Lee Stone

This post isn’t about the finale of Lost, but how it was made available.

The fact that it was shown at the same time in the US and UK I think was a brilliant idea. However, it’s a shame they didn’t do the same for iTunes downloads.

As I don’t have sky in my house, I’ve been subscribed to the Lost series pass on iTunes. Therefore, with Lost being shown on TV early Monday morning, I was hoping it would become available during the day for download so I could watch it that evening. But it didn’t.

I saw tweets from the US saying it was available at mid-afternoon UK time. I still hasn’t received an email saying it was ready to download for me though. When I got home that evening, it still wasn’t available for me.

I’d quite successfully avoided spoilers during the day, but knew I couldn’t do that much longer, so immediately went looking for other sources to get the episode – one of the things they’d tried to prevent by showing it at the same time!

Fortunately, my parents have a Sky subscription, so I was able to use their account to watch it through the Sky Player online (though this experience is by nowhere near great – the player is a bit buggy (I had to use IE as it wouldn’t work in Firefox or Chrome) and the quality isn’t great either).

I finally got an email saying the episode was ready to download at 1:45 Tuesday morning. Not too bad a turnaround (if it wasn’t the finale of Lost, I could have waited till then), but it would be nice to see the shows being available to download closer to their air time.

As for the final episode of Lost, I would say it was pretty good, though I was a little disappointed by the whole idea when it became clear.