It looks like we're in the middle of a race between television networks to grab the profits from online downloads of their shows, as a wave of such deals have surfaced in the last few days. Los Angeles Times reports that Fox Broadcasting signed a deal to offer season premiere episodes of seven TV shows or free through Apple's iTunes store.

Essentially, Fox hopes to lure in TV viewers or downloaders by offering them the premiere episode for free. "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," said William Bradford, senior vice president of content strategy at Fox, quoted by LA Times.

The premiere episodes will reportedly include Back To You, Til' Death, Prison Break, Bones and K-Ville.

There's clearly a struggle by the major networks to see whether people are willing to pay for their episodes to watch them commercials-free or whether it's more lucrative to offer free downloads supported through embedded advertising.

Others who jumped into the download bandwagon include ABC, who just struck a deal with AOL to make full-length episodes available for free a week after they initially air, via a co-branded version of ABC.com’s broadband player on AOL video. Under the deal, four episodes per series of shows such as: "The Bachelor," "Big Shots," "Brothers & Sisters," "Carpoolers," "Cavemen," "Dancing with the Stars," "Desperate Housewives," "Dirty Sexy Money," "Eli Stone," "Grey's Anatomy," "Lost," "Men In Trees," "October Road," "Private Practice," "Pushing Daisies," "Samantha Who?" and "Ugly Betty" will be available at any given time. The agreement marks the first time that ABC's prime-time programming has been made available on a major online portal and is also the first time a major online portal has offered a full feature version of a broadcast network's online video player.

Also, on Wednesday, NBC Direct was announced an ad-supported free service that will allow users to download full-length episodes of NBC shows straight to their desktops starting in October. The decision comes after NBC Universal allegedly notified Apple about its intentions to pull their TV shows from iTunes Store in December. According to the report, NBC Universal invoked its disagreements with Apple over the pricing scheme and DRM policies. Although Apple officials declined to comment directly the New York Times story, the company released press statement which announced that will not be selling NBC television shows for the upcoming television season.

Apparently, Apple declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99. NBC Universal reacted to Apple’s statement, by saying that the problem wasn’t the price, as the iTunes’ owner implied. Just days after its dispute over TV shows' pricing on iTunes, NBC Universal has left the iTunes store for good and announced a new partnership with Amazon Unbox, none other than iTunes’ biggest rival. Their shows are also available on Unbox -- for a price, but ad-free.

Meanwhile, CBS, Viacom Inc.'s unit, and The Walt Disney Co.'s ABC network allow free, ad-supported viewing online.