A unit of media NBC Universal has signed a deal with Israeli start-up Hiro Media to enable ad-supported downloads. This suggests a willingness of NBC to allow its content onto peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks and still receive advertising revenue.

The deal will allow NBC's DotComedy.com's content to be downloaded freely with Hiro's codec, a program used to encode and decode digital data. Hiro's codec will report back viewing figures to content providers so they can charge advertisers for how many people watched their ads.