Currently offers “Life,” the “Bionic Woman,” “30 Rock,” “The Office,” “Friday Night Lights,” and “Heroes.”
NBC Direct, which is still in beta, has begun offering free full episode downloads of several popular NBC shows. The list of available shows currently includes: “Life,” the “Bionic Woman,” “30 Rock,” “The Office,” “Friday Night Lights,” and “Heroes.” More offerings are planned for the future.
These download offerings are in addition to free streaming of episodes from “Chuck,” Journeyman,” “Las Vegas,” “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” “Passions,” “Phenomenon,” “Scrubs,” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”
The are a few drawbacks however, to using NBC Direct. The first is that you have to use the IE browser. I can’t remember the last time I used anything but Firefox and made me a little nervous frankly. Then you have to install NBC’s Direct player which ensures that any content you download stays on your PC only as long as NBC sees fit.
In addition, all episode downloads are available for only 7 days after they initially air on TV. Once you start watching it you have only 48 hours before it deletes itself. Each show also contains advertisements that can’t be skipped.
On the upside though, you can choose to subscribe to your favorite TV shows so that you’ll automatically download new episodes each week. This may come in handy for those too lazy to configure their BitTorrent client to do the same.
After all the NBC Chief’s grumbling about how Apple wouldn’t let it raise the price of downloads from $1.99 to reportedly $4.99, I think it’s hilarious that NBC is now testing the idea of free ad-supported downloads. Sure they only stick around for 48 hours, but how many times you can honestly watch the same episode?
Looking for more stuff to watch or download?
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NBC Chief Says iTunes ‘Destroyed’ Music Pricing, Video Pricing is Next
NBC Chief: ‘We’re Losing the Battle Against Piracy’
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BitTorrent torrent sites & search engines
uTorrent – A Beginner’s guide to BitTorrent downloading
News Tip? Comment? Suggestion? jared@zeropaid.com
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Well I get all my stuff from newsgroups anyway.
But even if I didn’t this seems to be too many hoops to jump through just to watch a TV program when there are tons of sites now that have TV shows streaming and no stupid ads.
But it is a step in the right direction….though ONLY a step. Kinda like when itunes started to offer DRM free tracks….though they are really NOT DRM free.
[quote=soulxtc]The are a few drawbacks however to using NBC Direct. The first is that you have to use the IE browser. I can’t remember the last time I used anything but Firefox and made me a little nervous frankly.[/quote] You can render IE pages in Firefox using [url=http://ieview.mozdev.org/installation.html]IE View v1.3.4[/url] including Microsoft update pages.
shit my BB code is messed up there.
The correct link for IE View is: http://ieview.mozdev.org/installation.html
Pretty handy extension.
It’s about time NBC came around. I watched a couple shows on their website just to celebrate. Not that they have anything worth watching but Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien are cool so I watched some of their shows. RON PAUL 08!
RAPIDSHARE IS BETTER.
and I second iamyour41: Ron Paul 2008!!