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Look who’s playing catch up with Apple’s iTunes?  Microsoft has confirmed the rumors that it will start selling TV shows in its Zune Marketplace, possibly to compete with the recently announced iTunes movie download offerings. For starters, Microsoft has sealed a deal with NBC, which incidentally is coming off the recent break-up with Apple’s iTunes.

Although Microsoft’s move maybe a little bit late, lagging behind Apple’s iTunes which started selling TV shows two years ago, Microsoft is confident that its Zune Marketplace will be able to make some headway over the iTunes especially now that one of iTunes biggest content providers has decided to move over to the Zune Marketplace. NBC and Apple had previously disagreed over pricing which caused NBC to stop offering their content in iTunes.

Starting Tuesday, TV shows will start showing up on Zune’s online store. Microsoft will have an initial offering of around 800 episodes of various TV programs including NBC hits such as “The Office,” “Heroes,” “30 Rock,” “South Park,” “Battlestar Galactica” and “Rock of Love” with Bret Michaels.

Quite uniquely or perhaps annoyingly, the Zune online store would only allow users to buy those show episodes using points that they can buy from the Zune Marketplace. Each episode will cost the equivalent of $1.99 in Microsoft points. Some potential users might find this system a little bit of a hassle though and might turn them off into buying stuff from the Zune MarketPlace.

Via [Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog]