Gizmodo
Even though there's no love lost between NBC and iTunes, that doesn't mean NBC doesn't love you! At least if you've got an iPhone or iPod touch. They're streaming full episodes of 30 Rock and The Office to iPhones (and touches) in QuickTime, for free, with NO ads. They work, nicely, but the major catch is that if you exit Safari, you've gotta re-DL all over again, and the files are huge, so is this Wi-Fi only, really. This looks weird for NBC, but it's really not.
They're putting their shows out online in a million different ways (you can even download 30 Rock, The Office, Conan and Leno direct to your desktop now) and more than happy to pipe 'em to you, as long as it's in a controlled sandbox of some sort. NBC Direct requires a walled-garden player install with loads of DRM, and they wanted copyright controls from Apple and Microsoft to give just two examples, not to mention Hulu. It's sorta surprising that the QuickTime feed for iPhone is unprotected, but theoretically it's restricted to two devices. You know, if they'd just relax a bit, overall, they'd be in a good place online. [Silicon Alley Insider, Thanks Peter!]
Comments
That will make my gym trips INFINITELY more bearable.
trying it now.... finally have use for this phone
If you game the Nokia N800/N810 Mozilla-based MicroB browser to emulate the user-agent of the iPhone/iPod Touch Safari browser, you can get these videos to work too. Take a little while to buffer, but then the quality is actually quite watchable on the N800.
Now I'm waiting for them to add CHUCK to the roster.
Loading Movie...
Will be interesting to see if they open it up to other platforms/browsers.
The quality seems kind of poor to me. And it stopped buffering and hung 12 seconds in.
And it does not work in Canada; surprise surprise!
what's with the photoshopped photo?
I love having this feature on my Sprint Touch... except it's faster and available anywhere I go.
All I get is a big Quicktime logo on a white screen. Wonderful.
Aww i was just about to send this in. The quality sucks though and it takes forever to load. Omg heres an idea for apple lets get flash support!
yeah this is similar to something Modern Feed is doing. [Modernfeed.com]
I found it a few weeks ago and they have a lot of streaming content- i'd imagine they'll have this soon too.
@draiko: Yes, yes, I've played with a "Touch" at work.....Makes me truly appreciate the patience of you Windows Mobile people....So Draiko, you have fun with that HTC Touch of yours.....*Thumbs up* [/sarcasm]
@GizMadone: That's better than what I get... I just get an "Error: Movie could not be played." Then Safari crashes.
@J. Nadeau: Not for Canada, but CBC.ca, thecomedynetwork.ca, ctv.ca, tsn.ca, discoverychannel.ca, muchmusic.com, mtv.castream almost all their shows like Lost, South Park, Daily Show, Colbert Report, jPod, the Border, you can get Podcasts of the Hour ... They even have live feeds of HNIC, and the IIHF games... what more could you want?
not enough people in Canada realize that most channels have their shows online. If there was a Canadian version of Giz, they would report about it...
And CBC already tested the Bittorrent waters by releasing one of their specials a few months ago in easily digestible torrent form... I don't know if was successful or not.
I tried watching the office and saw a Corolla ad. There are ads! :(
chuck is such a horrible show. i can't believe they didn't chancel chuck but chose to cancel journey man... wow seriously? and what is up with bionic woman? equally bad if not worse than chuck.
I liked the SNL skit with Steve Jobs on that foward link.
"It holds 4 kabillion contacts.
Okay, how much battery life does it have?
20 minutes."
Well, that's exactly why I won't be using this service. I appreciate their effort...but that's just lame.
This isn't F***ing 1999. I don't need/want 125 different video players on my computer just because everybody wants to use their own DRM and do their own thing. I learned my lesson from Real Player.
I've got Windows Media Player, Quicktime, an FLV player, and VLC for when none of the previous players can figure it out. Each of those is pretty darned universal and between them I can play just about everything I want to play...why can't NBC play nice and work with a player that already exists and has other uses?
It loaded immediately in my iPhone (with WiFi connection). Now, et tu NBC? Cries the Zune.
@EQC the iphone files are /unprotected/
Hopefully this will be the start of more to come.
Works on my Touch...
Quality is bad, but free is good. This is very confusing. Why would NBC turn their back to the iTunes model in favor of this?
@oopl: I came across nbc's mobile site last week. And was able to access the shows on my Nokia E61i over WIFI and not on EDGE. It was RA stream.
it's not just for iphones/touches. it works fine on my motorola q9c.
let it load as I'm leaving work and watch it on the bus all the way home! No one ever calls me anyway.
quality is shit compared to the BBC Stream
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