NBC and Apple tussle: Pricing, piracy or both?
Apple’s top 10 TV shows and about 1500 hours of programming came from NBC universal. However, recently NBC pulled out its TV shows from iTunes. Some of the reasons seemed piracy and pricing, with pricing being the prime criteria. NBC reportedly feels that it should be NBC, not Apple that should decide the retail price for the TV shows. In a recent on stage interview at Ad tech conference in SanFransisco, George Kliavkoff, chief digital officer at NBC Universal, asserted without taking names of ipod or itunes that piracy was a key issue too. He also made it clear this week that NBC would like to resume selling its television programming through the iTunes Store if Apple made changes to its client software that would allow it to serve as the gatekeeper for all forms of potentially pirated media. Quoting George Kliavkoff, “If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets onto that device, it has to go through a gatekeeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some antipiracy measure. One of the big issues for NBC is piracy. We are financially harmed every day by piracy.” Apple uses a digital rights management (DRM) software embedded within each audio and video file it sells. It seems like NBC want to extend this to track every piece of digital media imported in or out of the iTunes library. It seems like NBC has decided to take the stick on piracy now in a big way.