The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
So if you owned a company the size of NBC, a company that has been spending the last few years seeing its market share and the overall general appeal of its technology dropping, would you not be doing absolutely everything that you could to ensure that your product reached as many eyeballs as possible? All those things being true, can anyone at all explain a reason why NBC has pulled all of their programming out of the iTunes store when it controls over 70 per cent of the legal download market? While still not available in Canada, Apple has been offering full length movies for $4.99 and full length TV shows for $1.99 for several years in the U.S. When they first began offering this programming, it was a surprise move, but coming on the heels of the overwhelming success of the iTunes music store, companies were willing to jump into a deal with Apple. While many of them now complain, and there seems to be a yearly fight between record companies and Apple over pricing, the fact is that this online store has been an incredible success story with over 700 million copies of iTunes having been downloaded. Download Market As the company has rebounded, Apple has found itself in control of much of the legal download market for most of the digital content that is out there. NBC, on the other hand, sees Apple as being a monopoly that works hard to control the pricing of the content it offers so that it can sell more iPods and computers. Of course, as a company that makes content, NBC needs to be worried about where its shows are used and how much is being paid for them. Online rumours say that NBC wanted its shows to be sold for over double the current cost, moving them from $1.99 to $4.99. To Apple, this would simply price them out of range and make the content unaffordable. It would also be a bad precedent. As Canadians, these fights over pricing affect us very little. We are not allowed to legally buy content through any of the online stores, although of course we can download all of the shows we want from services like Bit Torrent for free anyway. But these battles mean a lot for the future of online entertainment, what gets bought, and how much we pay for it. Everything is moving online, of that there can be no doubt. From music to television shows, from software to games, everything that can be digitized is moving onto the Internet. It is the best bet for companies, allowing them to lower their shipping and production costs and update their products much easier than having to send every customer a new CD to patch problems in the old one. It is also better for consumers in many ways. It allows us access to a lot of things that we normally would not be able to get; content from around the world. We can also get updates quickly and easily. So as things move online, how they are sold, where they are sold, and how much they sell for is important to us all even if we still can't buy some of the things that are being bought right now. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.t
