It’s almost as if, once NBC decided to dump iTunes, the network has been looking for every venue possible to make its shows available for digital viewing.

The latest place on the Internet to find NBC shows is Netflix, best known for its online DVD rentals. Netflix has signed a deal with NBC Universal (press release) to offer online episodes of “Heroes” and past episodes of other series such as “30 Rock”, “Friday Night Lights”, and “The Office.” Netflix subscribers will have the option of watching these shows immediately on their computers at Netflix.com or on DVD.

“Heroes” episodes will appear on the Netflix website the day after they air on NBC. There’s no word if each episode will be available throughout the season, or if shows will be taken down once new ones are aired.

South Park fans rejoice (“Kenny” to live online forever).

Following a successful experiment with “The Daily Show”, MTV Networks will make every episode of “South Park” available free online sometime next year, as part of the company’s wider distribution strategy “to reach consumers everywhere” (see the Reuters report).

The lesson learnt by MTV Networks subsidary, Comedy Central, when it made the entire archive of “The Daily Show” available for streaming online, is that Internet TV viewing can lead to more traditional television viewing. In other words, The Daily Show’s television viewing figures are up not down, even though fans are able get an unlimited fix via the show’s own website.

The three significant British terrestrial TV networks – the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 – have today announced an initiative to develop a combined service for accessing their on-demand and catch-up services. The new service is currently known under the working title “Kangaroo”. At the moment each network offers their own service, each with their own failings and benefits. Most recently the BBC launched their controversial iPlayer, which hit headlines after it was announced that it would only be available (in the first instance) for Windows XP machines, alienating Windows Vista machines and users of other operating systems.

By having a unified method of browsing, downloading and viewing programs from each of the three providers, viewers will have more control over the content stored on their machine. I argued a while back that a unified application just makes more sense. The end-user only has to learn one method to view their favourite programs, and not three. Imagine this as being similar to an electronic program guide (EPG) – one view for all channels (or at this time, for those channels covered by those networks). If, for example, Sky’s EPG was fragmented like the current online catch-up services, you would have one style menu for BBC, another for Sky channels, another for Channel 4, and so on.