TV Delays Driving AU Viewers To Piracy

Astat1ne writes in with a story in The Register about the delays Australian TV viewers are experiencing getting overseas-produced series and how this is driving many of them to download the shows via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. The problem is compounded by the fact that Australian viewers are unable to download legal copies of the episodes from the US iTunes website. Quoting: "According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series, Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first-run series first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months."

Comments

Why the delay?

[Weaselmancer]

Seriously, 17 months?

Why the delay? What exactly is it that could possibly take so long? You could almost put the DVDs in a hot air balloon and get them there quicker.

Especially considering that this is sales. Who waits that long to make money? Especially in that industry?

Re:Why the delay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically the older a show is the cheaper it is to buy. The Australian tv companies would have to pay a lot more to the American production companies if they wanted the rights to a show soon after it came out.

Re:Why the delay?

[krosov]

This is also the case in region 2, where I happen to live. There's a similar delay in episodes of all american shows, from Southpark to Oprah. I'm downloading Southpark and The Daily Show (of which only quotations make it to the region 2 television) solely because I'm not going to wait 18 months until the show is less fresh, therefor less funny, is and broadcasted with commercial interuptions for phone sex, at 23.30h at night when I really do need to sleep. I can get a sure weekly southpark fix from the local bittorrent dealer in a dark alley of an internet and watch it hours after it was broadcasted at prime time. With movies, the same issues occur. Whe have to wait at least 6 months, which made sense in the old days when the marketing machines would also arrive 6 months late. At least the release was in sync with the marketing peak. Now, we do see movie trailers, reviews, blogs, parodies, pleasant scandals and bloopers at the same time the Americans do, thus months before the movies enter our movietheatres. I'm not a film lover, but I can see why people download the movies. Since the advertising reaches us all the way here, the marketing boosts the filesharing! Most DVD players in .eu are region-free now (I 'hacked' mine), otherwise we can't watch the movies we legally order over the internet! There's no way you can be 100% legal!

If you can make a copy of my Ferrari

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can create a cloned copy of my Ferrari without damaging mine, then I'd have no problem with you doing so. Make two.

Re:If you can make a copy of my Ferrari

[bendodge]

I would, because you agreed not to let that happen in your EULA, and the engineers who spent years designing it wouldn't get their earned pay.

In regards to the article:
Shocking! People want something they can't get, so they bootleg it!?! How surprising!
Come on, this is obvious. But it is still wrong.

Re:If you can make a copy of my Ferrari

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be wrong if they had a way to legally aquire these videos, but they don't.

Re:If you can make a copy of my Ferrari

[nekid]

But Ferrari would. You didn't pay the engineers to design the car and the machines to manufacture it, or the marketers to sell it. You paid for a piece of the total cost, yes, but not so much that it gives you the right to freely clone it and give it away. If they can't live on it, then they'll have to stop doing it and the world will be without Ferrari cars. Either that, or someone with some spare time will attempt to make some facsimile, but it won't be as good, and it will take far longer to be made available.

Yes, yes, we all understand how you don't like the system. But eventually, somebody has to make some money by selling something so that employees can be paid, so that they in turn can buy products. This is basic economics. If you believe everything should be freely available, then you should realize that you'll need to put in your 40 hours a week for nothing. Even if you hope that only electronic information or intellectual property should be freely available, realize that, without money as an incentive, you will have trouble get people to program, design, act, draw, build, write, and in general, create your beloved movies, television shows, music, applications, and images. Again, at best, you can only hope for inferior works that take much longer to complete than those driven by money.

Re:If you can make a copy of my Ferrari

[Sj0]

Actually, the dealerships buy the ferraris. They're the ones that actually pay for it, so the engineers would get their money. Also, in this example, the dealerships don't need to sell their cars to individuals. They make their money by selling advertising at stoplights. Since the standardized metrics used to estimate the number of people watching aren't affected by piracy, the only people who are hurt are the advertisers.

Don't hold your breath on me crying a river for advertisers who get slightly less exposure than they thought.

Re:If you can make a copy of my Ferrari

[Dun Malg]

But Ferrari would. You didn't pay the engineers to design the car and the machines to manufacture it, or the marketers to sell it. No, Ferrari wouldn't care, so long as you didn't attempt to make copies to sell to others, misrepresenting the copies as Ferrari originals. You could even make copies and give them away and Ferrari wouldn't care much, as the cost of materials would drive you to bankruptcy very, very quickly. This is why the "car analogy" shit fails. "Content owners" only care about digital duplication because it exposes the fraud of their business, that they've made a living out of distributing information based upon an artificial monopoly on information reproduction and and the traditionally high cost of encoding that information in physical, transportable form. The cost of the latter has suddenly vanished, leaving them tap-dancing in mid air.

