NBC may not need no steenkin’ iTunes, but that doesn’t mean they’re prepared to ignore the legion of iPhone/iPod touch users out there. Hence, they’ve decided to make two of their most popular shows, The Office and 30 Rock, available to those on Apple’s mobile platform. In order to watch the free episodes, you just need to go to NBC’s site on your device, hit Video, and then Full Episodes.
All NBC has really done here is format their shows as iPhone-compatible QuickTime files. However, since they’re using the 3GPP codec to make the shows load faster (and they still, over Wi-Fi, do not load very fast), the quality is not very high. Also, this is downloading, not streaming, so while you can play the video before the entire file is downloaded, if you want to pause in the middle and go do something else, you’ll have to start the whole process over again. Also, the episodes are divided up into smaller segments, meaning you’ll need to load up multiple files. All of which makes it impractical to use this as a solution for downloading files to watch while offline. On the flipside, well, you get what you pay for.
Should you wish, you can access the files from your Mac via the same User Agent spoofing trick we discussed on MacUser for getting onto AT&T’s Wi-Fi hot spots, but you’ll need to poke around a bit to find the file name for the videos. though, given how poor the resolution is, you’re way better off just streaming them for free from NBC’s site or from Hulu.
I didn't find them slow, but the layout was confusing. For 30 Rock there was only one part for one episode and duplicate parts for another. They weren't laid out in anything I would call order. Oh yeah, there was at least one commercial (I gave up after that).