NBC and Netflix team up to offer Heroes through “Watch Now”
NBC recently killed its iTunes contract with Apple, so the company’s been searching for a way to offer new and old episodes of its large catalog of shows. Today, Netflix announced that it will help to fill that need.
For those of you that don’t know, Netflix offers an on-demand video service to its subscribers called Watch Now. The number of dollars a customer pays per month is the number of hours of online video a customer gets per month.
Normally, the service is used to watch movies online as opposed to ordering the disc through the regular delivery service, but NBC will now use it to distribute new episodes of Heroes the day after they air. Unfortunately, that’s all you get.
You can also watch older episodes of NBC’s other shows, but hopefully NBC will wake up and offer new episodes of its other shows, such as Battlestar Galactica and The Office, through Watch Now. Although, such a move could conflict with NBC’s deal with Amazon’s Unbox service to do the very same thing.
NBC also offers free, but poor in quality, new episodes of its current shows online through NBC.com and Hulu. NBC also offer free but highly DRM-ed episodes of its shows through NBC Direct. Currently, NBC Direct is in its beta stage, and it’s not Mac or Linux compatible.
If you find this confusing, you’re probably not alone. Looking back at everything I just wrote, it’s hard to figure out what NBC’s doing with online distribution. It seems like the company’s tasting the various flavors of online distribution to make a long term decision later, or perhaps it just wants to give consumers a (confusing) choice.
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November 29th, 2007
[...] NBC and Netflix team up to offer Heroes through “Watch Now” » This Summary is from an article posted at TECH.BLORGE.com on Thursday, November 29, 2007 This [...]