Oh NBC, what were you thinking?

A short while back, NBC made the very foolish decision to not renew their contract with iTunes. They did this because they could not come to an agreement on pricing structure. Apple wants to (and will) keep all of their shows at $1.99 and NBC wants to first, raise the price and second, have more control over pricing structure, such as bundling things together. Apparently, NBC has forgotten that iTunes is, by far, the largest online seller of music, tv shows, and movies. Perhaps they forgot that The Office would have likely been cancelled, if not for iTunes making it popular. This will be a much bigger loss for NBC than for Apple!

Instead, NBC opted to sell their tv shows through Amazon's unbox...a service which does nowhere near the volume of iTunes, and is not compatible with any mac or iPod. Perhaps NBC also forgot that the iPod holds over 70% of the market for similar devices!

So instead, most people are not going to switch to Unbox...they're just going to download the shows illegally. It was already possible for people to download the shows faster and in better quality illegally than with iTunes, but iTunes was just so convenient! You are going to lose, NBC. You are biting off your nose to spite your face!

So, for all those who still want to watch NBC's top shows (including Heroes and The Office), but don't have any desire to make NBC any money at all, please take a look at a program called TVShows!!! I am not saying that I will being doing this and I do not recommend you do anything illegal (like easily download high quality TV shows right after they air, for free), but if I were going to, this is how I'd do it.

TVShows really couldn't be any simpler. Just install the program, click the shows you want to download, and quit. That's it...the program does the rest. It activates itself in the background every so often (every 1/2 hour by default) and automatically downloads any new shows that are available, as soon as they become available. You will also need to download a torrent program (I'd recommend Transmission), but you don't really need to know anything about torrents to use this program. Here's the link: http://tvshows.sourceforge.net/

Happy watching!!

Really, NBC, what were you thinking??