But now Australian broadcaster ABC is aiming to beat the pirates by satisfying demand from one of the most avid groups of fans.

It will place online episodes of the upcoming seventh series of Doctor Who just 50 minutes after they end up in the UK (announcement).

Although the September 1 season opener won’t air on Australian television until September 8, by placing the episodes on its iview catch-up service just after UK transmission ends, ABC will eliminate the week-long opportunity pirated copies have previously had to gain viewer share.

Typically, shows are added to catch-up services only after their broadcasters’ linear TV transmission.

ABC1 controller Brendan Dahill (via News.com.au):

“Piracy is wrong, as you are denying someone their rights and income for their intellectual property. The fact that it is happening is indicative that as broadcasters we are not meeting demand for a segment of the population.

“So as broadcasters we need to find convenient ways of making programs available via legal means to discourage the need for piracy.”

Of course, this won’t stop ripped encodings from being made or circulated. But ABC, by super-serving Doctor Who fans (the episodes will go online at 5.10am on a Sunday following UK transmission), will likely gather to its official channel an audience renowned for wanting to see its favourite show as soon as possible.

ABC has previously experimented with placing its legal drama, Rake, on iview before TV transmission.

News.com.au: “This is the first time a big blockbuster TV show will air in full on an Australian online player within hours of its official release elsewhere.”

The venture, a first for BBC Worldwide, will feature several digitally-remastered stories via the show’s Facebook page. They will be accessible by Facebook users in Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

They will include older stories like “Tomb of the Cybermen” as well as more recent story lines like “Silence in the Library” and “End of the World.” One of them, “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” will be released on Facebook before it has even had its DVD window. Each story line features several episodes, and each rental lasts 48 hours.

The cost for each set of episodes will be 15 credits, or the equivalent of £0.93 ($1.47). As it does with games like Zynga’s FarmVille, Facebook will take a 30 percent cut of each sale.

Facebook is the latest online platform experiment for BBC Worldwide, which also syndicates content on YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG). It has already seen a lot of traffic for its content from Facebook, with the car show Top Gear deriving 30 percent of all of its traffic to TopGear.com from its Facebook fan page. The FT notes that Top Gear might become the next brand that BBC Worldwide ports to the Facebook Credits platform.

For Facebook, the BBC is its latest conquest in its aim to become distribution hub and financial conduit for digital content.

Warner Bros earlier this year started to rent out films on the platform.

And the TV production company Endemol is now also using Facebook Credits as a currency for public voting on the German series of Big Brother.

BBC Worldwide is expected to soon launch a long-awaited international version of its iPlayer VOD service as an iPad app.