Austar was an Australian subscription television and telecommunications company, founded in 1995 as Community Entertainment Television (CETV) and later operating as Austar United Communications Ltd. The company served regional and rural Australia with pay TV, internet and mobile phone services before being acquired by Foxtel in 2012. The Austar visual identity is best remembered for its star-based logo, which appeared in several forms over the company’s history.
Design and History
The Austar logo centered on a star motif, a visual device that carried through the brand’s various iterations. The most documented version of the mark debuted on February 26, 2007, appearing in an animated form on Austar’s television channel identifications. In that animation, multiple transparent three-dimensional stars in yellow flew across a red light background, then swirled near the top of the wordmark to form a drawing of a shooting star. The “AUSTAR” wordmark itself was rendered in a transparent-looking white as the logo filled itself in, with the yellow glow dimming as the animation completed. The slogan “you’ll love what’s on” formed below the logo in the same sequence. This animation was also used in Austar’s commercial tags of the period, which included the company’s telephone number and website address.[1]
Earlier versions of the Austar identity also used star imagery. An archived 2005 Wikipedia entry for the company shows an “austar_logo.jpg” file used in the company infobox, confirming that a logo was in place well before the 2007 refresh.[2] A separate Austar logo file, “Austar logo.svg,” is referenced in DBpedia’s structured data for the company, though the file itself is no longer accessible on that platform.[3]
The 2007 logo appeared during a period of significant growth for Austar. In February 2007, the company reported a record 601,126 subscribers, and its CEO John Porter announced plans to launch the MyStar personal digital recorder in the first half of that year.[4] The new logo debuted just days after those results were announced, on February 26, 2007.[5]
Austar’s corporate history included a name change from Community Entertainment Television, and the company was 53.4% owned by Denver-based Liberty Global Inc. at the time of the 2007 logo launch.[4] The company ceased operations on May 24, 2012, following its acquisition by Foxtel.[6]
Meaning and Symbolism
The shooting star formation in the 2007 Austar logo animation is the most clearly documented symbolic element of the identity. The red background and yellow star colors are documented in the animation description, but the company did not publish an official explanation of the color choices.[1]
It is worth noting that a separate, unrelated company called AUSTAR Group, a pharmaceutical engineering firm based in Hong Kong, released a new logo on April 26, 2020, with purple as its primary color. That company’s branding is entirely distinct from the Australian pay TV operator and should not be confused with the Austar identity discussed here.[7]
Typography and Design
The 2007 Austar wordmark was rendered in an all-caps sans-serif typeface, described in the animation documentation as “transparent-looking white” lettering. The wordmark appeared beneath the shooting star formation, with the stars positioned near the top of the text. No official documentation identifying the specific typeface used in the Austar logo has been located, and the font cannot be confirmed from available sources.[1]
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