“NBC Universal said [Wednesday] that it would soon permit consumers to download many of NBC’s most popular programs free to personal computers and other devices for one week immediately after their broadcasts,” Bill Carter reports for The New York Times.
“The service, which is set to start in November after a test period in October, comes less than three weeks after NBC Universal said it was pulling its programs out of the highly successful iTunes service of Apple Inc. That partnership fell apart because of a dispute over Apple’s iTunes pricing policies and what NBC executives said were concerns about lack of piracy protection,” Carter reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple and NBC remain in negotiations. NBC TV shows remain for sale at Apple’s iTunes Store.
“Under the new NBC service, called NBC Direct, consumers will be able to download, for no fee, NBC programs… But the files, which would be downloaded overnight to home computers, would contain commercials that viewers would not be able to skip through. And the file would not be transferable to a disk or to another computer. The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable,” Carter reports.
“‘Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,’ said Jeff Gaspin, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group,” Carter reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Also, if you don’t wise up quickly, Jeff, just like your career and the careers of many others that your kind always take with you. Let’s see: predicting the future of technology: Steve Jobs or Jeff Gaspin? Puleeze. Jeff, wake up, you dumb-ass. Give it to us in an acceptable way or we will take it. Period. End of discussion. Get it now, Jeffie?
Carter continues, “The programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later… Chris Crotty, an analyst for iSuppli, an independent firm that specializes in analysis of new electronic media, said of the NBC move, ‘I think it’s a stretch.’ He argued that consumers have shown they are extremely happy with the iTunes service and that it would not be attractive to consumers to have to range far and wide over a number of services to find the programs they want to download… ‘The consumers have decided they want to get their content from iTunes.'”
Carter reports, “Mr. Crotty said NBC had come across to consumers as ‘highly greedy’ in its dispute with Apple. Apple reported that NBC was insisting it raise the price of some downloads on NBC shows to $4.99 from the $1.99 iTunes charges for all programs. NBC hotly denied that… But, Mr. Gaspin said, ‘piracy was and is our No. 1 priority.’ He said that the music industry had been devastated by the free exchange of music, much of it facilitated by iTunes.”
MacDailyNews Take: Jeff Gaspin is your typical know-nothing, BS-shoveling network suit. The sooner these empty-headed dinosaurs like Gaspin die off, the better. Until then, think of P2P as a sort of giant meteor that users can magically deploy in surgical fashion, so as to not take out all of the other old media types that happen to “get it.”
Full article here.
Who cares. Heroes proceeded to suck more and more as the season went on. It no doubt will continue to suck in season 2.
There you go, MAC lemmings. I get to download and watch all of that fantastic free programming from NBC this season, and you get NOTHING!
I bet you wish you had magnificent Microsoft Windows Vista running on a Dell now. Losers.
Your potential. Our passion.™
you lost me as a viewer
let your advertisers know
FU NBC
thank gawd for other content available on iTunes, TiVo and torrents. Now way in hell will I be force fed advertising via commercials.
This reminds me of a US Dept. of Defense system I was involved in programming years ago.
Encrypted, classified digital data was to be transmitted over short wave radieos. It passed thru several computers on its way to the transmitter.
The DoD wanted everything secure up to the point the signal hit the transmitter. We convinced them that since the whole sorld would know once the info hit the tranmitter, what did it matter that the computers were totally secure with the data milliseconds before thre transmission?
NBC needs to learn that once they transmit a show, it’s out there, and anybody can do just about anything with it.
He said that the music industry had been devastated by the free exchange of music, much of it facilitated by iTunes.”
We’ve got a history revisionist, folks. Free exchange of music started long before iTunes Store or iTunes.app exists. iTunes.app doesn’t facilitate free exchange of music anymore than Photoshop does since it is not a P2P app. iTunes Store actually created a viable download market when record labels were losing money by investing in download services that were hostile to consumers. It turned a lot of people from P2P downloaders into paying customers and poured billions of dollars into the labels’ pocket. Yes, the FairPlay DRM can be defeated, but why will any pirate bother when Audio CDs don’t have a DRM and can be ripped into MP3/AAC in 3 easy steps: 1. insert CD, 2. select tracks and 3. click convert button.
Gaspin, please wipe off your ass after you finished talking since obviously you are talking shit.
Jeff:
I foresee gloom & doom at NBC by year’s end!
NBC’s want-to-be iTunes strore is little more than Bull Shit!
And the would-be customer know it!
sorld?
Make that world.
Sorry!