Re:If you can make a copy of my Ferrari

[suckmysav]

"The only thing that makes one item counterfeit from another identical item is the brand owner saying it's fake."

Sounds like DeBeers and their ongoing efforts to discredit "man made" diamonds as being somehow fake, despite them being indistinguishable from the "real thing."

standard register article

[gEvil (beta)]

I find it humorous that the article talks about how the Australian TV networks are "unable or unwilling to change their programming policies", yet makes no mention about the actual core problem here--the licensing of the content. Yes, if a TV show is produced and owned by an American TV network, then the Australian TV network needs to license it from the American company. They can't just decide to air it whenever they feel like it (which is what this article seems to suggest). Whether the problem is the American company not offering up the content for licensing, or whether the Australian companies don't want to pay the fee until it's lowered needs to be mentioned in order for this article to be more than an uninformed gripe. Then again, it is the Register, so it comes as no surprise to me that it's actually missing the point...

Re:standard register article

[Mateito]

Many of the US shows last year (CSI and SVU spring to mind) had double episode end-of season finales. In the US, these were aired a week apart, so that the cliff-hanger was resolved in 7 days. Here in Australia, the local networks played half the finale around mid-November, then advertised that the second part would be shown in early February. This is an absolutely dispicable way to treat your loyal fans. So, yeah, I pulled down the second half via P2P. Stuff them.

And you know what? I discovered that could get an HD version with no commercials and with better sound. So, I kept doing it... just for one or two of my favourite shows. I can honestly say that if the local networks hadn't treated me (the viewer) with such contempt, I never would have bothered to look around the Net, never worked out which P2P client was the most efficient, and frankly would be watching them on local TV week to week.

Note that most of the current shows are aired only a few of months after the US. Heroes, NCIS, House and Grays Anatomy all fall into this catagory. We are about 3 or 4 episodes into the current season of each of these. I think in the US the episodes are up to the mid teens. The delay in airing doesn't bother me, but being forced to wait four months for the resolution of a double episode pushed me over the edge.

Re:standard register article

[grimJester]

I don't even know how far behind the shows I watch are in Finland anymore. There simply is no legal way to get them within a reasonable time. I've quit watching TV almost completely - all I watch nowadays is BBC News or found on the net.

I follow several "currently airing" series. Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, SG Atlantis, Rome, The Simpsons, South Park to name a few. I'd be happy to pay, for example, $2/episode for subscriptions for these if I could get them to start downloading from a trusted source as soon as they're available. Heck, I'd be willing to develop the service for a pittance. Still, the content providers are more concerned with preventing the audience from viewing their product than making it possible for the audience to view said product.

The current state of copyright no longer serves the purpose of making as much art as possible available to as many as possible. It needs an overhaul. Badly.

Re:It's Still Wrong

[unformed]

Who said it's about justifying piracy? It's not. It's still wrong, but it shows that there IS a market that is willing to pay for it ... if it was provided.

Piracy isn't justified, but if the consumers want to see a TV show, they will. The question now is, are you going to sell it to them, or are they going to have no choice but to steal it?

Piracy is bad

[bhalter80]

While piracy is bad, I think most people would agree, this study shows an interesting phenomenon of our shrinking world. With the increased availability of digital content the barriers to acquiring a product available in a region of the world that is not your own are almost non-existent. In the past you would have to fly to the region that had the product you sought out, buy it and fly back or have it imported via some other means. Now there is no technological reason you shouldn't be able to do the same, just some legal hurdles imposed by countries out to make a buck anywhere they can and media companies out to do the same. I don't know what the solution to the former is but in regards to the latter I would think this would be enough to show that there is a demand for the content and for them to find a way to distribute it.

Re:Piracy is bad

[frdmfghtr]

Now there is no technological reason you shouldn't be able to do the same, just some legal hurdles imposed by countries out to make a buck anywhere they can and media companies out to do the same. I don't know what the solution to the former is but in regards to the latter I would think this would be enough to show that there is a demand for the content and for them to find a way to distribute it.

I don't follow how you can say that the "countries" are out to make a buck...unless you are referring to government officials who will allow their influence to be, well, "influenced" by the industry that wants to make a buck then make another one without extra effort.

