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NBC chief says Apple ‘destroyed’ music pricing
[Quote:]
NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker on Sunday urged colleagues to take a stand against Apple’s iTunes, charging that the digital download service was undermining the ability of traditional media companies to set profitable rates for their content online.
We know that Apple has destroyed the music business — in terms of pricing — and if we don’t take control, they’ll do the same thing on the video side,” Zucker said at a breakfast hosted by Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Communications.
[..]
He said NBC routinely propositioned Apple to breach its standard pricing model and experiment with higher pricing for one hit show such as “Heroes” by raising the price from the iTunes standard $1.99 to $2.99 on a trial basis.
“We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99,” he said. “We made that offer for months and they said no.”
The NBC chief also revealed that in addition to more pricing flexibility, his firm was also seeking a cut of Apple hardware sales — such as the iPod and iPhone — which were capable of viewing content downloaded from the iTunes Store.
“Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money,” he said. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.”
Zucker’s comments also arrive just as NBC and NewsCorp. are launching their joint online video venture, Hulu.com, which aims to compete with iTunes by offering streaming TV and other commercial video content to viewers under an ad-supported model.
Read “ruined the music business” as “actually giving the consumer what they want instead of relying on greed and laziness to fill my coffers with regrets.”
Also, I checked out the “hulu” service he talked about, and it claimed that the content wasn’t available in “my region”, which is odd, since there are plenty of other sites that tell me otherwise. The only places that don’t allow me to view NBC content is the services ran by NBC…
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What is really interesting is how iTunes can make a profit on selling those shows but NBC Universal cannot seem to “set profitable rates for their content online” selling the same shows! Evidently it isn’t just our school kids that are getting dumber.
The sad reality is that even at $1.99 it is too expensive! The demands for a share of the hardware sales is ludicrous too. Do they really think that their poor quality content is doing anything to encourage sales of iPods? I seem to remember the statistics suggesting that the vast majority of iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes store. Most people are happy with just their ripped CD content, and other free content. That, and some free podcasts is all I put on mine.
And I haven’t bought any nrw music in a long time because their attitude is starting to piss me off. I won’t download anything or copy it – I write software for a living, so I understand well enough why that is wrong. So, I just don’t buy any more. I don’t think it has ever occurred to those idiots who run the music companies that there are people like me out there who just get so fed up with their whining about not earning quite so many millions off of somebody else’s work that they just stop buying altogether. They’re just pimps in reality, and they’re annoyed that somebody came along with a new business model. What would really make a difference would be for Apple to start signing artists directly, and giving more of that 99c to the people who really deserve it.
Check out the comments on the hulu weblog…. brutal!