Many of you will recall that about six months ago NBC made a hard break from iTunes due to DRM interests. NBC wanted tighter control and more money and well, Apple is Apple and does not need to barter.
It is with this information that makes it such a shock to find out NBC is now serving up full, DRM free, commercial free, Quicktime based episodes of 30 Rock and The Office.
I attempted to watch a clip on my iPhone via wifi. At first it appeared that it was just sitting there doing nothing, however after sitting at a page with the Quicktime Q on it, I was transported to the black style video app and continued to wait 4 minutes until I could load 3 seconds of video. The speed makes this entirely unusable, which is a shame because the video quality is decent (~200kbps).
As usual anything meant to only be used on the iPhone only checks the useragent, so a quick change in Firefox will give you access to this website (http://nbc.starcutusa.com). Surfing the site seems speedy enough, however downloading a clip proved just how awful the download speeds were. At 2kbps I was able to obtain 4 secs of footage before the clip timed out. This footage can be seen below.
[qt:http://www.theapplesauce.com/Image/NBCiPhone/30Rock.3gp 480 320]
This looks promising and it would be nice to see more quicktime streaming sites like this. I hope that the bandwidth issues will be settled soon. Welcome back to the (i)life NBC
theApplesauce