I would like an explanation from somebody in the industry as to why content is not made available to more viewers/listeners/etc. Demand is there; we see that in the amount of sales that come from online digital resources and transfers via other means such as BitTorrent. If there is demand for your product, you can do business and profit. If you don't do business, somebody else will.

People download from p2p nets because YOU (the content provider/copyright holder/whatever term you want to use) won't provide quality content and a reasonable price. Do that, and you will profit. Those who continue to use p2p weren't going to buy your product anyway, so you have lost nothing.

It all seems so simple, I must be missing something somewhere.

Re:It's Still Wrong

[pnattress]

You can't afford a Ferrari. That doesn't mean it's not available to you, just that you don't have the means to get it. The issue here is that Australians don't have the means of legally acquiring this material. They can't even log on to the US iTunes and pay for it. That's the problem.

I love how Slashdot has become the only place to come for incorrect car analogies.

No surprise

[Dan East]

I guess a bunch of execs are sitting around the board room table, still thinking it is 1970 and they have exclusive control over video distribution of their content. It will probably take an entire generation worth of executives to die off before some of these industries can reform. It really takes serious denial to think that consumers would prefer to wait for them to broadcast the content over their channels, when it can be obtained immediately, on-demand, in HD without commercials for free.

Dan East

Re:It's Still Wrong

[anagama]

I disagree with you here. Note, I've been modded flamebait and troll a lot for saying stuff against the partyline on copyright. The problem with piracy is that has the potential to harm producers because some people who would have paid won't (it's impossible that all copyright infringers absolutely never would have paid for the content). Thus, the producer is harmed by illegal downloading and it should not be condoned.

This situation different. If the material is not released in any pay format, the content producer cannot possibly suffer any negative consequences by banned groups' piracy.

The question is different when there is delay as in this case and there are more questions to be answered. For example, do all shows make it to Australia or just a few? Why exactly are the content producers delaying so long? Is it actually the AU media that is standing in the way of distribution?

Answers to these kinds of questions could sway my thinking (remember, it is based on the potential for lost sales, not any "moral" argument posed by either side). If it is simply a choice by the content producers not to sell to AU, then I don't really have a problem because they would never have made a dime of Australia. I would think the answer though is more complicated. Politics? Protectionism?

Re:It's Still Wrong

[bendodge]

or are they going to have no choice but to steal it? You forgot to include the RIGHT choice: don't steal it. Instant gratification isn't vital to your existence, although that's what we are teaching our kids by buying them everything as soon as it "comes out". It used to be that kids saved their money to buy something, and in the process learned to WAIT.

Re:It's Still Wrong

[anagama]

Chances are these people aren't stupid, but have looked at the numbers and concluded that people aren't willing to pay enough for them to make a profit.

How does that make sense? If they intend to never sell in AU, they've made the show with the presumption it will make a profit in other markets. If it turns out they can also sell in AU, then that's all pure bonus money. And how much exactly would it cost for them to get the show on iTunes? Doesn't apple actually provide the bandwidth for their pay stuff? There's just no downside.

Re:It's Still Wrong

[MostAwesomeDude]

Woot, a troll.

Okay, so listen up. If you can't afford a Ferrari, that is understandable. Ferraris are spendy little cars. But DVDs? They're perfectly affordable. So is basic cable. The problem here is not cost, not at any level -- Australia is an English-speaking country with similar obscenity laws and a excellent grasp of American culture. There should not be any costs associated with "preparing" episodes for export to Australia, neither for broadcast nor for DVD.

People are pirating it because there is no other way to get it. For some inexplicable reason, the industry seems to think that there is little to no demand for importing these shows, and so they've neglected to do so. It's sort of sad, really; the industry hasn't always been this way. For example, Cartoon Network started airing late-night anime precisely because polls showed that the biggest demographic of anime fansubbers and traders was also the demographic most likely to sit up late at night and watch cartoons. While this may not seem like a big deal to you, it was an amazingly awesome thing for anime lovers, and I think that Cartoon Network got it right.

Your "wait for it" method assumes that the show in question will in fact be aired and released in Australia regardless of consumer input. This is not true. There are many shows in markets which simply never arrive in places due to a lack of demand. For every anime imported, dubbed, edited, NTSCed, and aired or released in America and Canada, there are dozens that they predict just won't sell no matter how snazzy the packaging is. The only way to show that there is a serious demand is to pirate the shows.

The TV business is usually not as receptive to input as the Adult Swim guys. They don't understand much besides money and ratings. The only way to force them to speed up their importing schedules is to create economic impetus -- to pirate the shows that are being demanded. Anything else is futile.

