That running a giant media corporation doesn’t preclude the possibility that you might be a) to avaricious for your own damn good, b) a drooling idiot, or c) both.
NBC/Universal has decided that they’re not going to renew their contract with the iTunes Store because of “piracy and pricing concerns.” I have to admit, I’m scratching my head a bit over the piracy bit because, AFAIK, to date no one, and I mean NO ONE has cracked the DRM for iTunes video (I’m not suggesting that Apple’s DRM for video is unbreakable. My guess would be that there isn’t a lot of demand for it. Most people who feel really strongly about DRM free commercial video are either going to buy the DVD or download a torrent), which suggests to me that Apple’s DRM prevents privacy about as well as any other DRM out there (tongue planted firmly in cheek).
The pricing question, however, is as transparent as it gets. Simply put, NBC wants you to pay $5 for every episode of The Office. Or, put another way, NBC wants you to pay $5 per episode for a show that you can legally watch and record for free over the air, in HD. But wait! There’s more! Not only does NBC want you to pay more for something they otherwise give away, they want you do this for a show that you would never have grown to love in the first place if it hadn’t been available on the iTunes Store.
Simply amazing. Let me predict this one: NBC pulls it’s shows from the iTunes Store and starts offering them through some other venue, maybe their own proprietary store. They charge $4.99 per episode and wrap each episode in DRM that makes it virtually impossible to watch in any convenient form (on an iPod, for instance), and NBC sits back and rakes in literally tens of dollars.
iLounge has posted a brilliant open letter to NBC that you have to hope someone at NBC will actually read, for their own good.
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