Austar was an Australian
telecommunications
Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...
company founded in 1995 as Community Entertainment Television (CETV). Its main business activity was
subscription television. It was also involved with
internet access
Internet access is a facility or service that provides connectivity for a computer, a computer network, or other network device to the Internet, and for individuals or organizations to access or use applications such as email and the World Wide ...
and
mobile phones
A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This radio ...
.
Austar's television subscriber base grew to 747,148 (on 30 June 2010), making it the largest subscription television operator in urban and rural Australia. Austar provided
subscription television services to 2.4 million homes, a third of all homes in Australia, primarily using
digital satellite technology. Austar also operated a digital cable network in
Darwin.
Foxtel
NXE Australia Pty Ltd, trading as the Foxtel Group, is an Australian pay television company that operates cable television, direct-broadcast satellite, direct broadcast satellite television, and IPTV streaming services. It was formed in April ...
acquired Austar in 2012. Since the acquisition, Foxtel has progressively merged all operations into the national system. Starting mid- to late 2013, Foxtel transitioned all accounts to Foxtel and removed the MyStar-related online services, which was the last step in the merge. In November 2013, the Foxtel IQ units were made available with satellite connections for those who wished to replace their MyStar units. The current Foxtel moniker took over all Austar branding in 2014, completing the transition. Austar provided services to
Sega Channel in Australia in partnership with
Namco Bandai Partners
Namco Bandai Partners S.A.S. (formerly Distribution Partners SAS) was a video game distribution company that was an amalgamation of several former Atari SA (formerly known as Infogrames Entertainment SA) offices located in PAL territories, which ...
, a joint venture between
Sega
is a Japanese video game company and subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings headquartered in Tokyo. It produces several List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises for arcade game, arcades and video game cons ...
,
Ozisoft
is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational video game video game publisher, publisher, and the video game branch of the wider Bandai Namco Holdings group. Founded in 2006 as it is the successor to Namco's home and arcade video game ...
, and
Foxtel
NXE Australia Pty Ltd, trading as the Foxtel Group, is an Australian pay television company that operates cable television, direct-broadcast satellite, direct broadcast satellite television, and IPTV streaming services. It was formed in April ...
.
Foxtel takeover
On 11 July 2011, Austar announced that it "had entered into definitive transaction agreements with
Liberty Global
Liberty Global Ltd. is a British-Dutch-American multinational telecommunications company domiciled in Bermuda, with headquarters in London, Amsterdam and Denver. Its respective legal names are Liberty Global Holdings Limited (UK), Liberty Glo ...
, Inc. (LGI) and Foxtel Management Pty Limited (Foxtel) under which Foxtel will acquire AUSTAR by a series of transactions including a scheme of arrangement (Scheme)."
This takeover involved a minority shareholder approval on 30 March 2012, the approval of the
Australian Competition & Consumer Commission
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is the chief competition regulator of the Government of Australia, located within the Department of the Treasury. It was established in 1995 with the amalgamation of the Australian Tra ...
on 10 April 2012, and had approval from a Second Court Hearing. The Austar shares were suspended on the
Australian Securities Exchange
Australian Securities Exchange Ltd (ASX) is an Australian public company that operates Australia's primary Exchange (organized market), securities exchange, the Australian Securities Exchange (sometimes referred to outside of Australia as, or c ...
(ASX) as of 16 April 2012,
and were delisted from the ASX on 27 April 2012.
The takeover was completed on 24 May 2012.
Subscription television (Austar Television/Austar Digital)
Austar's main business was subscription television, serving customers outside of the major metro areas. It took programming from both Foxtel and
Optus
Singtel Optus Pty Limited is an Australian Telecommunications in Australia, telecommunications company headquartered in Macquarie Park, a suburb in the Northern Sydney region of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is a wholly owned subsidiar ...
services, and operated on a digital platform.
Austar Television was available in 2.4 million homes in regional areas of
New South Wales
New South Wales (commonly abbreviated as NSW) is a States and territories of Australia, state on the Eastern states of Australia, east coast of :Australia. It borders Queensland to the north, Victoria (state), Victoria to the south, and South ...
,
Victoria,
Queensland
Queensland ( , commonly abbreviated as Qld) is a States and territories of Australia, state in northeastern Australia, and is the second-largest and third-most populous state in Australia. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Austr ...
and
South Australia
South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a States and territories of Australia, state in the southern central part of Australia. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories by area, which in ...
and all areas of
Tasmania
Tasmania (; palawa kani: ''Lutruwita'') is an island States and territories of Australia, state of Australia. It is located to the south of the Mainland Australia, Australian mainland, and is separated from it by the Bass Strait. The sta ...
and the
Northern Territory
The Northern Territory (abbreviated as NT; known formally as the Northern Territory of Australia and informally as the Territory) is an states and territories of Australia, Australian internal territory in the central and central-northern regi ...
