It’s official - the traditional broadcast mass media business model is dead. Today NBC opened its own direct to viewer store. It had no choice. (NYT)

NBC Universal said yesterday that it would soon permit consumers to download many of NBC’s most popular programs free to personal computers and other devices for one week immediately after their broadcasts.

The service, which is set to start in November after a test period in October, comes less than three weeks after NBC Universal said it was pulling its programs out of the highly successful iTunes service of Apple Inc. That partnership fell apart because of a dispute over Apple’s iTunes pricing policies and what NBC executives said were concerns about lack of piracy protection.

NBC’s move comes as companies throughout the television business search for new economic models in the face of enormous changes in the business. Networks continue to lose audience share, and viewers — especially many of the highly prized viewers under 30 years old — are increasingly demanding control of their program choices, insisting on being able to watch shows when, where and how they want.

At the same time viewers are finding more and more ways, like TiVo machines, to avoid watching the commercials that have long provided the bulk of television revenue.

Jeff Gaspin, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group, said, “The shift from programmer to consumer controlling program choices is the biggest change in the media business in the past 25 or 30 years.”

NBC makes many of its popular shows available online in streaming media, which means that fans can watch episodes on their computers. Under the new NBC service, called NBC Direct, consumers will be able to download, for no fee, NBC programs like “Heroes,” “The Office” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on the night that they are broadcast and keep them for seven days. They would also be able to subscribe to shows, guaranteeing delivery each week.

But the files, which would be downloaded overnight to home computers, would contain commercials that viewers would not be able to skip through. And the file would not be transferable to a disk or to another computer.

The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable. “Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,” Mr. Gaspin said.

The programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later.

In a second phase of the NBC rollout, customers would pay a fee for downloads of episodes that they would then own, and the files would be transferable to other devices. NBC hopes to offer this service by mid-2008, depending on how quickly the company can put in place the secure software necessary to allow payment by credit card.

The latter system is what is already available through iTunes.

Like Wile E Coyote, the affiliates have not hit the canyon floor yet - but gravity has an inevitable force. So the local stations in commercial and in public media are going to die or create a new model for themselves. It is no longer possible to make money by having a local monopoly on content. Nor can the affiliate depend on the national producer like NBC to protect them.

Both the National Producers and the Affiliates are going to face a crisis before all of this works it way through.

I work with and talk a lot to public radio and TV stations that have long been aware of this inevitability. They have plans well under way along the lines that I have described here. But many have had their head in the sand and may find that they are too late. The real challenge is first of all ‘Mindset”. It takes time to imagine an entirely new way of being.

Think of a habit that you have in your life - one of mine is indolence and sloth. I knew for ages that I was really over weight and weak. My Dad died at my age partly because of this. But in spite of my wife pleading for me to take care, I refused. It took over a year for me to take charge myself, and then only because a dear client, who is in the business of helping the unwilling, took me by the hand. Now, my new habit has taken hold and I feel so much better. I can now experience the improvement and I think I am on my way. It has taken small steps and lots of encouragement and lots of time.

Most stations have none of this. It takes special circumstances to change your whole way of life - even if death is a consequence. Many stations will not have the benefit of a loving and capable friend to help them change. Now they do not have the time either. It’s going to be ugly for many but the aware will pull away and do well.

It’s going to be very rough as well for the national producers. Will their revenue from selling direct, keep up with the losses that they will experience as stations push back on the price for programs that are no longer exclusive?

The fact is that there will still be traditional viewers and listeners but not enough to pay either the station or the producers way.

My bet is that NPR is especially vulnerable here. NPR fees are a very significant cost to stations that will be starving for revenue. NPR’s costs are high. They are also in need of a new building just when the crunch will hit. I think that there is a way though of NPR and PBS and the local stations all starving to death.

What if NPR and PBS had a central site that sold you their content for a very small fee. I click to buy a Nova Program or Morning Edition for a month. I pay a small fee on my credit card as on iTunes or 1 Click on Amazon. My IP forces a choice immediately - which station I will support. The national producer and the station get fed. I get what I want - my content “My Way”.

The affiliates and the producers in Public Media have to get together and do something like this soon. If they don’t the entire system of Public Media will die, leaving only a few local stations.

What will you say when your children ask you why America lost its last place where civic discourse could take place? What then will be lost? Whose fault will it be? It will be the fault of every station leader and NPR and PBS executive who thought that someone else would do their work. It will be the fault of every person in Public Media who refuses to see crisis that confronts them. It will be the fault of every leader who thinks that they can do this on their own.

I beg you all to act together. It just needs a few of you to take the lead and the rest will follow.