Do you like watching TV shows? Then pay up. More than anyone else in the world. Australians have to pay four times more than overseas users for TV series.

The pricey legal ways to view global shows include pay television, Foxtel and stream or download programs with Google Play, iTunes or Apple TV. But a consumer group, Choice, has rated the TV shows as expensive. Australians can watch Season 5 of "The Walking Dead" at a cost of $39.99 through iTunes, 376 percent more than consumers of Now TV in the UK. Another new series, "Orange is the New Black," is also expensive. It is marked for Foxtel Play users at $45.45. This is 431 percent more than Netflix clients from the U.S. Choice saw that a few of the shows are not even accessible to Aussies. The Steven Soderbergh drama, "The Knick," is showing in the U.S, but refuses to fall below Singapore. Clients are being knocked with the Australia Tax on digital content. There are business models that are pressurising Australians to hike prices for content.

Choice chief executive Alan Kirkland has some explanations for the high prices. "The pay TV industry is probably the most protected industry in Australia," he says, to ABC Radio, as reported by Daily Mail. The rates, in fact, are due to heavy domination by Foxtel, he adds. Choice Research has found that local digital providers shoot up their prices due to low competition. The middlemen are not responding to changing technology or giving affordable content.

In fact, online piracy of TV shows is becoming viral, mainly because of the skyrocketing prices. The shooting rates, weak service and a slow, ponderous pace is driving consumers to explore other options.

Recently, some suggestions to lower the rates have been drawn up by experts. A few would like to see if internet providers could block users who download files. Others feel that providers could ban websites from abroad from giving access to pirated files. Hence, about 200,000 Australians are signing up for the U.S. digital provider, Netflix, so that their access is cheap and quick. Gizmodo, a study in July, said that Netflix's popularity is second only to Foxtel. About 27 percent of Australians use this fundamental rental service. But the average consumer needs to be braced for another reality: even an alternative that is priced lower than Foxtel, through Google Play, is available for $27.26---219 percent more than other Netflix users.

Meanwhile, the government is getting ready to crack down on Internet piracy. It is also driving the federal government to search for some ways of beating the online copyright infringement.

In July, the Minister for Communications, Malcolm Turnbull, suggested that programs could be made available in Australia easily and efficiently. A Spotify-style service could make the access easier. Meanwhile, the content owners, too, should make it universally available.

"So everyone has to play their part ... the content owners ... are the ones who have to justify why they are charging more in Australia, why they are not releasing content in Australia at the same time it is released elsewhere in the world," he said, according to Daily Mail.