The recent news was that the BBC has bought “lifetime rights” to Heroes. This essentially means that Sky or another broadcaster won’t be able to come in and outbid the Beeb. I expect that also means that the BBC is also compelled to buy future series whether they’d like to or not. It was a similar deal to the one that Five did early in the life of CSI that ensured that they’re the primary UK broadcaster for that series and all its spin-offs.
But more interesting is the news that BBC Two will be broadcasting the third season of Heroes in the same week as NBC in the US, or as near to as they can. This is something we’re only going to see more of, and I wonder how much of it is to do with fans of the series either simply downloading shows from the US in advance of watching it in the UK or more simply the fact that with the internet, we know too much too soon if we don’t watch shows like this quickly. It’s obviously been a concern at Sky who’ve ensured that major series like Lost, Prison Break, 24 and Battlestar Galactica all air in the UK as close to their US airdates as possible. Why download if you can watch it comfortably on your TV in a day or so?
In any event, for cult series like this it’s something to be applauded, although I worry about the nature of US networks scheduling patterns being mirrored by the BBC. Is NBC going to give Heroes an uninterrupted run before Christmas without running repeats?
One additional thing the BBC might want to be doing is running the webisodes that NBC.com has running until the series returns. No sign of them on the BBC Heroes website, and yet UK viewers are geo-locked out from seeing the episodes on the US site. Shame.