You can bet that people at Fox are furious at the moment. This weekend, the first four hours of 24 were leaked and there are plenty of torrents of the episodes around. The four episodes are airing next weekend over two nights to kick off season/day 6.
It seems that they came from a DVD of the episodes which Fox is due to release after the show’s aired. Quite why the episodes are being released this way is a little unclear. I know that each season’s boxsets are enormously popular, but that tends to be because a lot of people like to get the story over and done with relatively quickly rather than wait months on end to get to a resolution.
Anyway, DVDs need to get produced early and a group got hold of a copy, ripped it, and put it on the net. I’m guessing that Sky are also going to be a little upset over here, although I’m a little surprised that Sky is airing episodes a week later in the UK, and they’re spreading the first four hours over two consecutive Sundays meaning that we’ll be two weeks behind the States. Not a lot, you might think, but plenty enough reason to, ahem, use other techniques to watch episodes.
Anyway, must either go to bed or get back to my (Divx/Xvid enabled) DVD player…