NBC emailed a press release last night touting DotComedy’s use of Hiro Media’s dynamic ad insertion technology for downloads, but since they’d already announced this in June when it went live, and after over a month, I figured I’d see if there were any results. What I found, or didn’t find, makes me wonder if NBC really embracing the power of Hiro to distribute high resolution, ad supported video content over P2P networks.

A search on torrent meta-search site Torrentz on variations of “Dot Comedy,” “Comedy To Go” and episode titles like “Playback: Mexicohabitation” didn’t turn up any torrents. Nor did searching the eDonkey and eMule networks with Figator.com, or individual torrent sites like Mininova or The Pirate Bay. A BitTorrent.com search provided a link to the main DotComedy site, while nothing turned up searching Azureus’ Vuze either.

This means that viewers don’t seem to be reposting the videos, and the network doesn’t seem to be seeding popular torrent networks with the content. As for the downloads themselves, they are direct links from NBC’s web host — so that rather than offering a torrent of the video and potentially saving on distribution costs for themselves through peer sharing, the network is paying full freight to their CDN for every bit.

I have to imagine that with NBC’s hyperbolic anti-piracy statements of late, the network wouldn’t want to associate the content with sites or networks where unauthorized file sharing is going on. But from a business standpoint, the beauty of Hiro is that it doesn’t matter how or where viewers get the files from — NBC moves ad units no matter what, and doesn’t have to pay a dime for distribution beyond the bandwidth as a seeder! So while I still applaud NBC’s choice to take a chance on a new revenue and distribution model, I wonder if the company is leaving money on the table by not promoting the content on file sharing networks.

In other DotComedy news, the Arby’s branded Lunchbreak Show which I also wrote about in June went on hiatus on July 30th with no word on when it may return with new episodes.