When Walter White was faced with sky-rocketing medical bills after a lung cancer diagnosis, he decided to cook and sell crystal meth. When his Australian fans were faced with waiting hours – and paying a considerable amount of cash – to watch the series finale of Breaking Bad, we illegally downloaded it.
Viewers with patience and a Foxtel subscription could have watched the final episode of this already iconic series at 6.30pm (or even 10.30pm) – four-and-a-half hours after the show was aired on the US west coast. They could have used a VPN to bypass geographical restrictions on overseas streaming services such as Netflix UK, which offered legal streaming the next morning. Perhaps they could have bought a season pass for the show on iTunes and waited until the wee hours of Monday morning to start downloading it.
Or they could have simply downloaded the show, along with the 500,000 other people Torrentfreak reported as having downloaded Breaking Bad within 12 hours of it finishing on the American premium cable channel AMC.
And it seems many Australians chose that final option. Australians constituted a world-beating 18% of Torrentfreak's total figure. We may not have won the Ashes, but with 90,000 downloads we walloped the Brits here on a measly 9.3%, with Americans on the same figure. If Australians are swashbucklers on the high seas, the rest of the world are just Jack Sparrow in cosplay.
I am one of that 18%, despite having the option to watch the show legally on Foxtel. When it comes to the series finale of a show like Breaking Bad, the idea of waiting six and half hours after the episode ended on the US east coast to even press play just doesn't cut it. It's like finding out your partner is about to give birth and deciding to walk to the hospital instead of drive.
But it's not just about the timing. Only 71,000 people watched the finale on Foxtel on Monday night. While I have a Foxtel subscription, others blanch at the substantial cost. A package that includes Showcase, the channel airing premium HBO content, costs from $72 a month. The cheapest way to watch the show as soon as possible was to use Foxtel Play, which costs a staggering $50 a month. If you were only interested in Breaking Bad, that works out at $12.50 an episode. And lots of viewers are increasingly interested in just a handful of shows: the policy of viewers having to buy packages of channels together is both prohibitively expensive and frustratingly inflexible.
And even if you do hand over the substantial sums, viewers still have to wait for the show to air after the US. It feels like instead of paying for content, Australians are paying to wait – and for long as the situation persists, piracy rates are not going to decrease. Anyone who logged on to social media on Monday knows that their best course was, as Walt would say, to tread lightly – I know that I would rather live with the burden of soul-crushing piracy guilt than have had the show's ending spoiled.
This was one of the most thrilling, definitive television shows in memory – and I'd wager that most of the people who rushed to download this final episode are big enough fans to fork out for the box set. That seems a far better way of showing your appreciation for a show than having to pay Rupert Murdoch large amounts of money for the privilege of watching a TV show at not quite the same time as in the US.
I don't want to have to download Breaking Bad or the king of downloaded shows, Game of Thrones, or anything else. But until Foxtel and broadcast networks realise that the only way to get straying audiences back into the fold is to make them feel like their money is worth something, in this kind of circumstance it's the most reasonable option.
One network is taking a step in the right direction: on Monday Ten offered Homeland's premiere for streaming 15 minutes after it began on America's west coast. It's one of the first times a commercial network has provided Australians with a streaming option worthy of use.
With geoblocking of high-quality streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu likely to remain thanks to the industry's fatal dependence on territorial licensing, this is a problem that will not go away. Ignoring the demands of an audience more stratified than ever – all watching in different ways and at different times – not only created the downloading trend, it is perpetuating it.
