Barely a month after taking most of its videos off of iTunes and going home, NBC is ready to play again. In a story about NBC CEO Jeff Zucker, the Financial Times reports:

Mr Zucker appears to have patched up relations with Apple after a pricing dispute last year led NBC to pull its shows from the iTunes digital media store. “We’ve said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple,” he said. “We’re great fans of Steve Jobs.”

Still no sign of the missing NBC shows on iTunes. But it looks more and more like NBC’s walkout may have just been a negotiating tactic.

I’m often reminded of the Monty Python line “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” as being the perfect analogy for the unexpected, so its apt that I use it here because it looks like what you download online in the United States could soon be monitored and blocked (presuming it breaches copyright) if new plans by AT&T are implemented.

At a panel discussion at the CES conference Tuesday, Senior Vice President of external & legal affairs for AT&T James Cicconi said that “what we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working” and further AT&T has been talking to technology companies, the MPAA and RIAA and “we are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this.”

But just in case you think this might be a per-download basis, the target could be much larger than that. General Counsel for NBC Universal Rick Cotton has P2P downloading as his first target, saying “The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status…the question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”

This ISP level blocking would be fairly unique, given that most countries that implement censorship online do so at a national level, and usually target porn, moral or political subversion, such as in Australia and China.

Although this would be implemented by AT&T only at this stage giving customers who prefer their internet access without the hand of big brother the ability to change providers, remember that nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. It could well spread to other ISPs as well, particularly once the MPAA and RIAA have one big win on the board.

With apologies to Monty Python again
“Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to copyright, and nice red uniforms.”

(via Engadget)

While NBC Universal is making deals left and right to try to make up for the fact that it is no longer distributing its digital TV shows through iTunes, don’t get distracted by all the small-fry announcements. For instance, today it announced that it would make NBC shows available to SanDisk for its new Sansa TakeTV/Fanfare service. Is anyone going to buy a USB TV device from SanDisk? We’ll see.

In the meantime, NBC has something brewing that could actually make a difference to the digital-download appeal on its own site, NBC Direct. NBC will soon start using peer-to-peer technology from Pando to distribute its downloads, a story StreamingMedia broke a couple weeks ago. Yesterday at the Web Video Summit in New York City, where I was moderating a panel, I was able to confirm that a stripped-down version of Pando’s technology will be incorporated into the NBC Direct video player. I also learned something new. The reason NBC wants to go with P2P technology is because it wants to start distributing high-definition videos. Pando’s P2P system can help NBC not just to lower the cost of distributing large files, but also to differentiate itself with HD video downloads. No special Vudu box or SanDisk USB video device will be necessary.

NBC will be betting big on HD to drive viewership of Web video. It is already playing around with HD streams on Hulu, its joint venture with News Corp. And it is not going to be just NBC. HD video is going to come to the Web a lot faster than most people think. It may even come to many people’s computer screens before it comes to their TV screens. Just think about that for a second. If you can get a better viewing experience off the Web than you can on your TV, that might just be the incentive you need to really start shifting away from TV.