Staring next year NBC will be offering commercial-free on demand shows for .99 cents. This is in response to Walt Disney’s ABC offering it’s popular shows, Lost and Desperate Housewives, on iTunes for $1.99. But instead of downloading the video to your computer or iPod, like ABC offers, NBC viewers will have to have a DirecTV Plus DVR. And hours after the show airs the content will be pushed to your DVR.

Among the shows that will be offered through this service are, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: SVU, The Office, Surface, Monk and the best scripted show on TV (only because Firefly was cancelled), Battlestar Galactica.

Where the service falls flat is the requirement to be a DirecTV subscriber and to get a different DVR. If I had a DVR, I would have recorded it anyway, and just fast forwarded through the commercials. And now you have to have a device, separate from your computer, to purchase the videos. And you can’t transfer the shows to another device, such as a computer or iPod. Put all that together and you wonder whether they want this to fail.

NBC is also not alone in the incompetent decision making. CBS will also get into the mix with CSI, NCIS, Survivor and the Amazing Race. These shows will only be available to Comcast digital subscribers. And only in certain markets, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and suburbs of New York City.

In my opinion these restrictions will only serve to cause the IPTV movement to fail. And the service itself is not even worth .99 cents. Thanks for nothing NBC.

You might want to sign up for retina transplant surgey or speed away in your computer-driven car, because Minority Report technology is real. Ok, so not really. But remember the scene with Tom Cruise working a computer with just his hands? That my friend, was based on work being done at MIT. The G-Speak Gestural Technology System is a reality and will change the way you think of “point and click”.

The team developing the G-Speak is currently being financed by military contractor Raytheon. The system works by infared cameras monitoring light bouncing off the gloves reflective beads.

From the site:

Raytheon and g-speak are developing “gesture-technology” systems, which use infrared cameras and reflective gloves rather than a mouse or trackball to manipulate video, text, and other information. Showcased in the 2002 sci-fi film “Minority Report,” gesture technology could be commercially available within five years.

Read more about it.