NBC Offers More on Heroes Downloadable Fate

 

Tonight, Heroes returns to NBC with its Season Two premiere. We'll be glued to our set, but we're wondering what's in store for those who might miss tonight's episode. What options will they have to obtain the episode without waiting for reruns or the eventual DVD set? Tomorrow they should be able to download it from iTunes, but soon that's all going to change as NBC's days cooperating with Apple are numbered.

 

A few weeks back, we broke news that NBC was planning to pull out if iTunes [details] due to pricing and privacy protection issues spelling an end to many fans easy access to shows such as Heroes, The Office and Battlestar Galactica. Today, we're learning that NBC recently announced they will be taking a bit of an unexpected step offering free downloads of their more popular shows.

 

Per the New York Times [full article]...

Jeff Gaspin, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group, said, “The shift from programmer to consumer controlling program choices is the biggest change in the media business in the past 25 or 30 years."

 

NBC makes many of its popular shows available online in streaming media, which means that fans can watch episodes on their computers. Under the new NBC service, called NBC Direct, consumers will be able to download, for no fee, NBC programs like “Heroes,” “The Office” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on the night that they are broadcast and keep them for seven days. They would also be able to subscribe to shows, guaranteeing delivery each week.

 

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. “Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,” Mr. Gaspin said.

 

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.

In a later deployment, fans will also be given the option to purchase the programs. The proposed price per episode? $4.99. A far cry from iTunes $1.99. This will be an interesting "network experiment" to watch as it unfolds.

 

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