Football fans have taken to social to slam Optus Sport’s problems with transmitting the World Cup.

For the last three nights, Optus’ live video stream of the World Cup matches has been interrupted by vision freezing. The company has apologised on its Facebook page telling customers to switch from the app to its  sport.optus.com.au website to watch further matches.

How soon the company can deliver smooth streaming is still unknown, but SBS chief Michael Ebeid has said today that the broadcaster is ready to step into the breach and warned that Optus’ issues will need to be sorted out in the next  24 to 48 hours.

“I think they’ll need to take a good, hard look at where they’re at in terms of fixing the problem,” Ebeid told the Melbourne Herald-Sun.

“But from the conversations I’ve had with Optus, they seem very confident that it (the issue) is down to a very small number of users.”

SBS has broadcast the World Cup for 32 years and still holds the rights but this year was forced sub-licence a number of matches to Optus.

Ebeid used the Optus glitch to stress that the only reason SBS was no covering the entire World Cup was because of government budgets cuts of $40 million to the broadcaster.

“So at the end of the day you have to cut your cloth to suit your own funding. One of the things we wanted to make sure was that we retained the World Cup for our viewers, and the deal that we did enabled us to have the best game of the day, every day of the World Cup which we get to choose … and one of the advantages of the Optus deal was it enabled us to get the English Premier League for 38 weeks a year every year for three years in between the World Cups.” he told the newspaper.

Optus has the exclusive rights to carry the majority of World Cup games in Australia but it costs those who sign up to its Optus Sport app $14.99 per month.