Satellite broadcasting
Optus, along with Austar had a joint venture in the use of Satellite broadcasting for the delivery of Subscription Television. Originally, Foxtel had not previously offered a Satellite service, until purchasing the satellite subscribers from Australis Media within their service area. Until 2004, Foxtel was a customer of the Austar/Optus joint venture.
Optus utilised this joint venture to initially trial and subsequently offer a basic satellite service, named VIP. The service was very select with not many being able to access the service. It was also offered to Norfolk Island and some smart cards were enabled for some residents (who had the required satellite receiving equipment) to take part in a trial of the service. The ability to offer the service came about due to Optus offering a large number of channels to East Coast Television (now a part of Austar). After Optus axed the "VIP" Service, it also sold its share in the joint venture to Austar.
In 2004, the roles reversed and Austar became the customer to Foxtel for satellite delivery.
Sports programming
Until 2002, Optus did not offer the Fox Sports sporting channels on their service as Foxtel and Austar did, instead offering channels from Sportsvision (later C7 Sport) and ESPN.
During the Super League/ARL war, the Optus sports channels had the rights to the ARL competition and the Super League rights were held by Fox Sports.
Seven bought Sportsvision, which became Optus and Austar exclusive C7 Sport and progressively lost sporting rights to Fox Sports. During that time Foxtel granted Optus an NRL Channel, screening all of the NRL matches that had previously been shown exclusively on the Foxtel platform.
C7 Sport for some time had attempted to access the Foxtel platform for their service – however Foxtel were hesitant to accede to the request, with one exception being the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where C7 offered two extra channels dedicated to Olympics coverage.
In 2000, Seven and C7 Sport lost the AFL rights to a Nine/Ten and Foxtel-based consortium leaving C7 with only the Olympic Games and Six Nations Championship rugby union rights of major substance.
In March 2002, the commencement of the new AFL broadcasting deal with Foxtel led Optus and Austar to drop C7 Sport from their services, leading to the demise of the channel. Optus replaced the C7 channels with an Optus rebadged version of Fox Sports. Optus dropped the "Optus Sports" name in October 2002.
The dropping of the C7 service led to Optus being a party in the unsuccessful legal action taken by the Seven Network over the demise of the C7 Sport service.
On 13 July 2016, Optus launched Optus Sport, a group of sports channels that were established to televise the Premier League.
