Apple Takes on the Dinosaurs
Anyone else watching the fight between Apple and NBC/Universal with interest? It's a great story. NBC wants to renegotiate its contracts with Apple to give NBC more control over the pricing of the tv shows, movies and music the iTunes store sells. Apple wants to keep its low, pro-consumer prices. NBC says Apple only wants to keep the price of content low to sell iPods. Apple responds that NBC is greedy, which it is. Consumers say that we'll start stealing stuff again if the greedheads at NBC win.
Why am I so skeptical of NBC's claims that their battle with Apple is not about charging more, but about pricing "flexibility"?
Well, first, it's just such obvious BS.
Once NBC gets the flexibility it wants, you can be sure it's not going to flexibly
lower the prices of its products.
Reminds me of the time back when gas stations started converting from full-service to self-serve, with the promise that the self-serve pumps would sell gas for cheaper than the full-service ones. That lasted about a month.
So here's NBC saying a few days ago that
it's not about raising prices. Now here's NBC about two days later,
inking a deal with Amazon to sell its movies for $14.99—five bucks higher than Apple's $9.99. Whoops! NBC's integrity lasted about 48 hours.
NBC is making the same mistake that the record companies made for years and years—not realizing that the Internet wants content to be cheap. They'll alienate consumers just as fast as the record companies did. There may not be easy ways to steal video yet (though several people I spoke with yesterday told me of sites where I can download any tv show I want), but NBC is going to create a market for an easy-to-use video sharing/stealing site.
When will the content providers realize that it's not just the content consumers want, it's the pro-consumer ethos of the Internet?
That was the genius of iTunes, which created an easy-to-use store and sold things at prices consumers actually considered fair, rather than than trying to gauge every penny they could from consumers, as record companies had been doing for years, creating a reservoir of ill will that made people all around the world feel that theft was a legitimate form of empowerment.
With NBC and Fox's sure to be pathetic
hulu.com, and
Sony's new plans to create a video downloading site, it's clear that these massive media companies just don't get it.
