so we have got time to support them. Because leave it to the last minute and we are going to be inundated probably with customers with queries and our ability to service them is going to be significantly limited.’’

Spark head of sport Jeff Latch said Spark could deliver coverage perfectly but was ‘‘realistic’’ there might still be some people who would be unhappy because they left it late, did not have the best set-up at home, or ‘‘did not bother to test and trial it’’.

‘‘Our goal is to deliver generational change and we chose the RWC deliberately because it is an event that will encourage people to change and, in particular, it will bring across the late majority and the laggards who haven’t yet embraced the world of streaming.’’

Berrill said live footage of the RWC would first be beamed via satellite to New Zealand, with a fibre-optic connection serving as a back-up. That feed would go to TVNZ which would ‘‘pull together the production’’ and send it on via the Southern Cross cable to Spark’s key technology provider in the United States, istream-Planet, which would encode it to play across all the devices Spark Sport supported.

Next, the coverage would be sent to technology firm Akamai, which would share it to ‘‘content delivery nodes’’ around New Zealand, from which viewers would pull the footage into their homes via broadband connection.

‘‘We would much rather those issues were flushed out early.’’

Rob Berrill