From the NYT story on their new video download service, i.e. what they’re doing because Apple wouldn’t follow their stupid ideas:

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.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Hey, let’s pull our material from the most popular online store EVAR and go our own way with a single-platform option that expires! Consumers will LOVE it!” Really? We don’t think so.

There’s more from Jeffrey McManus over at his site; here’s a great point:

Here’s the bit the writer really screwed up, though: the terms under which NBC wants to “sell” you videos are not just worse than iTunes, but worse than every single video delivery system that has ever existed.

Slick move, boys. Here’s something you should pay attention to: as we’ve said before, the more you make your programming hard to get to, or hard to use like a paying customer wants, the more likely you are simply encouraging folks to seek out the darknets and illegal copies. “Piracy” rates in the UK and Australia for first-run US programming are huge not because they’re all scofflaws, but because that’s the only way they can get crap like “Heroes.” Make it hard to get in the US, and you’ll have the same issue here.