NBC Universal announced today that they will stop selling TV shows on iTunes. NBC needed to give 90 days notice to Apple so the shows were to be pulled in December, but Apple punched back and is not selling the shows at all this season to avoid yanking them mid-season. Here's Apple's side of the story.
3 of the top 10 shows on iTunes were from NBC: Battlestar Galactica, The Office and Heroes. That accounted for 30% of iTune's TV show revenue. Do they only sell 10 shows? I've not paid to download an episode but I have friends that have watched whole seasons of Galactica this way. Two years ago I downloaded the 5 Oscar nominated best short films for $10 total which seemed like a deal to me, particularly as I had no other option to see them. Last November we learned that strong iTunes sales saved The Office.
NBC wanted to charge more and the ability to bundle shows to sell more of them. Apple works hard to maintain the same price ($1.99/episode) across the board. Apple claims under NBC's terms the price would go up to $4.99/episode which seems way to expensive. $110 for a 22 episode season is crazy when the DVD is $40-60.
NBC must be betting on it's new online service hulu being as popular for their shows as iTunes is. We'll see. The web makes it easy for customers to go to difference places, but sites that aggregate things (google, yahoo, amazon, ebay, etc.) are really popular for their convenience. If there's a lot of content on iTunes will fans looking for some shows go to another site to pay more (the whole reason for this) or will they find something else to watch for less at the site they're already at?
Piracy was another reason NBC mentioned. BitTorrent while easy is still beyond most people's ability. I definitely believe it provides a better experience as you can watch it on the computer or your TV or reformat it for your iPod or whatever you want to do. I find streaming large videos through a browser to be annoying.
This article on CNet seems more like a rant to me but I agree with this: "Sad as it is, there's no way to fully eliminate piracy. Whether you want to believe it or not, the best way to stop piracy is to give people most of what they want: no DRM, an affordable price and ease of purchase. NBC wants stronger DRM and higher prices and it's making its product less available. Sounds like a recipe for trouble." Piracy of TV pilots is also a problem but it seems to me the networks could use it as marketing tool. Aren't these the people that love focus groups so much?
One thing is for sure, neither NBC nor iTunes are going away anytime soon. Well, by soon I mean in the next 5 years, it's hard to predict anything too far out. I know this, a couple of times I've downloaded an episode of a TV to watch. It usually because my TiVo didn't record it or I came to the show a little late and wanted to catch up and there was no other way to see them. Finding the shows was a little difficult, but downloading and watching was really nice. Having feeds that downloaded new shows automatically would be great. Oh wait, Miro already does this, really easily. Now if only they could get some really good content, I wonder who has some? If Miro had as simple a billing system as iTunes it would be ideal. Oh wait, the simple billing system was the problem wasn't it?
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