NBC Officially Removed from iTunes Store

NBC Universal TV channels (Bravo, mun2, NBC, NBC News, CNBC, NBC Sports, Sci Fi, Sleuth, Telemundo and USA) have disappeared from the networks available on Apple's U.S. iTunes Store. This makes good on the announcement made three months ago by NBC and Apple.

NBC has launched hulu and the NBC Direct service which suffers from severe limitations. These limitations include:
- the requirement of Internet Explorer, NBC Direct Player(Windows only), and .Net framework
- a seven day window to download new episodes
- 48 hours to watch a downloaded episode before its self destructs
- videos only viewable on computer they were downloaded to
- unable to transfer video to portable media player
- macs not supported

I wonder if NBC will ever crawl back to iTunes....?