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NBC Launches Hobbled TV Show Download Service

Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 8:45 AM - by

NBC is launching its own TV show download service following the broadcaster's split with Apple and the iTunes Store. NBC's own service, called NBC Direct, will let users download shows for free, but with several strings attached, according to Forbes.

Episodes will be available for only a week after they first air on television, and will expire once that window passes. Shows will include embedded advertisements that can't be skipped, and playback requires Windows, leaving Mac users out in the cold. NBC does, however, plan on offering support for Mac OS X before the end of the year.

NBC Direct will feature new episodes from returning shows like Heroes and The Office, and episodes from upcoming new series including The Bionic Woman.

The service will start up in October in a test phase. NBC plans to eventually add the ability to automatically download shows through subscriptions, and also plans to offer high definition versions for download.

Apple and NBC parted ways after the two companies failed to reach an agreement during contract renewal negotiations in August. Even though NBC's contract runs through December, Apple chose not to carry the network's fall lineup at the iTunes Store since customers would only be able to download a partial season.

NBC has also signed a deal to offer its shows through Amazon's Unbox service because Amazon was willing to agree to NBC's demands for more flexible pricing -- a demand that Apple refused.

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DaiMac said:

member since 29 Jun 2001 with 952 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Sep 20, 2007 10:34 am

So, still not even close to the ease of use of iTunes, not to mention the various illegal ways to get the same shows? Well that will certainly result in an increase over their revenues from iTunes...oh wait.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Sep 20, 2007 10:44 am

Do they honestly expect that people are going to use this "service"? I suppose they actually do, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered. They are in for an extremely rude awakening...

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Terrin said:

member since 29 Jan 2006 with 414 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Sep 20, 2007 11:04 am

I can't use it, I use a Mac. Even if I did, I wouldn't use it because I do not want to support NBC.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Sep 20, 2007 11:38 am

DaiMac wrote:
So, still not even close to the ease of use of iTunes, not to mention the various illegal ways to get the same shows? Well that will certainly result in an increase over their revenues from iTunes...oh wait.

How can you tell the ease of use without even seeing it? For Windows users, this could be a much easier experience for the eps that are available. Automatically downloading seems to be a nice feature. As far as revenues go, they might realize for more per episode viewed than they could with iTunes. Except instead of the viewer shelling out the cash, the advertisers do.

I'm also surprised at how many people say they cannot use something that only supports Windows on a Mac. Is running Windows on a Mac really that bad?

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Sep 20, 2007 11:56 am

I wouldn't know. I have no reason to buy a copy of Microsoft Windows and really, it isn't worth $200+ to watch an NBC show WITH COMERCIALS that I could watch for free from other sources.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Sep 20, 2007 12:20 pm

Come on now, do you really expect people to pay for such GARBAGE? Videos with commercials that you can't skip? Better off just using a VCR off of the TV and getting your videos that way. You don't have to watch the commercials and it's free. It's no wonder that iTunes is so popular and such a great service. Commercial free video's that you can not only buy and keep, but also use on your portable devices when you are on the go. NBC, stop kidding yourself because this plan isn't going to work. Amazon isn't going to be much help to you either as 75% of the market buys from iTunes and I seriously doubt that will change. Apparently someone at NBC is just as ignorant as some of the record label execs and they just don't get it.

By the way, windows is a pain in the butt to run and when you have the choice between OSX and windows, the choice is obviously OSX.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Sep 20, 2007 2:51 pm

Guest wrote:
[quote="Is running Windows on a Mac really that bad?

Yes, it is. It really is.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Sep 20, 2007 3:44 pm

Guest wrote:
Come on now, do you really expect people to pay for such GARBAGE? Videos with commercials that you can't skip? Better off just using a VCR off of the TV and getting your videos that way. You don't have to watch the commercials and it's free.

Did you miss the part where you don't have to pay for it? I agree with using a VCR or DVR, that's my preference, but there are times when you didn't set it up correctly, it fails, or you just plain didn't know about a show before it aired. In that case, free online video is a nice alternative.

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Intruder said:

member since 07 Jul 2004 with 3149 posts, TMO Mac Specialist, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Sep 20, 2007 3:57 pm

Anonymous wrote:
I'm also surprised at how many people say they cannot use something that only supports Windows on a Mac. Is running Windows on a Mac really that bad?

Not everybody has an Intel Mac. Spending $80 for Parallels (or $50 or whatever for VMWare) plus the cost of Windows just to watch TV on an Intel Mac probably isn't very palatable for most people either. If someone has no other need for Windows on a Mac, then this isn't very cost-effective.

