Apple, having yet to renew its content distribution agreement with NBC Universal, began pulling all television programming produced by the network from its iTunes digital download service this past weekend.
The ongoing dispute between Apple and NBCU stems from the pricing of the content within iTunes.
Apple claims that NBCU wanted to more than double the price per episode from $1.99 to $4.99. Meanwhile, NBCU maintains that it was only trying to keep the door open to more flexible pricing methods and was hoping to price Heroes at $2.99 on a trial basis.
Given how the music industry power structure has shifted to Apple, this zinger of a quote from NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker is hardly surprising:
"We know that Apple has destroyed the music business -- in terms of pricing -- and if we don’t take control, they’ll do the same thing on the video side."
For more, click here: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/12/03/apple_drops_nbc_television_shows_from_itunes.html
1 comment:
I think it's smart of the media companies to actively try to control their content, but they need to be careful not to alienate massive content distributors like Apple. Since many of the media companies distribute their own content for free (like this season's Heroes episodes), Apple may have thought dropping the shows were not huge revenue losses since audiences could easily get this high quality content for free.
Post a Comment