As expected NBC has removed their content from iTunes including shows from Bravo, mun2, NBC, NBC News, CNBC, NBC Sports, Sci Fi, Sleuth, Telemundo or USA Network. Not a peacock feather in sight. This is due to NBC’s contract expiring with iTunes. NBC greedily wanted to raise prices, Apple said no and that was that.

Do not fret, if you want to continue to watch NBC shows there is always the TV, since most all of these come into your home for free via broadcast. That is what makes NBC argument with Apple so ridiculous. They apparently were not happy with the millions that made selling the already aired content on iTunes, even though the promotional value actually helped viewership. Story has it iTunes may have saved The Office from being cancelled. I will outline other solutions for your iPod.

NBC will soon be launching hulu (invitation only right now) that allows you to watch these broadcasted shows on your computer provided of course you are running Windows, Internet Explorer, the NBC Direct Player and the latest .Net framework. Videos will be available for only 7 days after they initially air, and disappear from your computer 48 hours after you begin watching them (unless you remember to renew your license before then). Also, videos will only play on the computer used for the initial download. No iPods or mobile players can be used.

OK, these shows are broadcast into your home, in most cases via broadcast for free. Watching them are recording them with your cable supplied DVR or TiVO is a no brainer.

But if you want to continue to watch them in iTunes, your iPod, or an Apple TV. There are solutions for this. I will outline two that also rids you of dealing with DRM (digital rights management). These shows are are already broadcast into your home allowing you to record them.

EyeTV
EyeTV – Records TV onto your Mac and will add the recordings to iTunes in iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV format. ElGato’s EyeTV is a great solution to record TV content from off the air or from your cable system.

Elgato’s EyeTV Hybrid records analog television using the encoder built into the EyeTV software together with your Mac’s processor. EyeTV Hybrid also comes with a break-out cable for composite video and S-Video, enabling you to connect a set-top box directly to your Mac.

The EyeTV Hybrid is about the size of an Apple Remote and costs about $135 from Amazon.

EyeTV 250 Plus is a hybrid TV tuner for the Mac with a powerful hardware encoder for higher quality recordings and smaller sized video files. EyeTV 250 Plus receives both free over-the-air HDTV as well as analog TV, and offers a complete solution for converting videos from VHS tape to DVD-Video. Connecting the EyeTV 250 can easily be connected to your set top box.

EyeTv 250 Plus costs about $179 from Amazon. I have been using the older EyeTV 200 unit connected to a Mac mini for years.

Once you get the an EyeTV up and running recording which is pretty easy, editing and viewing the content is a joy.

TVShows – BitTorrent
If you want convenience consider downloading the free open source TV Shows. With TVShows you simply subscribe to the shows you want from the list provided.

Once you add the shows you are interested in TVShows, the application will find them on BitTorrent and download the torrent file automatically to your Mac, opening them in your default BitTorrent application for download. Usually within a day of the broadcast, in some cases within hours.

You can even choose the quality of the video you prefer in the TVShows preferences. Once downloaded you can view them on your Mac instantly in a variety of players. Adding them to iTunes and converting them to an iPod or iPhone format is easy using a number of applications.

Looking for BitTorrent Clients? Personally I like Xtorrent a lot. Also read BitTorrent Clients for the Mac/Windows some are free!

The TV Shows offered on iTunes are mostly available off air for free. Using the iTunes Store for much of these TV programs is just a convenient way of easily getting video content without commercials already in the right format for the iPod. But the videos are crippled with DRM The videos you get from BitTorrent are usually better quality, free and have no DRM.

As far as legality, I will leave that up to the lawyers. With content providers like NBC showing this much greed, for content that has aired already on free broadcast, more people will move to P2P sites to get they content they want when it is NOT available in places like iTunes. Seems like a very bad business decision on NBC’s part, even with hulu coming, making your content available for money in more than place sounds OK to me. Now millions will get the content for free, with no money for NBC.

Apple’s model with the iTunes Store is one of the best ways to compete with P2P sites. But like some record companies it seems, NBC has not yet figured that out. DRM has been a dismal failure in stopping what the content providers see as pirating. Suing users and fans has not helped. Moves like what NBC is doing will only add to this failure.

    | Tags: iPod, iTunes