TECHNOLOGY - Fox tries new lure for iPod crowd - The network and Apple will offer premieres of seven shows free.

Beginning this week, season premiere episodes of seven Fox Broadcasting programs will be made available for free through Apple's iTunes store, a move that highlights the TV industry's race to harness the Internet and try out potential business partners.

The Fox-Apple deal is designed to expose iPod users to the upcoming season of new and returning prime-time shows. Executives with the News Corp.-owned network hope that free downloads of such shows as "Prison Break," "Bones," "American Dad" and "K-Ville" will entice viewers to watch later installments on TV or pay to download them from the iTunes store.

The deal underscores the television networks' predicament: They are trying to protect their lucrative businesses at a time when more viewers are catching their favorite shows when they want, thanks to TiVo and digital video recorders.

In a similar move, Walt Disney Co. said Thursday that it would make full-length ABC prime-time shows available on AOL. And Wednesday, three weeks after a well-publicized breakup with Apple, NBC Universal announced that it would offer free downloads of such shows as "Heroes" and "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" for one week after their air date through a new service called NBC Direct.

"What we are seeing is a rather messy and inelegant fumbling into the future of video distribution," said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president of Denuo, a consulting arm of the advertising giant Publicis Groupe.

"It's also an admission that the television networks' time-honored, top-down manner of distribution is not the way that people are watching video anymore," Hanlon said. "Programmers are having an interesting time trying to figure out how to adjust."

Fox's William Bradford, senior vice president of content strategy, said, "I wouldn't call it fumbling around. We are trying a lot of different things and there is a lot of learning that the TV industry is going through."

The networks are still trying to determine whether they can make enough money by selling downloaded shows without commercial messages or whether they should focus more on offering advertising-supported programs free to viewers.

So far, TV companies have not raked in big money on their Internet offerings, at least not the enormous sums they have become accustomed to from their current customers: advertising sponsors, TV stations and cable channels.