Brainwashed

[clang_jangle]

You sir are brainwashed.

The people who began calling the process of copying files from the network w/o the permission of the "IP owner" "piracy" and "stealing" are the **AA parasites, and they add little to no value while conspiring to hold us all back technologically and for what? To keep milking a clearly obsolete business model.

Data wants to be free; we can only restrict distribution and charge $$ for it by making some artificial arrangement (which is always going to be defeatable). Even so if they would price their "IP" at a level the market is willing to bear and provide it in a format people find useful (vs restictive) most people would rather just buy it, it's easier.
These are some *reasons* piracy happens.
So the real excuse makers and criminals here are the **AA .

All this is not big news --- do try to keep up old man!

The post about copying the ferarri is spot on and should be modded up.

Re:Brainwashed

[Dun Malg]

Data wants to be free;
Oh god, not that crap again - data isnt tangible, it doesnt want to *be* anything, let alone free. Hey genius, let me introduce you to the fascinating world of Rhetorical Devices.
Note that those with "nothing to lose but [their] chains" need not actually be confined by chains, nor does a comment of "I wouldn't want to be in your shoes" have anything to do with the relative merits of footwear.
"Information wants to be free" is a catch phrase, shorthand for the larger, more complex principle that the entire purpose of information is to be shared. But you knew that. You were just being an ass.

Tape Trading

[mrshowtime]

It seems that in the torrent age, everyone has forgotten that tv shows used to be traded on VHS all over the world. I used to get Dr. Who episodes from my cousins in England (I had a very expensive PAL/NTSC converter-player) and I used to trade episodes with a lot of people all over the world. Now I can just download whatever tv episodes that I want. I don't understand why nobody gave a shit about tape trading, but now if I share a private torrent or a custom made dvd of a tv show with my friends, instead of sending them a tape, I am a now PIRATE! Television has always been regarded as "disposable" entertainment. It was not till Lucille Ball started filming all her show that anyone thought that a tv show could hold any future value after once it aired. Look at the BBC, they have had a policy of no reruns past the original broadcast. While we here in the states got to watch Dr. Who/Blakes 7 over and over again on PBS stations, it was difficult to find old episodes in the UK.

Re:It's Still Wrong

[MillionthMonkey]

Well, we wanted all this "globalization", didn't we? And we have worldwide communication now, don't we? So why do they act surprised when people start pirating titles when they delay release dates across different continents by months?

I mean, geez, who's running the television industry, the Dutch East India Pictures Association? Why is their incompetence the fault of the market? Why do we have laws to protect incompetence?

SG-1, Doctor Who, Torchwood

[Anonymous Coward]

The first two I see have already been mentioned, and then there's Torchwood, the Doctor Who spinoff. There's no way we're going to see Torchwood here in the US... Too much swearing and nudity... Likely too much homosexual 'activity', as well.
And Sci-Fi channel, while I'm grateful you picked up SG-1, there's nothing you can say to convince me to wait until April to watch a series you've killed off and won't allow other networks to pick up since you have exclusive TV rights. Oh, and the whole wrestling thing... Screw that. Your credibility dies a little each time. In the meantime, you're bringing the whole piracy thing upon yourselves by trying to call the mid-season cliff-hangers "season finale/premieres"
As for Atlantis, well, same thing. You delay airing it by six months or so, all the while, the customers of other carriers of that program have this really neat series of tubes...
If your best argument is "you're breaking our copyrights" or "violating the law," then you need to re-think your lineup strategy, because I am not really interested in waiting THAT much longer just to watch your commercials. Maybe a few days, OK, if SkyOne is airing Tuesday, and you on Friday...

bullshit laws just suck

[zogger]

Now I am old enough and ornery enough and imbued with a certain sense of basic right and wrong. And as such, some of the things I did when I was younger was I walked in protest marches where the bullshit laws said people of a certain color could not use certain public facilities or go into certain open to the public businesses. Yes, that was "the law" back then and the pigs tried to enforce it, sometimes extremely violently, on orders from their masters, their pig political bosses and pig lawyers and pig "businessmen" who were worried about their pig "profits" should "the law" change, or some other weirdo crap they spewed. The law needed to be violated en masse once it became apparent the system was corrupt and so hopelessly broken that the only actions left to take was either break the law peacefully as possible or break the law violently and have a revolution. I can say it got close probably.

