NBC to Offer Free Downloads of some Primetime Shows

The article i read this week comes from the BNA Internet Law News article talking about the recent idea for the NBC network. The popular television network NBC is going to start offering limited free downloads of some certain prime time shows such as "Heroes" and "The Office". They say it will help "expand the digital distribution of their programs" and they also think it will help compete with Apple's iTunes store. They say that this service will be available to anyone using Microsoft Windows software. This program for downloading prime time shows will be available for a week after the show is aired on television, but then the digital file will expire. NBC, like many other networks, already has many of their shows available for purchase permanently and has streams of some of their shows free on their website. But with new technology and new business models NBC is trying to give viewers more options for watching these shows.

I think in general this is a good idea. Then I was thinking, isn't this one of the reasons that there is this writers strike which is taking place now. All of the writers for these big networks such as NBC are all on strike and no new shows are being wrote. One of the reasons these writers are on strike is because the writers don't receive any of the money for shows downloaded over the Internet. This is exactly what NBC is trying to do. That's why in general I think it is a good idea to try to expand viewers options for watching some of these shows but at the same time I feel that this will further extend the writers strike that is currently taking place.