. Subscriber numbers to Austar Television were second behind
Foxtel
NXE Australia Pty Ltd, trading as the Foxtel Group, is an Australian pay television company that operates cable television, direct-broadcast satellite, direct broadcast satellite television, and IPTV streaming services. It was formed in April ...
. Delivery methods include utilising the Optus C-Class Satellite
Optus C1
This is a list of the satellites operated by Optus, an Australian telecommunications company. The satellite communications facility is located at Belrose on Sydney's Northern Beaches. Optus' satellites are divided into 4 classes A, B, C and D. As ...
and a
digital cable network in
Darwin.
On Demand (Featured)
Austar featured On Demand, used to deliver Austar shows on-demand to MyStar each week to those with a MyStar subscription. It has since been replaced by Foxtel On Demand.
Austar AnyWhere
Austar AnyWhere was Austar's online TV service, which allowed customers to watch or download full-length programs online. Austar Anywhere closed on 30 June 2013.
The ''MyStar'' personal digital recorder
MyStar was launched to existing subscribers in late 2007, with a general launch to both new and existing customers in February 2008.
The last MyStar was the model T500. It was a four-tuner
set-top box
A set-top box (STB), also known as a cable converter box, cable box, receiver, or simply box, and historically television decoder or a converter, is an information appliance device that generally contains a Tuner (radio)#Television, TV tuner inpu ...
equipped with two satellite tuners and two terrestrial tuners available both for viewing and recording standard definition digital
free-to-air
Free-to-air (FTA) services are television (TV) and radio services broadcast in unencrypted form, allowing any person with the appropriate receiving equipment to receive the signal and view or listen to the content without requiring a subscri ...
services including full
electronic program guide
Electronic programming guides (EPGs) and interactive programming guides (IPGs) are menu-based systems that provide users of television, radio, and other media applications with continuously updated menus that display scheduling information fo ...
data for
Seven Network
Seven Network (stylised 7Network, and commonly known as Channel Seven or simply Seven) is an Australian commercial free-to-air Television broadcasting in Australia, television network. It is owned by Seven West Media, Seven West Media Limited, ...
,
WIN Television
WIN Television is an Australian television broadcasting, Australian television network owned and operated by WIN Corporation that is based in Wollongong, New South Wales. WIN commenced transmissions on 18 March 1962 as a single television stat ...
,
Prime Television and
Network Ten
Network 10 (commonly known as the 10 Network, Channel 10 or simply 10) is an Australian commercial television network. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Paramount Global's Paramount Networks UK & Australia, UK & Australia division and is o ...
. (
ABC,
SBS and
ABC2
ABC Family is an Australian free-to-air television channel owned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and part of its ABC Television network. The channel broadcasts a range of family and teen entertainment programming. The channel oper ...
continue to be provided via satellite). However, only two tuners can be used because the processor is not capable of handling all four tuners at once.
It featured a 160 GB
hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...
, with 120 GB user accessible. It could record 60 hours of content. Because it is equipped with
Macrovision copy protection
Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, is any measure to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media.
Copy protection is most commonly found on vid ...
, content saved to the MyStar cannot be transferred to other media (such as VHS or DVD) without the use of something such as a video stabiliser. It had support for
time shifting
In broadcasting, time shifting is the recording of programming to a storage medium to be viewed or listened to after the live broadcasting. Typically, this refers to TV programming but it can also refer to radio shows via podcasts.
In recent yea ...
for up to one hour.
Support for
Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital, originally synonymous with Dolby AC-3 (see below), is the name for a family of audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. Called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1995, it is lossy compression (except for Dolby Tr ...
Surround Sound was available on selected programming when connected to appropriate equipment, however the Mystar box wouldn't control the volume when using optical or coax, the volume had to be controlled by the device it was plugged into. It also had support for
Closed Captioning
Closed captioning (CC) is the process of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information, where the viewer is given the choice of whether the text is displayed. Closed cap ...
and four different aspect ratios (
4:3 Cropped, 16:9
Letterbox, 16:9
Postcard
A postcard or post card is a piece of thick paper or thin cardboard, typically rectangular, intended for writing and mailing without an envelope. Non-rectangular shapes may also be used but are rare.
In some places, one can send a postcard f ...
and
16:9 Widescreen). Both of these features were accessible through the remote's coloured buttons.
It supported additional outputs not found in some of the standard decoders, such as
component video
Component video is an analog video signal that has been split into two or more component channels. In popular use, it refers to a type of component analog video (CAV) information that is transmitted or stored as three separate signals. Compo ...
, as well as both
coaxial and
optical
Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultravio ...
digital audio outputs. Support for
Composite Video
Composite video, also known as CVBS (composite video baseband signal or color, video, blanking and sync), is an analog video format that combines image information—such as brightness (luminance), color (chrominance), and synchronization, int ...
