What you need to know:

• Optus, OzTam and Nielson are believed to be entering into an agreement to have Optus Sport's streaming numbers publically reported
• The telco confirmed it was "considering options" but stated it had not yet entered into a formal agreement
• Hayley Cameron has been bought on as digital advertising commercial manager 
• The move is said to see Optus take advantage of Video Player Measurement figures (VPM)
• Optus' decision signals greater intent to engage with advertisers as the broadcast rights for Rugby Australia hang in the balance

Optus' commercial cash grab

Statements made by Hayley Cameron were given at the Programmatic Summit in Sydney earlier this month. Since that time multiple major sporting events broadcast by Optus Sport have suspended due to COVID-19.

Optus is set to start wooing advertisers more aggressively, with the telco currently engaged in serious conversations with audience measurement companies, OzTam and Nielson.

There has been speculation that deals are imminent and will see Optus Sport's audience figures including in the OzTam Video Player Measurement (VPM) data.

The telco confirmed that it was currently "considering options", but was yet to come to any formal agreement with either.

Optus' decision to engage with more comprehensive audience measurement is part of its wider strategy to launch an in-house advertising offering as it bids to increase the volume and variety of ads on the platform.

Optus currently run no programmatic advertising on its sports streaming platform, with traditional TVCs hard coded into the linear stream. 

Meanwhile, its digital ad business is "nowhere near launching", Optus digital advertising commercial manager Hayley Cameron told the Programmatic Summit in Sydney earlier this month, instead aiming to hit its August deadline.

"At the moment, a sponsorship really just consists of spots and billboards on the linear feed. So, the same ad goes out to anyone that's watching, no matter what device they're on," said Cameron. "We can do things like content sponsorships but it ... has to be hardcoded ... and it goes out back to Singapore and then gets fed into the content that goes out to everyone."

But with the subscriber base "up 77% to 825,000 since 2018", she claimed, that is about to change.

Own goals

After the fiasco of the 2018 FIFA World Cup - where the platform failed at critical moments - Cameron says Optus has doubled down on technological resilience.

She says Optus Sport "absolutely never" can have another situation of what happened in the World Cup, adding the telco was relying on one large vendor for too many parts of its tech architecture.

"Since then we've added a lot more automation into our video pipeline. What we wanted to do was minimise the number of human interactions that go on across all stages of the transcoding of the content, encoding it and then distributing it out onto the platforms," said Cameron. "We then wanted to make sure that the platform could handle if we added anymore content to it."

With the resilience improved, and subscribers reaching critical mass, it is now focusing more fully on digital ad capability.

If sport globally can resume over the coming months, Optus may yet reap the benefit of that investment.