NBC and iTunes are splitsville
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- August
- 31
I downloaded the entire Office Season 3 at iTunes this past summer, and planned on saving a few bucks by buying the Season Pass for the new season.
Well, now it looks like I’m going to save a whole lot of cash, because I won’t be downloading The Office or 30 Rock as I’d planned now that NBC and Apples have dissolved the groundbreaking digital partnership that helped launch the TV download phenomenon.
According to today’s New York Times, a pricing dispute between the world’s leading digital download seller and its number-one digital video supplier ended in divorce. The entire Peacock catalogue—some 1,500 hours of Battlestar Galactica, Heroes and Project Runway—will still be available through December. But no new material from the network will be added after today.
Hard to believe there was a time when TV on your iPod was less than commonplace. But before The Office cross-promoted the pervasive little gadget in its Christmas 2005, taking shows to go was a novel concept.
Seems that video content producers like NBC don’t like being told how to sell their wares by iTunes behemoth any more than music sellers did when the iPod first came along. But Apple forced a revolution in music sales, and broke the criminally unfair hold the $18 CD had on the market, with its single-song-download idea.
NBC would rather you buy the season finale of The Office along with 40 Year Old Virgin (both Steve Carell vehicles) and pay a premium you wouldn’t pay for either alone. And they say Apple only insists on singular downloads because they serve as a loss leader for its iPods with someone other than Apple—namely content providers—taking the loss.
As usual, the consumer loses out. Either we pay an unfair premium for content or we lose access to that content. And believe me, if you shelled out $349 for an 80-gig video iPod and suddenly your favorite shows are only available in a competing format (no side in this game has ever heard of the word compatible), you’re losing out.
This entry was posted
on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 8:40 pm by Brian Howard.
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