NBC & Pando Networks, a provider of P2P content delivery services, announced today that Pando will be providing video delivery services for the NBC Direct service.

While it’s interesting to see a mainstream network using P2P to distribute video, it looks like NBC Direct is going to be another misbegotten proprietary Internet television offering. It requires a special player, it won’t work with Macs and it won’t work with most successful Internet media platform, Apple’s iTunes ecosystem.

What NBC Direct will offer is ad-supported downloads, via a custom Windows player, of programs across the NBC prime time line up. Pando’s p2p solution will ensure protection of copyrighted material using hash matching, digital fingerprinting and content watermarking technologies. Good for NBC – but it means that you’ll be locked into viewing videos on NBC’s terms.
Viewers will also be able to select shows that they’d like automatically delivered to their computers, in a sort of proprietary podcast-like fashion.

Programs currently available include “30 Rock”, “The Office”, “Heroes”, “My Name Is Earl”, “Medium”, “American Gladiators”, “Celebrity Apprentice”, “Friday Night Lights”, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”