Excite News – Apple Escalates NBC Spat Over iTunes — This is typical of the way boneheads operate. Good for Apple doing this.
Apple Inc. AAPL AAPL escalated a dispute with NBC Universal over the pricing of television shows by announcing Friday it would not sell any of NBCs programs for this fall season on iTunes.
Earlier, NBC had told Apple that it would no longer allow its programs to be sold via iTunes at the end of the year. NBC Universal-controlled television programming accounts for an estimated 40 percent of the video downloads on iTunes.
“We are disappointed to see NBC leave iTunes because we would not agree to their dramatic price increase,” said Eddy Cue, Apples vice president of iTunes. “We hope they will change their minds and offer their TV shows to the tens of millions of iTunes customers.”
Rather than cut off NBC programs in the middle of the season, Apple decided to stop before the new fall episodes premiere next month, he said. That would be a blow to fourth-place NBC, which could use the buzz provided by Internet sales for its programming – not to mention the money.
ABC, CBS, Fox and the CW, and 50 other cable networks, have deals in place to sell fall shows at iTunes current price of $1.99 per episode, Apple said. NBC wanted Apple to pay more than double its wholesale price for the material, which would have resulted in the retail price increasing to $4.99, Apple said.
#59 at least you’re clear that Jobs wants to screw you. That’s a start.
Odyssey67 -
Ya. Apple very much has dropped the ball on many aspects of this whole media revolution. Plenty of things they should be doing, and some that they shouldn’t.
But even with their many fuckups, they’re still on top and poised to remain there – because the others fuck up so much more.
#62 Is that the reason why the other fuck-ups have bogger market share than mac?
#63,
Actually all this is happening right now for a reason. In a couple of weeks Apple will be announcing a new video iPod, I am sure to much hyperbole in the Apple friendly blogosphere. A place filled with personalities that like to hear themselves talk(when they are not complaining). Otherwise, Apples demographic. By moving now, the media companies will seriously blunt the coming apple PR stunt. Who cares about the next gen video ipod when there is no content for it?
From other things happening, look for FOX to announce they are dumping iTunes in the coming weeks as well. The pattern is clear now. They launch programs on the XBox, then with a couple of weeks sales they lose interest in iTunes sales potential. Basically because Apple has so far failed to deliver a seamless path to the living room television set with mass market appeal.
Oddly Apples business decisions seem more motivated more by Steve Jobs pride than any other factor. Just look at the Apple TV, it is apparent now that piece of shit was designed to fail so Steve Jobs could say to the networks with maniacal eye, “SEE our consumers are not interested in watching tv in their living room, because their living room television is not an elegant Macintosh computer!”
But mostly this is happening as a result of Apples near total failure to capitalize on iTunes video. The fact of the matter is, the all important male 18-49 demographic (read “people with money”) are more than willing to rent HD download movies for $5 a pop, and buy a HD television show for $5 an episode. My proof of this the xbox media center has, in less than a year, become the dominant movie download service as well as the dominant HD on demand server (besting not only apple in total downloads, but besting the CABLE companies in HD downloads).
It is unfortunate for the bloggosphere, that during these very public negotiations they have shown their true colors. Which is, they want their tv shows without commercials and free. I am certain that the cacaphony of posters threating to use bittorent instead of pay for content is not lost on these media companies.
#64 I think you’re onto something. Maybe NBC saw that they could perfectly well do their bussiness thru Xbox (at the same price or above the price they had with oy!Tunes, doesn’t matter) and instead of dumping them flat out, they just gave them a really absurd new price scheme and forced the exit from mac. This way, it would be seen as mac throwing them out, and not NBC dumping mac.
If this is the case, it has been a brilliant move. Don’t know what their future sales would reflect, but mac has already accused the punch. Just that statement about NBC video content being 40% of their video download….ouch! that must hurt. Let’s see if, as you say, other will follow. It’s shaping into quite an interesting subject to keep an eye on.
And about the new oy!Pods, I can only laugh at them. The day they can show me a wireless 2TB (yes, Tera Bytes) media player (which I just turned my old pocketpc phone into and my wife’s 2002 pocketpc), then I MAY start to to see them with a little less pitty. But, as always, mac needs to play catch-up.
Hello!! How about reading NBC as MSNBC!!! Look
hard enough and you’ll find Microsoft behind this.
I suspect Microsoft thinks they can handle the sales
and take it away from Apple.