I was initially impressed by the fact that NBC began offering full episodes of some of their shows online. When 30 Rock was premiering this season, NBC had put up all of the first season episodes. Sure, you have to sit through occasional unskippable ads (the driving factor behind the current writers' strike), but you got pretty nice quality and not much lag so it was worthwhile to use it to catch up on shows easily.

But some shows could be hit or miss. They may not have all of the full episodes for a season (or in the case of some shows, no full episodes - just clips). So I was interested to hear NBC was launching a new venture with some other companies that was essentially like YouTube for their content called Hulu.


But once again, not all shows have full episodes, the site's still limited access (and while it lets you embed videos, international viewers still can't see them, probably because advertisers know that they're not going to be buying American products and consequently wouldn't pay for those views), and for shows that have had a few seasons, the available seasons can be bizarre (i.e. The FX show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has all of season 1 and the most recent 5 episodes of the 3rd season (eps. 9-13) online. Plus these shows will not be up forever (though I wonder what the criteria will be for shows not currently on the air, like the A-Team, to disappear from the site).

Obviously neither solution is ideal, but it seemed like they're getting closer to creating something that's better for users. Videos can be embedded, many more episodes are available now than before, etc.

But now they're launching NBC Direct as a way for people to download episodes and view them offline. Except it's far from ideal since you have to download Internet Explorer-only software, can't transfer the videos anywhere, can only get recent episodes (currently there's only 6 total episodes, and episodes disappear after 7 days), and more.


My question in all of this is: Why confuse users and provide several sub par alternatives when you can do just one thing and do it right? An excellent example of this would be the newly launched dailyshow.com. You can embed videos, they don't expire, the collection is complete, and there's one place to go for all content. YouTube has also proved that model works, though they have the pain of not owning the content they host. It doesn't seem to be that difficult to see what works and what doesn't, and yet NBC's current internet distribution is a giant mess. I'm not going to check three different places to see if an episode I want to see is available, nor will I always be looking for recent content. Wake up!