Netflix’s comedy favourite Arrested Development makes its return next week. So why will its Australian subscribers need Foxtel to see it?

On 29 May, scores of Australian subscribers will head to Netflix to watch the fifth season of Arrested Development in concert with the rest of the world. They won’t find it.

That’s because Foxtel (her?) holds the “first-run” rights to the Netflix-produced show in Australia – meaning it can premiere the program before anyone else – and, as it announced this morning, it will instead air all new episodes of the cultish comedy back-to-back on 30 May. Those episodes will then play weekly on the Comedy Channel from 4 June.

That a show Netflix revived, produced and ordered a fifth season of belongs to its competitor in Australia is just one of many blips on the Australian streaming landscape, which has only got messier since Netflix officially became available on our shores three years ago.

These days punters balance paid subscriptions to half a dozen services alongside the costs of a pay-TV giant. Hearty competition was meant to benefit home viewers, but instead, Australians have to unravel a series of byzantine rights riddles, shrouded in mystery and inconsistency, just to watch, say, Veep. And they have to pay for the privilege.

Those who assumed their $10-a-month Netflix subscription afforded them access to the new and immoral adventures of the Bluths will have to consider forking out another $15 to $26 a month to Foxtel. Similarly, Amazon Prime subscribers in Australia may wonder why Nine and Fairfax’s joint venture, Stan, has “first-run” rights to Amazon Original show Transparent, or why their subscription doesn’t include Tig Notaro’s acclaimed, Amazon-produced One Mississippi, which is literally not available to watch legally anywhere down under.

Only in Australia. Literally.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A ‘Kafka-esque quandary’: To the chagrin of Amazon Prime subscribers, Amazon’s Transparent is coming first to Stan. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

That Kafka-esque quandary is only part of the nightmarish hedge maze Australians must navigate. For instance, CBS All Access is floating a local launch, even though it has already palmed off the rights to its original content, sending Star Trek: Discovery to Netflix and The Good Fight to SBS. CBS could call on its Showtime programs, like Billions and I’m Dying Up Here … except, they’ve been sold to Stan. Maybe as new owners of Ten, CBS could put up reliable favourite The Simpsons. Oh, right, Seven recently snagged The Simpsons away from its longtime home. Are you keeping up?

This shemozzle can probably be blamed on our national reluctance to embrace streaming. Our slow crawl towards the NBN made it difficult in the first instance, and while waiting for our infrastructure to play catch-up we became experts at setting illegal downloads overnight, placing us among the world’s worst television pirates. (When it comes to Game of Thrones specifically, we’re #1.) Our savviest then learnt how to use a VPN, and grew accustomed to America’s more expansive Netflix range, as well as Hulu. These are hard habits to shake.

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But the habits of the slow-to-adapt outlets were more deeply entrenched. Game of Thrones at least airs “express from the US” on Foxtel, and is available on its streaming service, Foxtel Now. Still, you would have never found it on the Foxtel-owned (and modestly priced) streamer Presto (RIP). Call the Midwife, which moved from the ABC to Foxtel’s BBC First channel in 2014, wasn’t available on Presto either.

Paywalls may have helped Australians feel vindicated in their piracy. However, Aussies were initially trained to torrent by free-to-air networks, which have historically been inconsistent in airing international programs, if they air them at all. (This is still a problem: Seven, for example, has fallen multiple seasons behind the Emmy-nominated Black-ish, but the new episodes aren’t available legally anywhere else.) No wonder SBS basically scored TV’s most talked about show, The Handmaid’s Tale, by accident, as part of a broader content deal with distributor MGM that included more than 100 hours of television. A hit for SBS On Demand, its commercial competitors are complaining of audience theft via the carrot of – gasp – free and timely content. Sounds like they’ve got tunnel vision worse than the Handmaids.

Remember, the free-to-air networks were initially hesitant to cannibalise themselves with streaming alternatives, refusing to accept the turning of the cultural tides, until Nine bit the bullet with Stan, and Seven (briefly) chipped in on Presto. Their catch-up services, meanwhile, are largely hubs for their cheap-to-produce reality TV, which they already broadcast multiple times a week, solving their “local content” quota problem too. A focus on cooking and dating shows (and combinations thereof), along with live events, may be their best chance at survival. Yet, they’ve left viewers who have a penchant for scripted entertainment with a damning decision: either pay up elsewhere, or pirate.

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It’s not all bad. Foxtel is experimenting by releasing all six episodes of its Picnic at Hanging Rock miniseries at once on Foxtel Now; Netflix gives us Riverdale immediately after it airs in America; SBS promptly shares beloved comedies Atlanta and Brooklyn Nine-Nine via On Demand; and you can watch episodes of Karate Kid reboot Cobra Kai on YouTube whenever you feel emotionally ready to do so.

However, the patchwork of our media landscape means streaming services operate half-formed here (with a tax that’s passed along to consumers). Some shows are “fast-tracked”; others sit in limbo, with no legal viewing option. And while many of our faves play on free-to-air in the US or UK, we find them behind paywalls. Face it: Australia is not yet part of the global viewing community.

• Simon Miraudo worked for streaming service Quickflix from 2008 to 2014.