One More Step into the Future of TV

NBC to begin free downloads of programs.

GET THE STORY.

As you’d expect for this kind of thing, there are commercials that can’t be easily skipped and (somewhat less expectedly) the files expire after a week.

Nevertheless, the industry continues to experiment with online delivery.

Paid, non-commercial, non-expiring is where it’s at as far as I’m concerned, but I understand free and commercial as one avenue to be explored.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

16 thoughts on “One More Step into the Future of TV”

  1. I don’t watch TV precisly because of the raunchy commercials(and we can’t find much worth watching). If we happen to want to watch something, DVR is a beautiful thing to have so that we can fast forward through them. I can’t imagine wanting to watch something online, especially since the commercials can’t be circumvented.

  2. It’s only for Windows-based PCs. There is still the discrimination issue against Mac users. So not fair!

  3. Though there is no reason it can’t be both.
    Paid for no commercial, non-expiring, and higher quality video.
    Free for streaming version with commercials.
    This way pretty much everybody who wants to watch the show is covered.
    Though I pretty much record anything I want to watch on Windows Media Center so that I can easily skip commercials.
    But it was pretty cool to be able to watch the whole season of Jericho on the net since I only found out about how good the show was when it was cancelled (and then picked up again.) And since the commercials it had were only 15 seconds, that was quite acceptable.

  4. Free & non-commercial would be nice. But someone has to pay for the shows. I think that they will have to rethink how to pay and advertise. TV will probably go the way of newspapers & lose volume to the internet.

  5. And this is only an interim measure. The news report I read said that NBC would transition to their own iTunes type of store. The quote made it plain that all they were interested in was eliminating Apple as the middleman.

  6. If only the commercials weren’t so long and repulsive, I wouldn’t mind them at all.
    What ever ever happened to a simple “This episode of [insert program]was brought to you by the fine folks at [insert sponsor] makers of [insert product]. Now back to our program.”

  7. “With the creation of this new service, we are acknowledging that now, more than ever, viewers want to be in control of how, when and where they consume their favorite entertainment,”
    Then how about acknowledging that part of the control we want is control over which OS we use. I hope I never have to give in, give up Linux, and get Windows (or rely on Macs either, for that matter) just to keep up with these things. I really pray I never have to do that. We should all pray, really, that down the road, we all still have choices, and don’t get locked into something, even if we’re absolutely willing to pay for our media content (which I am).

  8. I didn’t really catch on to “Heroes” until about eight weeks into the series last year — it was nice that NBC had all of the episodes online to enable me to catch up. I’m a little disappointed that this service will only be for one week after the show airs.
    BTW, what’s up with the archives.org site that Martin referred to? It doesn’t seem to be anything other than a search engine. From what he said, I thought it would have free downloads or something.

  9. all they were interested in was eliminating Apple as the middleman.
    This after Apple wanted to drop the iTunes prices for TV shows and NBC refused?

  10. I don’t understand why this is news. ABC was doing this last year. That’s how I watched Day Break and Lost.

  11. That archives.org site is freaky, with that header that says: “Find Something Interesting“. Eech! It gives me the creeps.

  12. This isn’t going to stop the tidal wave of piracy. If the networks insist on providing only cumbersome, commercial-laden files that expire, the mushy middle that might be willing to pay $2 for honesty will just go to Usenet, BitTorrent, and P2P for commercial DRM free files that can be easily played on TV and never expire. The reason that piracy is so popular isn’t mainly because its cheaper than the alternative, but because it is better (in the non-moral sense) than the alternative.

  13. This “news” makes no difference to our fam. There’s nothing worth watching…much less downloading!

  14. We used this feature on NBC last year to watch “Kidnapped”…the series went to online only after about 4 weeks on TV…same thing, though, the files expired one week after each initial “airing”, so if you missed it, you missed it…and it was tough to watch on the computer…but I definitely didn’t miss the commercials! (Just one at the beginning of each episode)

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