More dirt has emerged regarding the Apple/Universal deal that turned rotten. According to an article in Variety, the deal went south when NBC Universal wanted to raise the price of hot properties like "Heroes" by a dollar, to $2.99, in addition to requesting a cut of Apple's hardware profits. On both counts, Apple refused. And the head honcho of NBC Universal, Jeff Zucker, was none too happy: "Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money."
Less than satisfied with his company's cut of Apple's pie--$15 million in revenue over the last year--NBC Universal opted to pull out of iTunes and spend who-knows-how-much to launch its own online video site called Hulu, which is headed into beta this week. "We don?t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side." Hey, anytime someone wants to throw $15 million in pennies my way, please go right ahead.
Wonder how he'll feel when those "pennies" are replaced by NOTHING. I'll never buy anything from their service, but I would have pre-purchased the entire season of Heroes on iTunes. Now I'll just have to pull out the p2p software again that has been sitting unused since iTunes started selling video.
NBC has no right to EXIST at all.
They make their money by controlling access to TRANSMITTERS and screwing:
* producers (the people who actually put the shows together,)
* consumers (the people who want to watch the shows the producers put together) AND
* advertisers, (the people who pony up the cash for access to the process while getting sold on nebulous "audience share" numbers based on the "facts" that people don't have any friggin' lives, families, pets, bladders or colons to distract them.)
NBC and the rest of the broadcasters are entirely UNNECESSARY on the internet.
No wonder they're running around like buggy whip makers after Henry Ford.
They're all going to get KILLED (and the world will go on fine after they're gone.)
They first show that gets to solicit money directly from the audience is going to slaughter them; absolutely slaughter them.