September 20th, 2007
NBC.COM to offer free downloads of TV shows
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
On Thursday, NBC announced a new service, “NBC Direct.” NBC Direct will allow users to download and view many popular NBC shows — for free. The shows will require a special player, and they will have a license that expires one week after the original airing — note carefully, not one week after you download it, but one week after the show originally aired. This announcement comes only three weeks after NBC Universal dropped out of the iTunes service and two weeks after it moved its television content to Amazon Unbox.
Besides the one week time limit, the gotcha is that while the shows are free, they will contain ads which cannot be skipped. Users could also subscribe to shows, meaning the shows would automatically be delivered to their PCs as soon after the broadcast as the downloads are available.
The first version of this new feature, which will begin beta testing in October, will allow users to download full length episodes for viewing on Windows based PCs. Each original episode will be licensed to users for viewing through “NBC Direct” for one week following broadcast and will then expire. The downloaded file will provide users with an improved overall viewing experience compared to traditional streaming video. The list of programs available at launch will include “Heroes,” “The Office,” “Life,” “Bionic Woman,” “30 Rock,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” Source: NBC Press Release
We Say: The Bionic Woman? They have high hopes for that show, I guess. Macs and iPods are in the future plans for the service. They will also later expand the service to allow customers to pay a fee for downloads that they would then own and could transfer to other devices.
Hmmm. I’m sorry, that sounds a lot like that iTunes store you just left, eh NBC? Personally, watching on a PC just doesn’t have the same oomph as watching on my 65″ HDTV. I will admit, this would be a great service if for some reason I missed a show, but that doesn’t happen very often with my Tivo (only in the event of a power outage — knock on wood). So for me this service - and for that matter, iTunes video downloads - are not an attractive option.
waiting says:
I,m Waiting.
September 20th, 2007 at 2:09 am
Roger says:
Obviously you didn’t hook up your HDTV to a media pc. Besides having all the on-demand viewing cable tv has been screaming about for much less you also suddenly got a huge screen PC.
September 20th, 2007 at 2:13 am
Nathan says:
Roger is right…for an author writing for “realTECHnews”, you don’t seem to be too tech savy if you haven’t hooked up your computer to your HDTV. It costs what…less than $100? Less than 1% of what your TV probably cost…
September 20th, 2007 at 2:35 am
DavidT says:
Well I am not tech-savvy in this respect, so can I ask Roger or Nathan, ‘Are you referring to streaming into your PC somehow, and using an HDTV as the display, or streaming into a HDTV from a cable service, and connecting the HDTV to a PC to capture and save the stream in a PC?’ I think the latter might be quite nice.
September 20th, 2007 at 3:20 am
John Corliss says:
So they’re still trying to shove commercials down everybody’s throats. I hardly watch television anymore because there are so many commercials that it’s not even worth the effort to fast forward through them all. When is the advertising community going to learn that forcing somebody to watch a commercial about a product in which they have no interest isn’t going to work. I refuse to shut off my brain for the 30 seconds that it takes to wait out one about some idiotic female personal hygiene spray for instance.
September 20th, 2007 at 4:52 am
Michael Santo says:
Roger and Nathan: first of all I have plenty of other stuff to do besides watch TV and other media. TV is a very small part of my life. Additionally, the normal person is not tech-savvy like us, so that would point to a smaller client base. Which is really the point of the comments. This site is not just for technophiles.
September 20th, 2007 at 7:06 am
Stephen says:
I have to agree with john corliss. the commercials on there are absolutely unbearable. They force you to watch 2 40 sec commercials in a row and we all know that 1 min 20 sec is an eternity on the internet. The funny thing is half the time they commercial doesn’t even pop up for me so I’m stuck with a blank screen…RE-tarded.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:47 pm