Spark sure it can win back fans
Telco confident streaming service will perform well for the rest of the World Cup
Spark Sport’s boss has promised customers the telco will deliver the remaining matches for the Rugby World Cup following a rocky weekend. It’s been a turbulent few days for Spark after many All Blacks and South Africa viewers encountered pixelating, blurring, buffering or lost signal during the match.
At its peak, the service reached 132,000 viewers but by the end of the match that number had declined to 126,000.
Spark’s bad weekend carried through to early morning yesterday with the company’s stock price dropping before later recovering. And as the All Blacks vie for a third consecutive World Cup title, questions had been raised around whether Spark could deliver quality coverage.
Speaking to Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB yesterday morning, Latch said the streaming service was not what they were hoping for. On Sunday, all World Cup matches were shown on TVNZ Duke as well as Spark Sport due to disruptions during the South Africa versus New Zealand match.
Latch could not guarantee a faultless run for the remainder of the tournament but said the platform, network and production were tested and had been outstanding. As a result, last night’s Wales-Georgia match was exclusive to Spark Sport after addressing the issues.
“We believe we are going to deliver for the next match and the other 41 matches left in the Rugby World Cup,” Latch said. Any problems with future streams would see the match put on TVNZ’s Duke channel within 40 or 45 seconds.
Spark chief executive Jolie Hodson was confident the streaming service would perform well for the rest of the Rugby World Cup.
“If we just stand back, and we look across the two days of streaming, we've now had six of the seven events stream very well,” Hodson told the
Herald. “From my perspective, we've resolved the issue that we had.”
As soon as the market opened yesterday morning, Spark’s stock price dropped 8c to $4.27. The drop was equivalent to a loss of over $144 million in market value for the $8 billion company.
But the company’s shares recovered, finishing 8c higher at $4.43.
Spark’s sport-streaming competitors Sky TV, meanwhile, saw its share price rise 2c to $1.16 yesterday.
Forsyth Barr analyst Matt Henry said Spark would have been disappointed given the amount of work done to make it a seamless experience.
While it highlighted the complexity of live-streaming services, compared to on-demand like Netflix, it didn’t matter to the end-user.
“You could say we tried very hard and point to what the issues were, but, ultimately, the person sitting on their couch doesn’t care,” Henry said.
Speaking to media from New York, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said it was “ultimately” up to Spark to ensure it delivered a great service.
When asked about the issue, Ardern said she was aware of the problems and had read some of the discussions around what happened.
She said she still had confidence in the telco, “based on the fact they have contingency plans in place”.
Ardern’s take on the streaming saga was far more diplomatic than her deputy, Winston Peters, who was serving as Acting Prime Minister while she was overseas.
He said the streaming of the game was an “abject disaster”, vowing the Government would get to the bottom of the issue.
“I can assure you we will find out as fast as possible as to what on earth is not going on,” he told Newstalk ZB’s Weekend Collective on Sunday.
Peters, who was forced to watch much of the game on his phone as the stream on his TV was interrupted, said Spark should have been better prepared for the event.
“They [Spark] were told to get ready and we hoped that they would be ready and they promised us that they would be and they’re not . . . It’s not satisfactory.”
At the post-Cabinet briefing yesterday, Peters said Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi had spoken to Spark.