If they wanted to, I'm sure that they could come up with a way to be fully cross-platform (including Linux). They choose not to.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Sep 20, 2007 5:45 pm

Guest wrote:
Guest wrote:
Come on now, do you really expect people to pay for such GARBAGE? Videos with commercials that you can't skip? Better off just using a VCR off of the TV and getting your videos that way. You don't have to watch the commercials and it's free.

Did you miss the part where you don't have to pay for it? I agree with using a VCR or DVR, that's my preference, but there are times when you didn't set it up correctly, it fails, or you just plain didn't know about a show before it aired. In that case, free online video is a nice alternative.

I would rather (and have done so) pay $1.99 to iTunes in order to watch a TV program that I've missed without commercials. That's my first choice. As a matter of fact, sometimes I've paid for the show just so I don't have to waste my time watching the commercials. Second choice is borrowing it from a friend, third is waiting for the DVD set and fourth is downloading it online which of course I would never do because it is illegal.

Way, way, way down at the bottom of the list is to go to NBC. I don't think it will ever come to that.

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A guest said: (hide)

Fri Sep 21, 2007 12:53 pm

DVR is definitely my first choice, it's the highest quality, it's free, and it's commercial free. My second choice would be a free online source, the NBC online video fills this need but I don't like that it is time limited, and one week is especially too short and unusable if you go on a two week vacation. The bottom of my list, so far down that I have only done it about once per service just to test them, is to pay for a DRM'd computer file. I too would prefer to wait for the DVD which is essentially free with a Netflix/Blockbuster subscription and higher quality than probably any of the online sources. It's main drawback is time, it simply will not work to catch you up to the current season. iTunes and other "pay-per-file" services are just too much money for content that is already available from legal sources for free, and the highest quality of those legal services is free.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Sep 26, 2007 10:39 am

Terrin wrote:
I can't use it, I use a Mac. Even if I did, I wouldn't use it because I do not want to support NBC.

GOODNIGHT!! You Mac fanboy's are seriously in the RDF. Get over Apple. I would much rather watch something for free with a few commercials than pay for a poor quality episode from itunes. Oh, & did you do the math with buying off of itunes? You pay as much or more than you would waiting for the season on DVD! & its less quality with no special features!

I run a mac, I think it sucketh. I can't wait to get into Win/linux where real computing is done. Now, I am done.

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DaiMac said:

member since 29 Jun 2001 with 952 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:29 pm

Anonymous wrote:
Terrin wrote:
I can't use it, I use a Mac. Even if I did, I wouldn't use it because I do not want to support NBC.

GOODNIGHT!! You Mac fanboy's are seriously in the RDF. Get over Apple. I would much rather watch something for free with a few commercials than pay for a poor quality episode from itunes. Oh, & did you do the math with buying off of itunes? You pay as much or more than you would waiting for the season on DVD! & its less quality with no special features!

Totally wrong, for various reasons I've gotten to compare DVDs of NBC TV shows (Battlestar Galactica and The Office) to their iTunes counterparts, and with the exception of occasional compression artifacts during deep black starscape shots in BSG there is no functional difference in quality. Both are in 480p, Apple's m4v files are compressed but its very close to lossless in most cases. Also, many of the "problems" with some shows on iTunes are issues with the people doing the encoding (South Park comes to mind) not Apple's software specifically.

As to special features, very rarely is there one I really care about on a DVD, so personally I'm not swayed. With TV shows its usually even less important than movies. There are even times when iTunes > DVD there, as with the latest South Park season being offered uncensored on iTunes, it may be changing with the next DVD release but as of Season 9 (the last one I bought) the DVDs have bleeps.

As to your silly little OS trolling, well there is no need to break that one down, you made your fanboy statement and it stands alone as such.

Also to the guest (assuming its not the same one) who said something about "how could I know about its ease of use yet", as others have said its Windows platform dependence shows how easy to use it is. Having used Windows MCE and iTunes extensively, I would never, ever go back to using my Windows box as the primary storage/download spot for videos and music, it was incredibly slow and annoying even on a newer PC. Plus, its harder to get Media Center to accept QT files than it is to run WMV in iTunes/QT Player, in my experience. I go with the easiest and fastest, and that remains Apple. iTunes needs serious improvements in several areas (file database management being the most glaring IMO), but for now its still the easiest way to _legally_ download multimedia content that I've encountered.

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A guest said: (hide)

Mon Dec 03, 2007 2:19 pm

I had downloads of all but the last two episodes of The Office Season 3 from iTunes. Of course, neither of these epiodes are on the NBC site. To make matters worse, I have a Mac and can neither watch the episodes on the NBC site nor purchase them from Amazon. These guys have let their egos get in the way of good business sense. They just lost another (formerly) dedicated viewer. Sniff.

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