ITWire

After stuffing around McLeod’s Daughters fans by keeping the final season of the show in TV-land limbo for months, if not longer, Channel Nine has in typical PR style decided to turn news of the show’s return into a display of recognition for “loyal” viewers.

While Channel Nine did show three episodes of McLeod's Daughters before the Olympics, it has frustratingly, for McLeod's fans, decided to wait until the end of the year before showing the rest on free-to-air television.

Even so, Channel Nine and NineMSN have managed a surprise: the first three aired episodes are now online, as are six more unaired episodes from the 21 eps in the final series, with episodes 10 to 21 going online on a week-by-week basis from now onwards at NineMSN.

However, cynical viewers, many of whom have turned in disgust to illegal TV show downloads at the poor treatment they’ve received by Australian TV networks, could be forgiven for thinking it’s all just a publicity stunt to pump up NineMSN figures a bit.

But the reality is that downloadable TV shows and video are on the up and up, and even our Government protected Australian TV networks have no choice but to wake up to the reality of TV show downloading, whether legally, or illegally.

Of course, Channel Nine is going for the legal download route, although it has suffered at the hands of TV pirates who had made the entire Underbelly series available for illegal P2P download long before the show had actually finished airing on free-to-air TV.

So, Channel Nine are making some of the McLeod’s Daughters TV show available to download before the episodes actually air, with the “Catch Up TV” service being the place to download the show every Wednesday until the season ends, with free-to-air television for once being behind the online broadcasting.

While this is great for those owning computers, I can imagine execs saying to themselves: “We’ll just stuff this show into December for free-to-air, but if they want to see it now, I hope they’ve got a modern computer, broadband, lots of hard disk space, and aren’t stuck on one of those evil 400MB “fraudband” plans!”.

Of course this just came from my head, and not from any Channel Nine or NineMSN executive, but you have to wonder if that bit of fiction has any reality to it. Maybe they think it’s a Christmas present, being a December thing.

So, what's a glaringly odd statement that Channel Nine has made in its press release? And what else does Channel Nine offer to download via Catch Up TV?

Please read on to page 2.