NBC officially removed from the iTunes Store
It’s official! Wanna watch the latest Heroes episode on your Apple TV? How about 30 Rock on your iPod or Zune? “Sorry!”, says Mr. Zucker, “No can do! You’re SOL for now!” No 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica, Bionic Woman, Heroes, The Office, Scrubs, or The Tonight Show. And that pretty much sums it up for any content from Bravo, mun2, NBC, NBC News, CNBC, NBC Sports, Sci Fi, Sleuth, Telemundo or USA Network. Wanna watch this stuff at a later time? Better keep those DVR set to record then! Thanks, Mr. Zucker, I appreciate it!
But, on the bright side, you can watch a lot of this content on the network websites! Err…provided you’re on Windows! Yep, NBC’s new fangled video download service has been getting a lot of flack lately. It requires that you use Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player to view and use the site and the videos are laden with DRM (the files expire 7 days after downloading!). You can’t play them on a portable player either…you’re forced to play them only on your computer. And if you’re on a Mac then you’re screwed. But they do say they’ll have Mac support in the first part of 2008. Great…so what do we do till then? Oh yeah! That’s right! We use Pirate Bay!
NBC also has a private beta of another video serviced called Hulu. A lot of early reviews have already been posted about Hulu (here, here, here, and here). But, just like NBC’s own video download site, there are restrictions on what you can and cannot do with the video downloads. It’s a streaming only service and thus you can’t download the video to your hard drive to watch later. Also, many new TV episodes will expire after 5 weeks so there likely won’t be a way to watch any back catalog of episodes online. And, of course, you can’t watch any content on a portable media player.
I’ve already talked about my disdain for CEO Jeff Zucker in a previous post. NBC’s new video download service is a travesty! No way am I going to sit there and watch a f#$king episode on their site. It’s quirky, the video is too damn small, and it skips. I honestly would prefer just to buy the damn episode for two dollars and watch it on my big screen…but NBC absolutely refuses to allow me to do so. Instead, they come up with some goofy scheme to make wads of cash off of services online like Hulu and their own video download service. Never mind what the customer wants because it’s clear that NBC doesn’t care. It’s about maintaining total control over their content and squeezing every last nickel from the consumer. Corporate bullshit at its finest!
You wanna impress me, Mr. Zucker? Why don’t you follow Amazon’s suit and offer up a way for me to download your content and burn it to a DVD at a fair and decent price? That, my friend, would impress the shit out of me!
People download from sites like the Pirate Bay simply because they are tired of DRM and their tired of people telling them what they can and cannot do with the content they are trying to legitimately purchase. DRM is a dead end, NBC! Get used to it!
Tags: nbc
