“Direct From The US”

Recently Australia has started to see a kind of evolution of the way we are presented with television. By this I mean networks putting more effort (and money) into allowing us to see programs soon after they are aired in the US. Of course the marketing speak like "streamed direct from the US" sometimes makes you wonder how they can consider a week later to be "direct" but this is easy to forgive.

I think the reason for this was rather obvious: Australians represented a disproportionate number of the people who regularly download TV shows from torrent sites and other sources. Obviously having to wait a year ore more to find what happens in your favourite show when you could find out inside a day is not something a lot of people are going to put up with. Personally I'm one of the people who downloads quite a number of TV shows from various other countries (mostly Japan and the US) but if I have the option of watching a

HD broadcast while not eating up my bandwidth I will definitely take it. I have so many shows I enjoy watching that I don't mind waiting that extra week.

Not every show gets this kind of treatment of course but the ones that do are usually advertised heavily. From the ones I watch there are: House, Life, My Name Is Earl and Heroes. Less popular shows like Smallville and Numb3rs are not so lucky. Still, I think this is definitely a step in the right direction. The only problems I can see are that scripted TV shows are a dying breed and that television itself is a dying medium that in the near future will be superseded by high-speed internet connection with streaming video, such as the increasing available IPTV.

Have any readers made the switch back to actual TV or do the delays and need to stick to a scheduled time still make you prefer downloads?