I'm watching Mad Men s.5 via a US iTunes account. It cost me $31.99 (£21.38) for the HD season pass. In the UK store Mad Men season 4 in HD retails for £28.99 and there's no sign of season 5.
Personally I don't like using "alternative means" to obtain US programming - as Jerry Seinfeld once lamented, "I don't wanna be a pirate!" - but the media companies deny the content to those willing to pay so what do they expect? I watched Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire thanks to friends who have Sky Atlantic and recorded it for me, and have "legitimised" that viewing by buying the box sets of both once available, but I will be in the minority. I'm not taking a moral high ground though and think that the media companies (Sky, HBO, AMC et al) encourage piracy with their draconian content strategy. Did they learn nothing from the music industry's collapse??
That Sky Atlantic's initial viewing figures (which exclude timeshifted viewing) are so low for the premiere, despite the hype, is hardly a surprise as it wasn't a popular show even on BBC4. But Mad Men is an expensive show to produce and you would think the producers would want to reach as broad a paying audience as possible, rather than just find the show as minority viewing available to a limited audience.
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I wonder whether in future Sky will put this on Now TV and charge an arm and a leg for access. For the moment though there is some irony in a much larger number of people spending their time dodging spoilers (as was the case reading the tv review in the Guardian yesterday) than actually watching it in the UK. This would be amusing if it were not rather more annoying.
One route people can take if they want access to more content through a legal route is to use Netflix US. It's incredibly easy to set-up if you have a PS3, and you can use a bog standard UK Netflix account and UK PSN account. You just change a few DNS settings on the PS3 (see YouTube tutorials for how to do this, it's incredibly easy and takes about 5 seconds).
There's no Netflix series 5 there yet, but they do have 1-4 in HD, plus a ton of other stuff not available on the wasteland that is Netflux UK.
Oh and as for Madmen S05E01-02. It was of course, superb, as expected.
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