They have to ramp up production, which means hiring lots of animators, training them in the stock drawings, and start producing episodes. It'll take them time to get to a point where they can put out the requisite number of episodes in a season, and they don't want to start broadcasting until the production team hits that target. Since there was no contract before, they didn't have the money nor (I'm sure) did they want to take the risk of blowing a bunch of dough getting things ready only to have it all blow out if the network backed off.

While Futurame uses computer animation, most of it is still classic cell animation, and that kind of animation is incredibly labour intensive. It's going to take time for them to get up to speed...

<off-key>Anticipation, anticipa-a-tion</off-key>

--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada               [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------