NBC’s Clueless Executives

A few months ago, I got an invite to try out NBC’s online video service, Hulu. It’s awful. Everyone in the tech community knew it was going to suck, and despite Om Malik’s enamored praise of the site, it has turned out to be a terrible, DRM-laden, user-hostile piece of crap. The video quality is *atrocious*. Check out an example of the jaggy encoding from an episode of The Office.

It might as well be from YouTube. What’s worse is you can’t download shows to watch on your iPod, TiVo, or laptop later. The selection is a joke, too–I want to have access to any episode of any show that was ever on NBC.

Techno-luddite television executives have not yet figured out what the music industry is slowly coming to terms with: DRM only hurts your best customers. Every single episode of The Office is available for download for free on the Internet in a completely portable format at much higher resolutions than you can get from Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix or anywhere else online video is sold.

It is impossible to stop piracy if there are no reasonably-priced good alternatives. I want to buy high definition, DRM-free, copies of shows at the exact same time they are broadcast on NBC’s television stations. NBC should be competing against The Pirate Bay, not trying to stop the BitTorrent firehose. Offer a product that is easy to use and satisfies my needs. iTunes isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close.

NBC’s feud with iTunes is absolutely ridiculous, too. While it’s amazingly dumb to shackle iTunes downloads to Apple hardware, Steve Jobs is giving people a slightly more acceptable amount of freedom than NBC. It’s mind-numbing to try to understand why anyone would refuse to sell its shows through Apple.

Back in October, NBC’s Jeff Zucker said, “We know that Apple has destroyed the music business — in terms of pricing — and if we don’t take control, they’ll do the same thing on the video side.” However, yesterday he alluded that NBC may return to iTunes, “We’ve said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple. We’re great fans of Steve Jobs.”

2008 is going to be a great year for video on the Internet. The writers’ strike might be an opportunity for video podcast producers to steal some of that audience from NBC. There are thousands of very high quality shows on the internet right now. Check out Tiki Bar TV, Diggnation, BoingBoing TV, MacBreak, Ask a Ninja, and Lynchland. They are all DRM-free. This is the future of television.

Just a few weeks ago, another NBC executive troll, Ben Silverman, remarked about the writers’ strike affecting the Golden Globes ceremony, “Sadly, it feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom. But NBC wants to try to keep that prom alive.”

NBC’s clueless executives must change their attitudes. Give the writers what they want, and offer every show in their archives for sale through iTunes. Hulu.com needs to be shuttered or converted into a store to sell downloadable DRM-free content to everyone.