NBC to provide kiosk downloads at CES

Booth visitors can take 30 Rock on a flash drive

By Susanne Ault -- Video Business, 1/4/2008

JAN. 4 | Entertainment kiosk company Mediaport has inked its first video download deal with a major studio, NBC Universal, and the pact will kick off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 7-10.

Mediaport will be installing several of its kiosks at the studio’s CES booth, which will let convention-goers download free NBC Uni-owned episodes, spanning such shows as 30 Rock and Project Runway. The CES attendees will receive a 1GB flash drive in order to access the episodes from the kiosks, dubbed Mediaport ATMs.

NBC Uni was attracted to Mediaport by its customized digital rights management. In this case, after transferring the NBC content from the flash drives onto computers, episodes will play for 14 days and then disappear. Also, users will not be allowed to make copies of the episodes retrieved from the flash drives. Additionally, NBC content from the drives can only be played back through Windows Mediaplayer 9 or greater.

“This is such an interesting digital method, and it fits with our philosophy about distributing digital content with DRM that satisfies the needs of NBC Universal,” said Frank Radice, executive VP of on-air advertising East Coast & MSNBC, NBC Agency.

At this point, the NBC Uni and Mediaport kiosk TV download offering is limited to CES attendees during the course of the convention. But Mediaport hopes its CES appearance will help show off its kiosk video capabilities to a wide and influential audience. To date, Mediaport is best known for its retail kiosks that let shoppers download music tracks onto CDs or Plays4Sure hardware, which excludes Apple products but includes most MP3 players and other portable devices, at retailers including Virgin Megastores and HMV.

“We have 500 [music kiosks] globally, and tomorrow we can enable the retailers to also handle video without any major equipment upgrade,” said Mediaport president and owner John Butler. “We are introducing the concept at CES. We can do the same things with TV and movies that are being done with music.”

Mediaport kiosks also can be updated to create manufactured-on-demand DVDs or provide video downloads directly to devices, bypassing the need for a flash drive.

NBC management has been bullish about getting its content out digitally. Although the company stopped offering content on iTunes over a disagreement with Apple’s pricing restrictions, NBC is finding many digital outlet alternatives. Many of its current primetime series can be streamed on its Web site, NBC.com, and the network counts about half a billion streams of its content since October 2006. NBC also is beta-testing new video streaming site Hulu, a joint venture with News Corp.

“I think we are aggressively looking at every way to distribute our shows,” said George Kliavkoff, NBC Uni chief digital officer. “Our end goal is to widely distribute them so the end user can choose the place and the time and the device to consume it.”