Back before my time, they tried to enforce "no, you can't ever have a drink, for any reason", and that was "the law", and the law was bullshit and it needed to be violated, en masse, and it was, because of basic human nature, that humans can see when things get to the "fuck you, that is total bullshit" stage. Humans can have a drink if they want to. I don't drink, don't like it, did for a long time but just quit, grew tired of it and prefer to be with all me wits all the time-but I don't care if other folks want to because it is their right to buy it or make it and drink it. The bullshit law eventually got changed back to medium non-bullshit. Because of mass "civil disobedience" which is a polite way of saying "you are full of bullshit and I no longer am going to respect your asinine "law".

It's something you can either see or not, two choices.

Right now copyright and patents are hopelessly broken, because of pigs and their profits, so they are being ignored, because it is basic human nature to not be gouged, lied to, taken advantage of, and so on.. People all over the developing world can't get affordable medicine to save their lives, so now they are just going "ok, enough,we've tried for years to be reasonable, but now that it is patented bullshit with extremely high artificial scarcity prices based on western income levels, which don't exist where we arem we are just going to make the medicines and fuck you and your gouging bullshit pig profits", because it is way past the obvious to anyone rational "bullshit stage" over there.

Now I personally don't download or violate any copyrights with music and movies, because I don't give two craps about hollywood movies and screeching popular music. I have more than what I want, bought it legit years ago, keep getting nailed with format changes, etc, so enough already, noticed the price gouging and bullshit "laws" that keep getting extended, so I quit buying their crap new. And if I can't get it over the air for free by the support of ads, either music or movies or shows, I just don't care, but I *certainly*, on general human principles can relate to people who are human and know they are being lied to, price gouged to the extreme, and forced into technological serfdom by the bullshit pigs of the media industry who want to keep technology to themselves and charge 1000% markups complete with more DRM and other bullshit buggywhip job protection practices and "laws". What do they expect, people will jump up and down and scream HALLELULAH! WE CAN KEEP BEING PRICE GOUGED OR IGNORED!

It used to be illegal for those pesky "commoners" to READ, that was "the law", it was bullshit and got violated and people learned anyway.

The redcoat pigs tried to say the early settlers had to pay taxes to some ignorant drunk royal "king" 3 thousand miles away for no representation, that was obvious bullshit,so the "law" got broken, along with enough redcoat heads to make the point stick.

And so on. Once stuff starts to get into the obvious bullshit stage, you can just expect it to be ignored/worked around/resisted, and depend

Would drive me batty...

[A_Non_Moose]

BSG's pilot, I watched a year or so after it aired after I downloaded it. Liked it and
watched "33" on Sci-fi's website for about 10 minutes before saying "screw this".

Real media (blech, but whatever) 3 inch window (c'mon, 640x480 days are long gone)
and of course frequent pauses for buffering.

Fired up BT client and all of the rips were from Aussie satellite and looked fantastic.
Also, they were 1/2 to 3/4 through season 1, so "what the heck" snagged them all before
they even showed on Sci-fi. Still watched them on Sci-fi (hey, Sci-fi/charter how about
a hi-def channel, or ffs a bit more gamme on your output, please! This is BSG, not
DooM3).

Still bought the DVDs.

Same thing with Dr Who, heck season 2 was worth it for the Daleks vs Cybermen exchange of
"Daleks would not be at war with the cybers, it would be more like pest control" (pause)
BWAAAHAHAHAHA.
Heck, I forget where Sci-fi is with Dr Who, but doesn't matter much as the DVD's are
released shortly after the British season ends, if I'm not mistaken. 80 bucks is
rather steep, but as I said, for some eps well worth the price.

Torchwood, too. Show grew on me quite quickly. Depending on season2, might actually
be worth it to get the DVDs.

Heck, the US/UK/Aus TV ppl would make a killing money/ratings-wise with an P2P/iTunes like
distribution without the bullshit delays and some easy way to unlock it/burn it.

Heck, the shows are going to get to viewers eyeballs one way or the other, and you'd think
something that benefits the studios bottom lines (rating/$) with them in the picture would
be better than out.

Global market whether they want to admit it or not, and as one quip by a brit I recall:
Yanks get Dr Who/Torchwood, and we get Sopranos and 24...fair trade.

Agreed, heck that 7month hiatus for BSG almost hurt, tho giving American Idol to the Aussies
first and us waiting a year sounds splendid.

Re:It's Still Wrong

[anagama]

This ignores the fact, whether illegal or not, that people will get the material when they want it. Laws and lawsuits notwithstanding, the media companies have a choice -- make some money and provide the content in a form people desire, or make little to no money and watch the people receive the content in a form they desire through unauthorized means.

