It seemed like just yesterday that NBC announced its partnership with Amazon's Unbox. Of course, it wasn't so long ago that NBC started talking about its own video site, Hulu, and left the iTunes store. But now NBC has a new rock solid business plan for distributing its shows online: making their episodes free.

Users can now download shows for free from NBC Direct, but the episodes will have ads and automatically disappear from users' hard drives in a week. For now, this service is only available to PC users and the episodes are not transferable to iPods. NBC isn’t exactly giving up on its paid distribution service with Unbox, but as the Times knows, the only original content people are willing to pay for online is porn.

What the hell Hulu actually is remains a mystery. But by next week, NBC should have a new service that forgets about Hulu, disregards iPod users and cheats the Apple Store.