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Free NBC shows to the iPhone

Written by Chris Tangora

Thursday, 08 May 2008

While NBC has been threatening to pull it's content off of iTunes, it appears that they do like Apple products. As of last night www.nbc.com would allow iPhone users to download/view some of their top TV programs with limited commercial interruption. The only catch was you had to watch it in a few segments. For example the last few episodes of The Office & 30 Rock came in four parts each, with only the last 5 or 10 seconds of each segment being an advertisement.

While it is available to the iPhone users now, you can also hack into the system by using Safari or another browser to emulate the iPhone browser. You can get the episodes, but they are at iPhone size. Looking at the past history of NBC and Apple I don't think that NBC is doing this as a favor to Apple, but rather as a way to attract their target market.

Log onto www.nbc.com on your iPhone browser to see.

From the Alley Insider.

Comments (4)

	08-05-2008 12:29
	Actually, it looks like you can skip the first 3 steps! Just open Firefox and start on step 4 in my previous post. Registered

the JoshMeister

	08-05-2008 12:23
	Instructions to download full episodes to your hard drive: 1) Install Firefox and the User Agent Switcher add-on: http://mozilla.com http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/ 2) Go into User Agent Switcher's Options, click on User Agent, click on Add button. For the Description field, type "iPhone" and for the User Agent field, paste "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" (without quotation marks). Click OK, and OK again 3) In the Tools menu, go down to User Agent Switcher, and select "iPhone" 4) Go to http://m.nbc.com/iphone/fullepisodes.shtml and click on the TV show you want to download 5) Right-click on the picture for the first segment you want to download, and click on Properties. A new window will pop up. Highlight the text to the right of "Title:" and copy it. Close the Properties window. In a new window or tab, paste the URL. When the video starts to play, go to File, Save Page As... and select a download location. The video will begin downloading. Do this for each segment of the video Registered

the JoshMeister

	08-05-2008 11:33
	Interestingly, this also means that you can download low-res copies of these episodes to your Mac or PC for free, totally legally, directly from NBC. Not the same thing as paying for higher-res versions from iTunes, of course, but at least it's free and legal. Registered

the JoshMeister

	08-05-2008 11:30
	This works in Firefox using the User Agent Switcher add-on and a custom UA string: --- Description: iPhone User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3 --- The video is a streamed .3gp file, viewable right within the browser. Registered

the JoshMeister

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