Austar

» see austar.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Austar started in 1995 under the name Community Entertainment Television and was carrying the Austar name by the following year. Its business was subscription television for the parts of Australia that cable was never going to reach, which is most of the continent by area. Delivery was mainly by satellite, on the Optus C1, with a digital cable network in Darwin as the exception.

It worked. The subscriber base reached 747,148 by 30 June 2010 and 755,374 the year after, and the service was available in 2.4 million homes, roughly a third of the country. Coverage took in the regional parts of the eastern mainland states along with South Australia, and all of Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Programming came from both Foxtel and Optus, which matters for what happened next.

On 11 July 2011 Austar announced definitive agreements with Liberty Global and Foxtel for a takeover by scheme of arrangement. Minority shareholders approved it on 30 March 2012 and the competition regulator cleared it on 10 April. The shares were suspended on the Australian Securities Exchange on 16 April and delisted on the 27th, and the transaction completed on 24 May 2012.

~ the record ~

~ the other australia ~

The two operators had carved the country up by geography rather than by competing for it. Foxtel served the metropolitan markets and Austar served everywhere else, and a household in Tamworth or Alice Springs had exactly one pay television option in practice. That is why the regulator's decision was the whole story of the merger: there was no overlap to protect, because the overlap had never existed.

What Australia lost was not a competitor then, it was a second set of decisions. One company had been making the programming and pricing calls for the households outside the cities, from a position where the metropolitan market was somebody else's problem. After May 2012 those calls were made in the same building as everything else.

~ mystar ~

MyStar was the recorder, launched quietly to existing subscribers in late 2007 and generally in February 2008, with its own remote that was the Foxtel iQ remote with a different button on it. It had a hard life. Local papers were collecting complaints by October 2008 about screens blacking out and recordings failing, and the box developed a reputation it never shook.

Austar Anywhere, the online catch-up service, closed on 30 June 2013. That November Foxtel started offering satellite-capable iQHD units to anyone who wanted to retire a MyStar, without forcing the swap on people who did not.

~ the name on the box ~

The company died on 24 May 2012 and the brand took two more years to follow it. Foxtel merged the operations progressively and started moving the accounts across from the middle of 2013. The job was finished in 2014, when the Foxtel name took over everything Austar had been. Customers in the bush had a logo change on their screen and the same dish on their roof.

I have never lived anywhere this product could have been sold to me, and the Australian pay television wars of the 1990s are something I have only read about. The geography is the part that carries anyway: a company whose entire reason to exist was that the other company's cable stopped at the edge of the city, bought in the end by the company whose cable stopped at the edge of the city.

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