A Good Idea?

I saw a notice on television last night that said NBC was breaking off its working relationship with Apple, and would no longer be offering its programming for sale through the iTunes store. Instead, NBC will be offering its programming free of charge on its own new download site, called NBC Direct. You can try it out for yourself if you want to; just go to http://www.nbc.com/.

Obviously, the network is hoping to attract a huge number of new viewers to its downloadable content, since people will be able to get all they want for free. It’s an attractive offer on its face, but there are a couple of things they don’t mention up front. For one, the “free” downloads are actually supported by advertising, just like broadcast television. That means that when you download a show off of NBC Direct, it comes with commercials as part of the download, and they’ve rigged the files so that you can’t fast-forward through the commercial part of the file when viewing it. You could still get up and go to the toilet during the commercials (thus not watching them), but short of actually leaving the room, you’re stuck with them.

Early reports also claim that if you don’t watch the download for two days, you will have to re-download the files before you can view them. This is supposed to assure that NBC can send you the very latest commercial content. And each of these “free” downloads is supposedly viewable for 7 days only, after which the file content erases itself (and is presumably not available for future downloads). No one has said what good that is supposed to do anyone, but I suppose if you have to keep downloading new files, that would give the network continual opportunities to deliver new commercial content.

Again, I’m not going near any of the 1st Amendment or Privacy issues here. From a business standpoint, the question is, does this constitute a sound management decision? It is possible that the number of people willing to put up with all of these restrictions and commercials in order to get free content will generate enough viewings for NBC to meet its contractual obligations to the sponsors of these shows, and thus make more money than they would selling the same content on iTunes. It’s also possible that they’ve misjudged the demographic of people who download television shows onto their iPods (many of whom could afford to pay for content in the first place, and many of whom will not stand for this kind of interference).

For the moment, the whole concept is mostly being mocked – I first picked up on this story on The Colbert Report, who were not what you would call merciful in their treatment of the mandatory commercials in the file. But it occurs to me that if NBC is not getting enough takers to make their new download site a going concern (e.g. not enough downloads to interest their advertising customers) it would be easy for them to return to selling the content. All they would have to do is add another “download now” button to their NBC Direct web site – one button that says “free – with commercials” and another that says “commercial free – three dollars” or however much they charge for content you can get for free over the airwaves anyway. They could even come up with an “enhanced” version of each show (commentary, extras, games, whatever) for a few dollars more, and add a third download button.

The possible downside is that the number of people who actually download television shows to watch on their iPods is small enough and those people resent the network’s attempts to control their viewing enough that they lose these viewers altogether. Which might not seem likely at first, but remember, this is the network that brought you the Olympic Triplecast…