NBC and Amazon have reached a deal. Apple will be mighty angry. Maybe, I don’t know. NBC will sell its really great shoes—”Heroes” and “The Office” among them—on Amazon’s Unbox video download service sometime in the future, presumably soon after NBC’s deal runs out with Apple in December. Victory for you, the consumer?
Probably not, no.
The issue here was control. NBC wanted the freedom to charge customers more for newer content than older content; Apple wanted none of that. So NBC will sell its shows—junk, in my opinion—on Unbox. Unbox, if you’re one of the few who have never used the service (that’s irony; no one uses it), sells movies for $14.99, or you can rent them for $3.99.
TV shows will still be available the day after they air.
Yeah, so will this work with my Mac? Because if not, hell, I’ll just go back to BitTorrent. They won’t see a dime from me.*
*As if I’d ever buy a TV show. Not in a million years.
Update: Make that available now. Download away!
NBC in Deal With Amazon to Sell Shows on the Web [New York Times]
I didn’t realise NBC had started selling “shoes” :-)
I totally agree wit this post, what NBC is doing here is shooting themselves in the foot.
It seems as though there is a large number of people willing to pay the iTunes store price for TV shows. However, I don’t think there will be large group of people willing to pay more than that (and even fewer who will pay the totally out of control Unbox price).
Medialoper also had a great post about this.
http://www.medialoper.com/hot-topics/itunes/nbcs-bad-move/
-N
Nope, Windows or Tivo required. At the moment, at least, NBC shows are $1.99 on Unbox. It’ll be interesting to see what happens come the end of September when the new season starts – will NBC try to jack up the price of new shows, thus driving away the handful of Unbox users that actually exist?
If these are viewable with the Tivo/Unbox linkage it could be a major play for Amazon.