As overjoyed as we were at the prospect of Apple and NBC finally mending their differences and becoming buddies again, there was this slight remorse in our souls that the entertaining peacock-a-thon had finally come to an amiable conclusion. Well, not quite, it turns out. Apparently, there are still a few details to be worked out and neither company is willing to “be the bigger man”, so to speak.
JB Perrette, NBC’s president of Digital Distribution (a.k.a. guy-who-probably-had-a-little-more-sense-than-Jeff-Zucker), told CNET that Apple had bowed to NBC’s demands and allowed the studio the pricing and packaging flexibility they’d demanded. His idea of pricing flexibility, apparently, is lowering them to $0.99 per episode for the classics, and getting the liberty to sell episodes from different seasons as part of a package (for a “best of” compilation, for example).
Eddy Cue, the guy who handles all the Internet-related services at Apple (you may remember him from his recent promotion in the aftermath of the MobileMe fiasco), on the other hand, refutes those claims, expressly stating that “we’ve never told anyone they can’t lower prices”. And, of course, since the prices of HD shows are the same for every network, that doesn’t count either.
All said and done, however, I don’t really understand the point behind this discussion. NBC is back and the prices haven’t been hiked—that’s what consumers are interested in. Who came crawling back to whom is hardly of any concern to us, as customers, and feuding over petty matters such as these only makes for bad publicity.
I’m not sure what Apple’s trying to prove either. If they’re attempting to show how they’ve rigidly stood their stance and not allowed anyone to hike their prices for TV shows, one need only look a little further up in the Networks list on the iTunes Store TV section to see that HBO’s shows, even in standard definition, are still priced at $2.99 per episode. So much for the one-size-fits-all approach, huh?
In any case, we just hope that whatever their disputes are, they take them to counselor this time and work on sorting these things out between themselves. The last thing we need is for one of them to go running to a lawyer and filing for divorce again! Dan must be glad though—looks like his masterpiece of a logo is going to get some more time out in the sunshine after all.
I highly doubt there was any "crawling back" by either Apple or NBC.. they just came to a mutual decision to relist NBC's product.. customers demanded it from both (that Apple have popular shows and that NBC distribute their shows on a popular platform). I mean, who really GAS anyways? The HBO example shows there is latitude.. Cheers :-)
Apple is pushing the issue because it wants customers to know that prices aren't going up (and that Apple isn't being so avaricious as to keep NBC from lowering prices) and invasive copy protection isn't around the corner, a possible interpretation of "Apple gave us everything we wanted" from NBC.
I have no idea what NBC is doing.