Re:It's Still Wrong

[TeraCo]

It's true, it is nothing more than a justification. But strangely enough, we don't care.

I mean.. I'm pro-copyright in principle. I buy loads of stuff on itunes and I think there is a case for DRM (in that content producers should control what happens with their content) but ultimately, I'd rather download the TV shows now and buy the DVD's later than wait for Australian TV networks to get their shit together.

Ultimately downloading + DVD buying = Watching good TV shows earlier for me + Extra cash for the content producer + Australian TV stations getting fucked in the ass until they learn to quit screwing us around. It's win-win-win.

Re:It's Still Wrong

[bonhomme_de_neige]

Anime is the best example of this. Fansub groups have been pirating Anime for a couple of decades, more so in the past 5 years as VCD/DVD and digital subtitles became practical. Most fansub groups pirate material until such time it becomes licensed in their country, which they feel they contributed to creating a market for material that otherwise did not exist. 100% justified. Whether it's right or wrong is up to the respective copyright holders, who in the past have shown tolerance to anime fan-sub groups. You can't say it's wrong, holding the copyright alone gives you the moral and legal authority to what you want. I can say, without a doubt, my spending on import material has increased as a result of these anime pirates.

To add to this, Madman Entertainment, the (pretty much) sole distributer and licensee of Anime works in Australia, decides what to license and distribute next by collecting feedback from fans & customers and examining the rate of fansub downloads. When 100,000 people a week are downloading the next episode of series Y, it's hard to argue a case that they shouldn't put it out there on DVD ASAP.

Furthermore, they are usually very nice to small groups wanting to use their content - if you're a small club and you want to show something licensed by Madman at a members' screening, all you normally need to do is write them a polite email asking for permission, and it will be granted (on the 'condition' that you give out some promotional posters, which they will provide, at the screening, or something equally benign - in fact when I was organising such things we had people offer to pay for the posters when they missed out).

Madman has been expanding at an enormous rate since its foundation and it would be absolutely blind for anyone to say they are not profitable. Of course, they are a monopoly distributor to a niche market - but at the same time having their intellectual property "pirated" in this way hasn't hurt them one bit, because they've embraced it and found a way to use it to its full potential. And what better way to do your market research than to let your customers do it for you ... for free?/pP

Helpful hint for non-USians to use iTunes

[patio11]

You *can* download from US iTunes. You just need an American address, an email account which is not the same as the one linked to your AussieTunes account, and a US payment method. For the American address, you can use the White House for all I care (or, if this scares you for some reason, use Google maps to pick out a city/state at random and use "1234 Maple Street" with the appropriate zipcode). The email can be whatever the heck you want. The payment method is the only tricky part, and its a lot less tricky thanks to eBay. You see, lots of people who get gift certificates but really wanted cash put them up on eBay and some other sites. Buy some gift certificates from eBay (at a discount to face value), get the codes mailed to you, use them to buy from iTunes. Since you aren't inputting a credit card they won't have the computer verify your address because there is nothing to verify it against.

I keep two iTunes accounts around, one for Japan and one for the US. Thankfully they don't do geotracking or anything, and they'll both happily integrate into the same iPod/iTunes/etc.

(Incidentally, the White House address:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
)

Re:Helpful hint for non-USians to use iTunes

[Neoncow]

So in order to avoid copywrite infringment, you have to commit fraud to obtain these shows?

Re:It's Still Wrong

[WilliamSChips]

Go read a freakin' book! I hate people always saying this whenever TV comes up. If all I wanted to do was read books I wouldn't even own a TV. But I do own a TV.

Re:Here are some examples of the delays

[hoojus]

You forgot the other major problem we have in Australia. Non-continuity! It has been quite often the case (CSI a prime example) that the network would just stop the current season for no reason and start playing reruns in the same time slot. If it wasn't for Grisham's beard showing up in the first few minutes you would have to rack the brain to figure out if you saw it. Then they move it to a new time slot without warning and you end up missing part of the season until you remember to check through the TV guide for new schedules. And finally living in a sport loving nation any program can and will be stopped half way through a season just because some stupid men in white have to stop some little red ball from hitting their wickets!

And then they wonder why we download instead of attempting to watch a season on one of our useless commercial stations (we have a whole 3)

Yes I am bitter! but I do have difficulty discussing Heroes with friends as I am 12 episodes in front.

Re:Here are some examples of the delays

[AeroIllini]

Star Trek: Voyager was the worst

Right on.