I just watched the first two episodes of NBC’s new web-only sciFi series, GeminiDivision. A rant about the fact that NBC’s “download” service is Windows-only: later. A rant about the poor user experience: later. A discussion of the business model: later.
But Wikipedia and P2P are endorsed by NBC. The “downloading videos” FAQ:
Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a way of rapidly delivering media files over the public internet allowing users to receive high quality NBC content in the fastest way possible directly to their desktops. When you download an episode through the NBC Direct service you’re doing it on a secure and efficient network made up of fellow NBC Direct users. As more and more users join the network, downloads will become even faster. Here’s how it works.
And for folks who want to know more, the writers reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2P