After Apple showed NBC the door in a tiff over prices and DRM, the network took its goods to Amazon and announced plans for its own download service. Now the service, called NBC Direct, is offering some very limited downloads.

They're free, in that you get to watch ads rather than paying cash up-front. They're also limited-time-only. According to David Chartier's piece on ars, the downloads that start in October have a one-week lifetime. From air date, not from download date. I'm not sure why - this makes the downloads strictly worse than what you can do with TiVo. Oh, and the downloads are Windows-only. Eventually you'll be able to sign up for automatic download - anyone want to bet me that the sign-up process will be harder and more complicated than just setting your TiVo to record the shows automatically?

I'm not sure who this is aimed at, but I am sure it's an idiotic idea. If NBC was trying to make Apple look like a winner in this dispute they've accomplished that much.