Many New Zealanders have tried and failed to watch hit UK comedy Fleabag. One Australian journalist made his own valiant attempt to track it down
Last week I spent $16 trying to "illegally" download a TV show. It wasn't through BitTorrent, but the BBC. The purchase went through but - as I had been fairly warned - I was blocked from downloading the actual episodes.
Handing over my credit card details was the last futile attempt in my campaign to watch Fleabag from Australia.
I first noticed Fleabag while browsing Rotten Tomatoes for the best-rated new TV shows. It had an unusually high 100% score. Apparently it's a filthy, but incredibly sharp, black comedy about a troubled woman whose best friend just died.
No worries - a quick trip to Google Maps was able to fix that. Within a few minutes I had access to other Amazon Prime shows like The Man In The High Castle.
But still not Fleabag. It turns out that when you try to watch that one, it checks your IP - not just the dubious address in New Jersey you may or may not have provided.
Across the Atlantic to the BBC it was. All six episodes of Fleabag are streaming for free through the BBC's iPlayer - their iView - but only if you're inside the UK. "BBC iPlayer only works in the UK. Sorry, it's due to rights issues," the website politely informed me.
OK. Back to Google. Searches for any and every variation of "how to buy Fleabag" I could think of only revealed a single option - which was that, for some reason, you can also buy the show through the BBC website even though it was streaming for free. Everything that happened after this point is my own fault.
Yes, the BBC warned me that I should not try to buy something if I was outside of the UK. Yes, I did it anyway - banking on there being some small chance of success.
No, there wasn't.
Six years ago, when I was the technology reporter for news.com.au, we held a survey of more than 7000 people who admitted to illegally downloading movies, TV shows or music. The overall finding was that, back then, convenience was one of the main motivators for illegal downloads and that pirates would pay for a legal service that was as easy at BitTorrent.
The incredible uptake of paid subscription streaming services in Australia in the past few years seems to me to have proved that point.
For me personally, there has been absolutely no need to even consider torrenting a TV show or movie for several years (and I dislike the idea of doing so). But occasionally there are moments like this where the expectations of internet-connected Gen Y and the old barricades of traditional media clash.
No doubt the reason I can't watch Fleabag right now is because an Australian network has paid for the rights to screen it in the future - months after it debuted in the US and UK.
I remember at the time I was writing about issues like this, I spoke to a big studio executive who explained why it's sometimes necessary that that's the case. Sometimes, he said, premieres are rolled out in various stages for practical reasons so that the actors can be available at different times to fly over and talk to local media and things like that.
But to be honest, those concerns are of little interest to me.
I don't know who has the rights to Fleabag, but if it's a free-to-air channel I'll just be waiting for them to put it on their streaming player after it screens anyway. I haven't had my TV plugged into the antenna for about a decade now, and the idea of watching something at a specific time of day is simply bizarre to me.
It's just as bizarre to me as the idea of not being able to pay $16 to download watch a TV show that aired four months ago.
I won't, however, pirate Fleabag. I'll wait patiently while Australia catches up, and I even kind of hope this helps the show with a bit of extra publicity.
I'm not sure if I mentioned, but it looks fantastic.