,
S-Video
S-Video (also known as separate video, Y/C, and erroneously Super-Video) is an analog video signal format that carries standard-definition video, typically at 525 lines or 625 lines. It encodes video luma and chrominance on two separate chann ...
and
RF out were also available. It also had
USB
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...
and
Ethernet
Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
ports, but they didn't have a clear function as yet, and were likely to be used for updating the decoder.
The MyStar Remote is similar to the standard Austar Digital remote, but it had the addition of buttons specific to recording and playing back video. It shared an almost identical design to the
Foxtel iQ remote, with the exception that it has an Austar button instead of a Foxtel button, and there was no AV button.

The next generation of MyStar, called MyStar HD, was launched on 15 November 2009, with installations beginning the following day. It had many advantages over its predecessor, most notably support for 1080i, HD programming. It included a 320 GB hard disk, a doubling over the 160 GB found in the original MyStar. Only 160 GB of this was available for recordings and other user-selected content, with the other 160 GB being reserved for OnDemand content, which was launched in early 2010. MyStar HD also included an HDMI output, allowing HD content to be viewed in its native resolution. It had a model number of T600 and also a T601.
Austar planned to use MyStar HD as its cornerstone set-top box, with true video-on-demand launched in 2010, and more access to web content becoming available after that time, building up to a complete interface redesign for its set-top boxes in late 2011 or early 2012. Since the Foxtel acquisition, these plans have changed. The plan was originally to upgrade MyStar and phase it out in 2014, however, in 2013, Foxtel decided to convert their IQHD units to satellite connections and made them available to "Austar" customers in November 2013. Foxtel had no plans to force current MyStar subscribers to replace their unit. If they don't wish, however, they are offering upgrades to customers who wish to take advantage before the IQ3 launch in 2015.
Mystar criticism
MyStar had ongoing technical issues which have plagued the system since release; however, Austar have said that "they have a huge team of people that will actively jump onto any issues as soon as they are reported to the call centre". Some of the numerous bugs included the MyStar box regularly causing the screen to black out, recordings to fail, and the screen to freeze. The box has also been reported to automatically switch itself off and on.
Austar Mobile (mobile telephony)
Established in 2000, Austar Mobile offered mobile services via resale agreements with Optus
SMmobile network. After the closure of Telstra's CDMA network, Austar mobile would only offer services through Optus. Austarmobile, on 31 December 2009, had 19,970 customers.
Dial-up internet (Austarnet)
In August 2011, Austarnet announced its exit from the Internet business and indicated that services would be discontinued on 30 September 2011.
Broadband internet (Austar Broadband)
Established in 2006, Austar Broadband operated as a trial network in
Wagga Wagga
Wagga Wagga (; informally called Wagga) is a major regional city in the Riverina region of New South Wales, Australia. Straddling the Murrumbidgee River, with an urban population of more than 57,003 as of 2021, it is an important agricultural, m ...
and
Tamworth, New South Wales
Tamworth is a city and administrative centre of the north-eastern region of New South Wales, Australia. Situated on the Peel River (New South Wales), Peel River within the local government area of the Tamworth Regional Council, it is the largest ...
.
Austar/Unwired Alliance
In 2005, Austar United and wireless internet provider
Unwired announced a deal to swap spectrum under either company's control to allow for interoperable wireless broadband services across the country. In 2006, Austar United and Unwired together with
Soul Converged Telecommunications formed AUSAlliance for the purposes of obtaining funding from the Australian Government's Broadband Connect Infrastructure Program and rolling out a regional broadband network.
[Austar United Press Release: http://www.austarunited.com.au/pdf/06-03-29%20AUSTAR%20_%20Soul%20partner%20for%20regional%20b'dband%20network.pdf]
Austar/Opel agreement
In 2008, Austar entered into an agreement to sell its 2.5 & 3.5 GHz spectrum licences to the OPEL consortium (Optus & Elders) for A$65 million and enter into a wholesale agreement with Optus for the resale of products operated by the OPEL consortium.
[Austar United Press Release](_blank)
The sale was contingent on the OPEL network rollout, so was cancelled upon the cancellation of the OPEL network by the Australian Government.
See also
*
Subscription television in Australia
Subscription television in Australia is provided using technologies such as cable television, satellite television and internet television by a number of companies unified in their provision of a subscription television service. Notable actors ...
Notes
:1.
References
External links
Austar webpageAustar BroadbandAustar United webpageMyStar webpageAustarnet Closure
{{CATV Africa, Asia, Middle East and Oceania
Australian companies established in 1995
Australian companies disestablished in 2012
Direct broadcast satellite services
Australian subscription television services
Defunct telecommunications companies of Australia
Companies based in Sydney
Telecommunications companies established in 1995
Telecommunications companies disestablished in 2012
Companies formerly listed on the Australian Securities Exchange
2012 mergers and acquisitions
Foxtel