Australian Television Is Still Woefully Broken

Here are the first few lines:

Top-rating SF program Continuum returns for season 2, first on FOXTEL Australian television premiere: Thursday October 3, 8:30pm EST



One of the top SF programs of 2013 returns for season two as SF acquires the exclusive Australian broadcast rights to Continuum.





Rachel Nichols (Criminal Minds, Alias) stars as Kiera Cameron, a cop from 2077 who finds herself trapped in the present day. Following the dramatic events of the season one final, Kiera must work with Alec Sadler (Erik Knudsen; Jericho, Scream 4) and detective Carlos Fonnegra (Victor Webster; Castle, Melrose Place) to destroy Liber8 and preserve the future of earth.



Continuum S2 premieres on Thursday October 3, 2013 at 8:30pm EST, first on FOXTEL.

You might have missed the important bit: Season 2 of Continuum will start exclusive to Foxtel and SyFy on October 3, 2013. Normally, that’d be great news. I have been hanging out for the new season of Continuum, it’s a great show and Foxtel and SyFy are to be applauded for airing it. The problem is the timing.

New episodes of Continuum will air at the start of October in Australia, but the season will have already ended in the US. In fact, season 2 of Continuum will end in the US on August 4. By the time it even starts in Australia, the spoilers and episodes will be online for everyone to see and pirate for a whole 32 days. Even then, the series won’t be dumped all at once for people to binge-watch, it’ll be spaced out over 13-weeks, so by the time the second season ends in Australia, we’ll likely be staring down the barrel of the third season in the US in 2014.

Sigh.

It’s worth pointing out that none of this is the likely fault of Foxtel or SyFy. Foxtel in fact made life easier for us technologically-savvy folk this morning by announcing Play: an online streaming service. That’s likely where I’ll watch the new season of Continuum. The problem here is most likely because of people over in the US hoarding content away from international territories until the last moment of air time before allowing it to leave the country and be broadcast elsewhere.

What these executive content hoarders don’t understand is that people will likely use the fact that they can’t see it legally as an excuse for piracy, when in fact there’s never an excuse for piracy. Just like there’s never an excuse for speeding. If you get caught, it’s an offence and you’ll be punished.

Australia is still sadly relegated into a content backwater by these content hoarders, and it’s sad that despite the wonderful advances in streaming we’ve seen as early as this morning, we’re still getting screwed out of day-in-date releases of awesome content. A screwing we just have to toughen-up and live with.

Continuum hits Australian screens on October 3 on the SyFy network.