★★★★★ 0/5

Seven’s FlashForward “leaked” to US

What did you see? Monday night's episode of FlashForward, screen in Australia before the US, is now a hotly-sought online torrent.

31
Leave a comment

joseph-fiennesMonday night’s episode of FlashForward was the last for the year on Seven, and screened before the US which took a broadcast break for Thanksgiving.

That resulted in the episode being uploaded as a torrent and now “leaked” to America.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that “Australians don’t care about our guilt-tinged empire-expanding holiday traditions and didn’t take a break. Whether the US-Aussie FlashForward schedule being jolted out-of-sync will result in future episodes also being leaked isn’t known.”

Presumably the episode will be downloaded across the US complete with a Channel 7 watermark.

It’s all rather ironic given Disney / ABC went to great lengths to make sure Aussie media didn’t reveal information on the series in the lead-up to the premiere, insisting they attend a cinema screening and sign confidentiality clauses.

The Hollywood Reporter goes as far as to note that “For the record, Aussies do have a Thanksgiving holiday, but it’s in May and they don’t really do it right.”

We do what?

Looks like somebody has been reading thanksgiving.org.au and presuming a religious observance amongst (some) worshippers is a national holiday. Not here, yankee…

Pass me the turkey.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

31 Responses

  1. Relatively few people download or care about it. As an American, though, I think it’s unfair that another country aired an episode of one of Our shows before it was aired in the US. The country of ownership should have first rights for TV broadcasting. I’d say the same of a Canadian or British, etc., show. FF is an American show, and people in This country therefore deserve first rights to it.

  2. @tasmanian devil – yes your right… now when was the new Scrubs starting LOL

    As for the ‘leak’ it’s not like most popular shows aired in the US end up online. If there wasn’t a demand for it then people wouldn’t bother putting stuff online. Look at, YouTube, iTunes and iView, if you build a successful service free or not people will use it!

    IMO it’s just sour grapes from fans in the US that didn’t get to see it first for once.

  3. Isn’t it great to see that all of Freeview’s restrictions (including the recent crippling of Sony’s PlayTV) have been so effective in stopping the unstoppable?

    The few original Australian shows worth the effort are out in the internet wild within minutes of their broadcast, and FlashForward was always going to join them with Australia getting to show it first. Happens when Canadian stations do ahead-of-time broadcasts as well.

    Hope the Americans enjoy all the pop-ups and promos and lack of HD. Thankfully Seven doesn’t do those awful blinding-white diagonal pop-ups any more or Australian TV would be a laughing stock.

    Oh, and Disney’s embargo back at the launch of the series now looks kinda foolish, doesn’t it? Then again, movie companies have for years gone to great lengths to prevent press coverage of their turkeys…

  4. Episodes are always leaked from the US to Aus, so now its time for the US TV giants to see what our TV networks (which are small time compared to the US ones) have to put up with.

  5. Americans, they think they’re the best at everything. And does it really matter if the episode was leaked? I really don’t understand why people download shows anyway. You’re not going to die if you have to wait a couple of days, weeks or even months. People have to learn to be patient.

  6. I like the irony that this is a show about seeing things before they happen.
    Anyone working at the Aussie Synchrotron willing to put their hand up to claim that they caused Australia to see this before the US?

Leave a Reply