Wish you could manage your service subscriptions from one place? If you’re an Optus customer, you’ll soon have that, but why we’re not sure.
If you’be ever found it a pain to sort through all the video subscriptions we all have — and these days, they can add up quickly — there might be a way to bring that together in the near future. That is provided you’re an Optus customer.
That concept is launching this week in something the telco calls “SubHub”, which is basically a portal for accessing and managing subscriptions from one location, all on your phone. It would mean instead of jumping into several apps, you’d essentially only need to go into one, and may even mean not needing to install extra apps on your phone if you planned to watch them on your TV.
Optus SubHub will see the likes of Amazon’s services across Prime — Prime Video, Amazon Music, and more — plus Kindle Unlimited join an assortment of services set to launch on SubHub, with Netflix, Fetch TV, BritBox, Fiit, and the recent launch of Paramount+ in Australia all coming to the Optus subscription portal, while Disney+, Stan, and Binge remain missing in action.
However Optus will offer its Optus Sport service on the platform, as well as a new arrival of “OS Fitness”, which is essentially a fitness program take on streaming services that joins Optus Sport.
“The pitch is simple – in an increasingly complex and growing universe of digital content subscriptions, our customers tell us that they find it hard to keep track of exactly what subscriptions they have, are active, and how much they pay for them,” said Clive Dickens, Vice President of Content and Product Development at Optus TV.
“With SubHub, we have turned the table on complexity with a single platform allowing customers to bundle their multiple new and existing subscriptions, enjoy them as they need them and pause them when they don’t, with just a few clicks,” he said.
One of the reasons this might be a handy idea comes from the discounts SubHub offers, with as much as 10 percent off the cost dependent on if services are bundled together.
However SubHub can also seem like a problem looking for a solution.
We’re not entirely sure how many people have gone looking for a subscription manager, though we could easily guess how many would look for an app that lets you jump right into any service and possibly provide recommendations across services for what you might have missed.
That last one does not appear to be what Optus SubHub is, with the service providing payment management, but not so much viewing or streaming access through the apps. For that, you’ll still need to have the apps on your devices, as this only covers whether you’re still maintaining a subscription for them.
For anyone interested in that, they’ll find Optus SubHub launched for eligible Optus customers, which at launch does not include prepaid customers, we’re told.