Did anyone else get the NBC ad on this page? Losers! (Was thru Google syndication. Hmmm. Must block,)
This guy is a fscking moron. Most of the shows on NBC suck ass, save for Heroes and a few others, so fsck him. Besides if you want a decent solution, buy an eyeTV 250 Plus for your Mac. Watch and record digital and analog broadcasts, strip out commercials and send them to your iPod. $199 or less. Well worth it considering that’s the cost of 100 TV episodes. And the quality is great. BTW, it comes with Toast 8, and you can burn them to DVD directly from the eyeTV software. No “self-destruct” ala Mission Impossible EVER. So Jeff, think about it, why would anyone want to wait a week for shows that will only last for a week anyway.
You damn stupid FSCK. Hope you get fired over this.
I just got an apple tv – gave me a whole new reason to love bittorrent.
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@qka
I don’t know what kind of system you were talking about and the specifics, but I can think one reason why they want the computers to be secured. The reason may not be to prevent hackers from getting the data since it will be broadcast by the transmitter, but it may be to protect the encrypted data integrity until it reaches the transmitter or to prevent other nasty things a hacker can do inside a network.
Guess what Gaspin? I have a little thing called EyeTV connected to my Mac. It lets me record ANY program I like anytime I want to. And I can transfer the files in broadcast quality to iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, other computers, etc., as many times as I want with NO DRM. I can also easily edit out your stupid commercials using QuickTime Pro. So, when I want to watch The Office on any of my devices this year, I’ll just record it on my EyeTV and bypass your shitty service entirely.
Big deal. If you can’t download something from itunes than you can find it on a p2p network like amule or download it using bittorrent or usenet. At the moment bittorrent is the main method used to distribute pirated material. You can’t win a war against piracy.
1 million hackers with nothing better to do > any DRM
And if you don’t want to download a show/movie you can watch for free on the internet at websites like Veoh or tv-links.co.uk – commercial free.
Tv and music executives need to ask themselves why so many consumers are inclined to piracy, and itunes has been successful.
The last line of my previous post should read:
Tv and music executives need to ask themselves why so many consumers are inclined to piracy, and why itunes has been successful.
if you want to know where NBC wants to take this, hold your nose and walk down the DVD aisle in any Wal-Mart. They’ve got big sections where they take a good movie and bundle it with two crappy movies by the same star and call it a triple-feature.
So you get Die Hard , Last Man Standing, and Hudson Hawk. Let’s hope that movie buying doesn’t get to be like cable TV, where you only use about 10% of what you’re you’re having to pay for…
ZuneTang deserves a special place in MDN history.
Love your posts ZT. This place wouldn’t be the same without you.
I’ll just DVR it and skip the commercials myself. If I want to download it and can’t get it on iTunes, I’ll just download a commercial free/DRM free version from, well, you know.
“The files would degrade after the seven-day period”–Allegorical to Jeff Gaspin’s career.
Is it just me, or is MDN the first character of some headlines?
“NBC Universal said [Wednesday] that it would soon permit consumers to download many of NBC’s most popular programs free…for one week immediately after their broadcasts,”
In other news, Yugo Automotive announced it will soon permit consumers to drive many of their most popular models free for one week.
Both offers should draw comparable crowds.
You damn stupid FSCK. Hope you get fired over this.
No, please! We should hope he gets promoted. Apple needs competition like this.
If he does get booted, no problem. His talents would fit in well at Microsoft.
I haven’t watched any television show regularly since 2004. I don’t care if NBC or any other network insist that hardware be built with gobs of DRM, and that their stuff is impossible to play unless you have the right codes, only available if you paid for the product and use it according to Hoyle, because I don’t patronize those vendors. Their products aren’t uninteresting, but I’m just not that interested, there’s lots of other things out there that occupy my time. They’re making it harder and harder to watch their stuff, but they have yet to realize that there really is a fine line between the fuzzy convenience of TV and VCR and the scintillating drudgery of digital broadcast and one week expiration. They think they can decide how people use their product. Good Luck with that.
Ferf Muckmeyer:
Your comments were right on target.
I just wish you wouldn’t sugarcoat it.
NBC’s business practices remind me of all of the Muslims who hate freedom. They resent iTunes liberal DRM policies and want to clamp down of the innocent video downloading citzenry. I apologize for the use of the word ‘liberal’ but it applies here. Liberals don’t belong in America because they hate freedom like Muslims. Liberals are gay like John Wayne too. I bet most Muslims are gay.
God bless America.