“NBC couldn’t have worse timing,” Vince Horiuchi reports for The Salt Lake Tribune. “The Peacock network, home to great series like ‘The Office,’ ‘Heroes’ and ‘Friday Night Lights,’ cut itself off from iTunes earlier this month in a move that is sure to hurt NBC much more than it will Apple, which owns the downloadable music and video service.”
“It’s the most bone-headed move a television network can make right now. For one thing, NBC pulled out of its contract with Apple a week before the introduction of a whole new lineup of iPods, including the new iPod ‘touch,’ which has a 3.5-inch-wide screen perfect for viewing video,” Horiuchi reports.
“It also doesn’t help that this deal went sour just before the start of the fall TV season, when millions will be turning to iTunes to get episodes of new shows,” Horiuchi reports. “Finally, NBC, which is in fourth place in the ratings, needs iTunes to drum up interest in its series. Many credit the success of ‘The Office’ on iTunes for giving that sitcom a leg up on television.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mike in Helsinki” for the heads up.]
Some of the “many” who credit iTunes for the success of “The Office,” include the NBC boneheads themselves.
and yes, we have a winner! someone with a clue who ALSO writes for a paper…..
i hope the price cut is coming, i am seriously looking to drop cable and buy all my shows direct.
I have dropped Dish. And am now getting all my content via Netflix and on-line — enjoying it more, and saving a ton of money.
MDN Magic Word: End — the beginning of the end?
Yeah it’s funny I’m dropping my Cable in about a week, so I guess I’ll be getting my NBC content “elsewhere”. Freakin’ douchebaggers at NBC forcing me to find free alternatives to iTunes…
In other words, what we are really pissed about is missing Heroes and Bionic Woman.
Doesn’t NBC’s current contract run through till December?
Just wait until our own video store with FOX goes online… sometime next year. Then you’ll see who has the smarts to own this industry!
The Office and Heroes were the only series I downloaded on iTunes last year.. oh well.
I bought the entire first three seasons of Top Chef. It was cheaper than paying for cable or satellite and not illegal as I am led to believe is the case with bit-torrent. I guess I may become an outlaw once season four begins later this year.
The article focuses on the availability of the iPod touch, for playing video, but the new nano is going to expand the video player market even more significantly. Read Dan Eran’s multi-page review of the new nano on AppleInsider.
Think about it: all iPods (other than the shuffle) sold from now on are video players. It’s just a question of what screen size, storage, portability and thin-ness factors most appeal to the buyer.
The various iPods are so attractively featured and priced now that it will not be a great surprise to hear of people with multiple video playing iPods in different size formats.
The next quarter’s sales figures will be huge, and there will be a tremendous jump seen in the number of video playing iPods ready to receive and play video over the next few months. (“critical mass” achieved)
by the way, the Netflix download service is windows only.
Netflix download is Windows only (borg loving pigs!). But the DVD rental is amazingly cheap. Yeah, I have to wait a day to get it, but I’ve seen more movies I want to see since joining than I did on Dish.
I guess my point is over the air TV, satellite and cable are all about feeding what they think will sell to the public. Download services, and rental like Netflix are about what the consumer wants to see and when they want to see it.
The paradigm is shifting. And the Media giants, like the Music industry, are too fat and blotted to change with it.
NBC’s ratings are the biggest reason why this whole thing is a surprise to me. Not iPods, not the power of Steve Jobs.
Some of their biggest shows are literally dead last in the Nielsens. And this is the time to experiment with a tried and true model? You’d think NBC was on top of the Big 4 with no problems.
I would never have watched 30 Rock had it not been for iTunes. Not that I thought it was a bad show, just always came on at a bad time for me. I’d think that its survival, like The Office, might also be credited to iTunes.
The AppleTV is getting ready to take off!
