They Don’t Get It

Posted in Observations,Rants,Things I hate — by Don on 09/01/07

Earlier this week it was reported that NBC was talking with Apple about the selling of their shows at iTunes. Of course, they wanted more money. Apple, naturally, said no. Talks ended poorly.

Now, come December, you will no longer be able to purchase NBC shows from the iTunes Music Store. I’m sure this will include all of the NBC properties as well.

I’m with John on this one. Lame. And let me tell you why.

Before I begin, I’m not going to count commercials as anything. It’s assumed when you watch television there are commercials and that’s that.

NBC broadcasts their content, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for free. I can go blind watching soaps or crappy reality programming on Bravo all day long and I don’t have to give NBC so much as a dime.

But, for reasons passing understanding, I have chosen to download a few shows. S60 from last season, some Office (I went through a phase) and a few episodes of Heros. Gladly I ponied up the buck-ninty-nine so I could watch those on my computer. Of course, these versions are free of commercials, which is a bonus.

While my eyeballs aren’t looking at commercials, doesn’t my $1.99 count for something? I would bet that there is quite a lot of money going through the ITMS and a nice little chunk landing at NBC for some of the more popular shows. I would bet that money pads their revenues fairly well too.

Then they got greedy. Wanting to increase the price of shows so that they would have to sell for close to $5.00! Wha wha wha? Two bucks is one thing, but there is no way I’m going to pay five dollars for something that I:

a.) Paid $2 for last season b.) Can get for free

This is just ridiculous. I guess the networks are really that greedy and/or stupid. There is not a show that has EVER been good enough to be worth $5. When I can buy all 7 seasons of The West Wing at Amazon for less than $200, how do they think I’m going to pay more than half of that for a 23 episode season of anything? Crazy.

I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. 2 words.

Bit. Torrent.