Abhishek Tiwari

Few weeks back I wrote about NBC breaking up with Apple in order to sell its content elsewhere. The popular knowledge at the time was that NBC will leverage Amazon’s Unbox service to sell their TV shows. In addition NBC also announced partnership with FOX to launch a new web video distribution service called HULU. Not to mention that NBC.com itself hosts videos of all its shows and users can access episodes for the whole season.

In that post, I predicted that NBC may dabble into alternate business models. They may offer access to free content purely based on ads, something which Apple does not provide. Following were my exact words:

I believe many more media networks will go down this path and explore their own delivery methods. Many (including NBC) will leverage ad based model to inherently make the content free.

Lo and behold, today NBC made a press release, announcing a new service called “NBC Direct“. The idea is to offer ad supported free downloads to users for its popular shows. The service will launch its beta program in October and will offer downloads on windows PC. The content will be available for viewing for 1 week after download and will expire after that.

The shows offered at launch are:

• Heroes
• The Office
• Life
• Bionic Woman
• 30 Rock
• Friday Night Lights
• Late Night with Conan O’Brien and
• The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

NBC plans to bring troves of features on its roadmap. Some of the notable ones are:

• Automatic download of pre-selected shows
• HD quality video download utilizing P2P distribution technology
• Additional business models such as “Download to own” and “Rentals”
• Downloads expanded to Macs and portable devices
  • As expected no mention of iPods ;-). Even though I am sure it will be supported

As mentioned before, this was very much expected once they severed their relationship with Apple. My guess is that this is just the beginning and NBC will experiment a lot with this service. The direct download service should complement its online streaming service currently available at NBC.com. I had posted some of these ideas before.

Having said that, the HULU angle is not yet known. There is no mention of that in this press release and some of this conflicts with what they have planned there. I seriously think NBC should abandon that project with Fox and solely focus on this service, which utilizes its brand in a much more valuable fashion.

So in conclusion I am looking forward to using the service and as usual I am glad that consumers win. I am sure hardcore Apple lovers will give me heat, just like the last time, but they have to realize that iTunes monopoly is gradually ending…

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