NBC: ‘Must DRM TV’

“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.