Monty’s Afterword

NBC has hammered in the final nail, pulling all its TV content from Apple iTunes. If you been following this feud between Steve Jobs and NBC you know that this has been in the works for some time now. In fact, I remember being in Newark, NJ shortly after the decision was reached to stop providing iTunes with new episodes. I was desperately trying to find the latest The Office episode via iTunes. Of course, I couldn’t find it, so I turned to NBC’s website, which on the hotel’s connection was too slow to view. I then turned to Amazon’s UnBox, which had started selling new NBC TV shows in place of iTunes, but I was on a Mac. Incompatible. So after about a half an hour of jumping around from site to site trying to watch TV on a laptop, I gave up. I was defeated.

Fast forward to today, nearly two months later and I’m reading this blog about the final moment of NBC’s removal from iTunes. What’s changed since my experience in Newark? Not much. If you’re a Mac user you still can’t download NBC’s TV content; not by NBC Direct nor Amazon UnBox. You’re stuck right now with viewing their content by streaming it over the Internet through NBC’s website or their hulu.com site which is still in beta. But, NBC Direct is promising to be Mac compatible soon. In the meantime, you better enjoy getting your content streamed to you, as that’s the only way your going to get it. As for me, that’s fine and dandy, but I lot people like the downloads so they can manage their content, perhaps viewing it on an iPod or Apple TV, etc. For those folks, they’re going to have to be patient. But, we’ve all got time to kill, right? When do you expect you’ll have new content to view with the ongoing Writers Strike? Seriously, TV viewing sucks right now– it’s like Nick At Night every night with re-run after re-run. So what’s the point?

I give up on you TV.

The good news is that even with NBC’s departure from Apple iTunes, TV Networks are realizing their full Online potential. That will eventually mean that viewing TV online will be a painless process. There’s just a few road blocks ahead, the writers who are demanding a cut in Online revenue and Digital Rights Management (DRM). Once those things are ironed out, I’ll be throwing out my 19″ RCA and crowning my Mac computer the King of my living room.