ABC's Doctor Who Fast-tracking Holds Pirates At Bay

For the second time in the ABC's history they are premiering one of their big ticket shows online. For the second time it's BBC megahit Doctor Who.

Last week the national broadcaster announced they would be airing the new season of Doctor Who a week after it was screened in the UK.

Today however the ABC released a statement unveiling plans to premiere the show online ahead of the screening date announced last week.

In one of the surest signs that Australian networks are finally understanding how to combat the threat of torrented TV, iview will go live the opening episode of the seventh series of the revived Doctor Who at 5.10am Sunday 2 September - "immediately after its UK launch on September 1".

The show will then be broadcast by ABC1 on 7.30pm Saturday 8 September.

While commercial networks have had varying success with 'fast-tracking' hit US shows (often the clash between our rating season and US scheduling has made this difficult), our payTV networks here are having huge success with expressing US cable shows such as Game Of Thrones and Breaking Bad.

The ABC though is leading the way with online scheduling, iview is this country's most-watched catch-up service. They claim 48% of online Australians aged 16+ have accessed iview. The new iview app has already recorded 434,000 downloads to date.

ABC1 Controller Brendan Dahill called the news of the Doctor Who debut "a fantastic opportunity to see new episodes within hours of them premiering in the UK." He added, "Each episode will be available on iview on Sundays.”

[This story has been edited, originally it reported the online airing time as 5.10pm, this has been corrected to 5.10am.]