Rugby World Cup live-streaming failures have landed on the New Zealand prime minister’s desk after tens of thousands of people couldn’t watch the country’s opening win of the tournament.
The All Blacks defeated South Africa 23-13 in an impressive start to their World Cup defence, with Jacinda Ardern in attendance.
In past years, the tournament has been broadcast on free-to-air television.
For the 2019 event, the rights were won by telecommunications company Spark Sport, who asked Kiwis to pay bumper prices and allayed fears of poor broadcasting quality.
When the match arrived on Saturday night, those fears were realised as subscribers battled pixilated screens and lag times.
Acting prime minister Winston Peters was one of the fans caught up in the mess, attempting to watch on his phone.
“(It was) not too flash actually. It’s a leap back to the black and white days,” he said.
“I thought to myself, ‘how many tens of thousands of New Zealanders were in my boat?’ They paid the money, and now you’re watching this critical game on which so much depends and you’re putting up with this.”
Spark’s head of sport Jeff Latch issued a national apology for the “unsatisfactory” service, saying 25,000 new match-day subscriptions challenged their service.
Refunds and compensation will be made available.
The drama led Communications Minister Kris Faafoi to meet with the company to seek assurances there would be no repeat as the tournament continued.
Amid the weekend’s outrage, Spark Sport allowed TVNZ to show the match on a subsidiary channel.
Mr Peters said the next-gen broadcaster could expect that to be the norm through the tournament if coverage didn’t improve.
“We do hope that Spark is on top of it and I’d suggest that they’d better be,” he said.
“They hadn’t done enough to make sure that it was foolproof.
“We’ve been given a whole lot of information that’s new plus significant assurances as to the future.”
The streaming failure is a repeat of the woes that beset Optus Sport on their first major rights-holding exercise in Australia, last year’s men’s football World Cup.
