Each tv company that sets up a video portal with the option to download videos is building their own video player. We got NBC Direct and HBO on Broadband for instance, Netflix and Apple of course. That’s four different video players each with its own restrictions. If you want to use all four services you have to install four different clients that basically do the same, they restrict usage.

The messy part begins when you take a look at expiration dates and the like. Do you know when videos that you have downloaded expire in all of these services ? Is there a way to keep track of the dates without having to open all the applications to take a look at all downloaded videos ?

What I mean is that it does not make much sense from a consumer point of view to create one video client per service. The companies on the other hand want full control of the player and their content which is probably the main reason why they do not create cooperations with other companies that basically do the same thing.

I can’t give an answer to the question above, a universal answer I mean. I still say we only need one player but we probably will end up with one player for each company that is entering the market which could be quite a few.

The second is the website Hulu which is currently invite only and hard to get in. Even if you do you still need to access it from the United States to be able to watch the tv shows. A reader, M.Keezay, told me in the comments that the software Veoh TV would also play NBC Shows free of charge and without country restrictions. (Did I ever tell you, my readers, how much I value your comments and remarks ? They are incredible !)

Veoh TV is a client software comparable to Joost. Once installed the user has to log in, or create an account, and will then be able to watch tv channels in the software. There is NBC with 22 shows including Heroes, My Name is Earl, The Office, Las Vegas, Scrubs and more as well as 154 other channels, most offering similar content that Joost offers.

Not all episodes or seasons are available but you do find five episodes of your favorite tv shows listed and you can opt to watch some or all of them.

Every show begins with a 10-20 second advertisement which is understandable if you consider bandwidth and server costs to run a service like Veoh TV.

Another remarkable channel is CBS which offers additional tv shows like all of the CSI series, Shark, Survivor China, How I met your Mother (the best), Big Bang Theory (even better) and Numbers.

This is probably the best way of watching those tv shows if you do not reside in the United States currently. Great news for every US-American who does not want to miss his favorite tv shows if he is on a trip outside the country.

I did install the service to be able to write about it and ran into a problem when I tried to uninstall NBC Direct. The uninstallation would hang and I had to press cancel to stop it. There was no progress and no information why it would not complete the uninstallation of NBC Direct.

My feeling was that it had something to do with the Open Case Media Agent service that was running on my system and I decided to stop the service. After stopping the service I tried to uninstall NBC Direct again and it completed the uninstallation in no time.

My conclusion would be to uninstall (using the normal Windows Add / Remove Programs menu for instance) the components the following way:

• Uninstall the Open Case Media Agent first. This gets rid of the service running in the background all the time.
• After this uninstall NBC Direct which will now uninstall completely.

The only application that I did install the other day was NBC Direct. A quick check of the NBC Direct FAQ revealed that they were indeed using the OpenCASE Media Agent “that manages your video downloads and monitors for any updates and/or new content to be downloaded”.

This means that this thirty Megabyte process MediaAgent.exe is wasting RAM and CPU cycles for doing nothing most of the time. I can understand that this process is started when starting NBC Direct but not if NBC Direct is not running at all.

The OpenCase Media Agent is a service that is installed with NBC Direct in Windows that is automatically started when Windows starts. The option would be to either disable the service which would surely make NBC Direct stop working or uninstall both NBC Direct and the OpenCase Media Agent to get rid of it.

There are however several catches which really reduce the attractiveness and quality of this new video download service. The service uses DRM, works with Internet Explorer, requires a NBC Direct software to download and view the movies and requires you to have a IP from the United States.

The selection is limited at this time offering episodes from The Office, 30 Rock, Life, Bionic Woman, Friday Night Lights at this time and only the latest episode is available for download at NBC Direct. The service seems to be rather unstable at this moment because my first tries of launching the NBC Direct player ended in an offline (Storefront is offline) notice.

What’s even worse is that there is no way to try to reconnect to the service from within the player and I did not have the impression that the player tried to auto connect to it either. Closing the player and opening it again was the only solution that I could come up with.

It should also be mentioned that downloaded tv episodes will not be in your library forever. You have got two days after hitting the play button for the first time to watch the video which will become defunct after that period.

To sum it up. The pros are that the NBC Direct service is free at the moment. Cons are that it uses DRM, only works with Internet Explorer, requires a proprietary software, offers only five tv shows and only one episode of them at any given time, has connection issues and lets the users watch the tv episodes in a period of 48 hours after pressing play for the first time.

NBC should really take a look at Torrent sites to see how such a service could be created that would be successful.