Movie rentals, then I would love to see a subscription to someone like HBO or Show Time, DL anything they are currently showing
Have been playing around with Bittorent, works, pain in the a**,
would much rather pay for the DL . at a fair price
I wouldn’t be so quick to cry foul about Netflix not allowing downloads for the Mac. The CEO said they desperately want to make this service available to Mac users, but they can’t because of DRM. For Windows users they use Microsoft’s DRM, which won’t work on the Mac (thankfully), and apparently they’ve approached Apple about using FairPlay but Apple said no. I read recently that there is another option in development and that they expect to make it available to Mac users some time in 2008. Netflix is a very pro-Mac company, they just haven’t been given much support. I guess Apple considers Netflix to be competition to iTS.
Isn’t it funny that the things that actually enable people to legally watch the network shows when it is convenient for them to do so are the things that they want stopped (or to rape the public for)? TiVo, iTunes… don’t they get that if I am able to watch a few episodes when I have time to do so that I might actually become a fan of the show and *gasp* actually watch some episodes during it’s usual airing when time permits? They are alienating a very large percentage of the public with their old time thinking.
Families don’t drop everything and gather ’round the TV set to watch their shows at a specific time anymore. Hell, families barely sit down to have dinner together anymore (though that’s not a good thing).
By the time these morons catch on, it will be too late…
The whole point of creating shows that people will watch is to generate more and more ad revenues. The more popular a show, the more the studio can charge advertisers for air time in that time slot.
Technologies such as Tivo and iTunes break or change this vital revenue stream for the studios. So it isn’t really that they “don’t get it”. They do understand it, but they understand these things as a monetary threat, and they are ultimately not concerned with things being more convenient for you the viewer.
How will the studios make up for this loss of ad revenue? THAT is the problem they are dealing with. The equation is quite simple… No growing or maintaining ad revenue = No new shows, or no quality shows… People tend to forget it seems that most human endeavors revolve around economic gain. These shows you like so much don’t produce themselves for free.
Now, answer honestly, how popular would Tivo or iTunes really be if you had NO WAY to skip through or completely avoid 15 minutes of advertising every hour?
@Connor MacBook,
I would think that the contract is good for the shows already there selling at the current price. I don’t want to believe the peacocks would want to sell their new shows at a lower price then try to get more for it on some other service.
NBC must be crazy, the only other place i can conviently get TV shows to play on my iPhone is for me to download pirate copies. I wanted to be good and not steal content but making it harder for me to do it legaly makes no sense. I love watching movies and TV shows on my commute. I can get every episode if Battlestar Galactica for free so fast, I can only imagine NBC must be so rich that they can throw my money away. Whatever, it no differnce to me where i get it as long as i get what i want.
Oddly enough, all this hooah about NBC got me re-interested in Heroes (which is still on the iTunes store) and I’ve purchased five or six episodes recently. Huh.
I think NBC tried to push back at Apple for flexible pricing, thinking they had until December to negotiate, and Apple unexpectedly cut them off immediately. Now NBC is scrambling to not look greedy and idiotic. The content creators mostly have iPods. Imagine how stupid and unsupportive NBC’s leadership must look right now to the people who create great shows like Battlestar Galactica.
“Now NBC is scrambling to not look greedy and idiotic.”
Unlike Fox which prides itself on being greedy and idiotic. It’s probably written exactly that way in their business plan.
What else is new? When does management ever demonstrate they have an ounce of brains? Typically, they can’t do anything else. That’s why they’re in management.
“Number Two; is our new fall season removed from iTunes like I wanted?”
“Yes Dr. Evil”
“Good, Apple will be begging us for content and we will charge them…A HUNDRED BILLION GAZILLION DOLLARS!!!”
muhhahalalala muhahahalalalal muhahahalallalalaaaa!!!!
“I think NBC tried to push back at Apple for flexible pricing…Now NBC is scrambling to not look greedy and idiotic.”
That’s OK. Based on the rumors of what their “flexible pricing” would have entailed, I’m sure they would have looked “greedy and idiotic” anyway.
I have read both points of view. Apple will be the looser, now NBC will be the looser. I guess they both will be, thats why I think NBC is more then likely to come back in a few months.