Over 1 Million NBC Downloads Since Return to iTunes

[MacRumors]

One of the major announcements during last week's media event was the return of NBC shows to the iTunes Store. NBC reportedly accounted for 40% of iTunes video sales prior to their removal late last year.

Hollywood Reporter reveals that over 1 million NBC iTunes downloads have been logged since the studio's return on September 9th. Some of those downloads may have been free HD episodes which are currently available from iTunes.

Free HD iTunes episodes include (via TUAW):

- He That Believeth in Me - Battlestar Galactica, Season 4
- Fun Runs, Pts. 1 & 2 - The Office, Season 4
- Lipstick Jungle: Pilot - Lipstick Jungle, Season 1
- Four Months Later... - Heroes, Season 2
- Pilot - In Plain Sight, Season 1
- Mr. Monk Buys a House - Monk, Season 7
- Ghosts - Psych, Season 3
- Merit Badge: Pilot - Life, Season 1
- Bad to the Drone - Eureka, Season 3

NBC's fall season will kick off next week for many of its popular shows including The Office and Heroes.


Article Link

[grooveattack]

bet that's a nice little earner...

[sjjordan]

SOME? Try MOST. As soon as I heard there were free episodes, I grabbed 3 of them. I'm sure a lot of people did the same.

[solipsism]

I wonder how many they lost by not selling on iTS, especially during the Olympics.

[sushi]

Nice to see NBC back and the level of interest shown by 1 million downloads in a relatively short time.

[gianly1985]

"Save the cheerleader, get a bunch of money"

ps: it sucks that all these HD goodies are only on the U.S. Store I'd like to see movies and tv shows on Italian (or foreign, in general) store too...

[garty]

Call me crazy but I just bought season 4 of Battlestar Galactica despite having them all from 'other sources'. Why? To show NBC that if you offer them in a way that is convenient for the customer (remember them?) at a reasonable price and HD as a bonus then I will buy them rather than get them from 'other sources'.

I hope the NBC execs have learned form this episode.

[stagi]

I downloaded a few of the free shows to see the quality of HD

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

That's a huge number for such a short amount of time. What are people saying about the quality of the HD programming from NBC.

[Stella]

Seems like iTunes needs NBC as much as NBC needs iTunes for an online impact.

1 million - says a lot to those people who were saying iTunes is better off without them...

[MrCrowbar]

Originally Posted by stagi

I downloaded a few of the free shows to see the quality of HD

I want to, but can't because I need different account information for payment of the free stuff...

[Papajohn56]

Funny they came crawling back.

[matt archbold]

I downloaded all but 3 of those HD shows. I dont know if I did something diffrent but when I selected the HD version it also downloaded the SD version as well (free of charge). Does anyone know if the SD version is free with the HD purchase? It makes sense, buy the HD version and put the SD verison that is included on my iphone.

The HD version diid seem better in quality than the SD versions of the same shows although not a whole lot. It was sharper and a little brighter using the same screen settings on my XPS m1330 laptop.

All in all it was a good experience with the HD shows. I dont think I'll buy every show in HD that's available, but will for my favs (The office, Heroes, Monk, Psych and pretty much anything on the Discovery Channel).

[iSaga]

Does anyone know if iTunes will be offering the Heroes season pass?

[yoda13]

I downloaded some Law and Order SVU shows in HD...the ones I missed last season, there were about 4 of them. I had some quirks with the downloading process, but now I will be able to download all the shows that I watch on all networks, so I am happy....no need to get a DVR now...which is expensive where I live unfortunately...

[arn]

Originally Posted by matt archbold

I downloaded all but 3 of those HD shows. I dont know if I did something diffrent but when I selected the HD version it also downloaded the SD version as well (free of charge). Does anyone know if the SD version is free with the HD purchase? It makes sense, buy the HD version and put the SD verison that is included on my iphone.

Yep, the SD and HD versions are bundled together. The SD version is for iPhone/iPod use.

arn

[penguy]

for some reason when I select any of the free episodes and they are moved to my shopping cart, they are then shown as 'unavailable'. Everything else in my cart is fine...

I did notice a reviewer on one of the shows indicate that they were having the same problem. Any thoughts? Could it be HD related? ie, your system is inadequate, therefore you cannot download the content? (if they would update the mini, that would NOT be the case, but I digress)

[gkarris]

Duh, since NBC left, there's a lot more video capable devices Apple sold (iPod Nano, Touch, iPhone). I'm even starting to see more people buy AppleTV, and you can now purchase directly on that.

I don't know, a network that cancels Stargate and gives us Flash Gordon....

[emaja]

I am not really sure that this is an indication of anything since they are free downloads. I can say that I would not have bothered if they weren't free. In fact, I really downloaded them to see what the HD content looked like.

[bobbleheadbob]

1,000,000 total downloads!

(Too bad only a small % of those were likely PAID downloads...Betcha almost all of them are just everyone grabbing the free stuff )

[marktesssing]

Originally Posted by penguy

for some reason when I select any of the free episodes and they are moved to my shopping cart, they are then shown as 'unavailable'. Everything else in my cart is fine...

I did notice a reviewer on one of the shows indicate that they were having the same problem. Any thoughts? Could it be HD related? ie, your system is inadequate, therefore you cannot download the content? (if they would update the mini, that would NOT be the case, but I digress)

from itunes click store>shopping cart from the sidebar on the left then click "buy now" in the lower right corner of screen

[clalor]

Originally Posted by penguy

for some reason when I select any of the free episodes and they are moved to my shopping cart, they are then shown as 'unavailable'. Everything else in my cart is fine...

I did notice a reviewer on one of the shows indicate that they were having the same problem. Any thoughts? Could it be HD related? ie, your system is inadequate, therefore you cannot download the content? (if they would update the mini, that would NOT be the case, but I digress)

Try turning on one-click purchasing for these shows. There's some sort of bug that prevents you from purchasing many of the NBC shows when using the shopping cart. It worked for me with the Battlestar Galactica season 4 HD episodes.

[MojoWill]

come on Apple sort out the UK store. We want the HD shows NBC etc.......

[FaasNat]

Originally Posted by penguy

for some reason when I select any of the free episodes and they are moved to my shopping cart, they are then shown as 'unavailable'. Everything else in my cart is fine...

I did notice a reviewer on one of the shows indicate that they were having the same problem. Any thoughts? Could it be HD related? ie, your system is inadequate, therefore you cannot download the content? (if they would update the mini, that would NOT be the case, but I digress)

I think you can still click on the 'buy' link from the shopping cart. However, doing it with the shopping cart option only downloaded the SD version. I had to enable the 1-click method to be able to get the HD versions as well.

[twoodcc]

i bet most of those are from free downloads, but that's still a lot of downloads