Apparently forgoing any last-minute late-night contract negotiations with Apple, NBC has packed up its things and slipped away in the night.
This means that all NBC-Universal channels have all been dropped from the iTunes store, including Bravo, mun2, NBC, NBC News, CNBC, NBC Sports, Sci Fi, Sleuth, Telemundo, and the USA Network.
Goodbye to The Office, Battlestar Galactica, and of course, Heroes.
Oddly enough, some content shown on NBC like this fall's "Chuck" is still available. (Chuck is produced by Warner, which maintains redistribution rights.)
Some of NBC's content is now available through their NBC Direct service, Amazon Unbox, the upcoming hulu, and through their forthcoming deal with NetFlix, in they will will stream episodes of NBC series like Heroes and 30 Rock the day after they're aired to Netflix users.
And just to confuse the issue still further, some shows are available via some of these services but not through the others.
All of these new "channels" require a computer, either to stream and watch the show directly, or to manage content rights after the show has been downloaded to a PC.
On NBC Direct, for example, shows are available for only 7 days after they initially air, can't be transferred from the original computer on which they were downloaded, require Windows, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, a proprietary NBC video client, an Internet connection, and contain licenses that expire every 48 hours unless otherwise renewed.
And in case it isn't obvious from the above, no Macs. But they're promising OS X support sometime real-soon-now in 2008. Or, at least, whenever they get around to it. (Spiteful? NBC?)
All-in-all, nothing beats a nice, user-friendly, easy-to-use system. I can just see the family now, all curled up on the couch, trying to watch streaming-video in a browser window on the family's 20" monitor.
There's also no support whatsoever for the best-selling portable media device on the planet, so no more NBC shows-to-go.
NBC maintains that most of these services are experimental and "promotional" in nature (this to the writers trying to get paid for their work), despite the fact that they're running paid advertising before, and in some cases, during the broadcast.
All this, and advertising too? How can they lose?
That said, I really think we need to have a discussion regarding the future of iTunes, and especially the one-price-fits-all model that got us into our current situation.
Stay tuned.
Continued in Higher Prices On iTunes? EXCELLENT!
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