NBC Universal has fallen out with Apple over the pricing of their products on iTunes with the result that Apple will not be offering any new material for sale from the company via its store. That means no new seasons of Heroes, Battlestar Galactica or The Office – three series that have sold very well on iTunes in the past.
For the most part, people are looking at NBC and thinking that they must be mad. Why would they make it harder to legitimately get hold of downloaded versions of programming when users can just download a torrent of the same programme without any payment.
But I’ve got to say that actually I think that NBC should be able to price their programming as they see fit. Some reports suggest that under NBC’s proposed pricing structure and suggest that costs might rise from the current $1.99 an episode to as much as $4 or even $5 an episode. Well, that’s really for them to determine. If they charge too much, then they won’t sell any programmes, and that’s the nature of a free market.
Apple’s insistence in controlling pricing doesn’t allow for product differentiation. Heroes is a premium NBC product just now and perhaps can command a premium, whereas an old episode of some eighties detective show might only be 50c. Yet on iTunes it’s $1.99 and there’s no flexibility. Why shouldn’t some of the forthcoming new series be sold at greatly reduced prices to garner interest?
If I walk into my local HMV, or scour the virtual shelves of Amazon, DVD box sets are sold at vastly different price points. I mentioned in my piece a couple of days ago about the launch of the television section on the UK iTunes store that season tickets for series are sometimes more or less expensive than their physical DVD equivalents.
There are many reasons for differentiating prices – sales, old programming or stock, promotions. It’s for the retailer and distributor to determine what a series can be sold for.
Similarly, music should have differential pricing too. We’re all used to picking up classic albums relatively cheaply. Yet compare a few classic albums on Amazon and iTunes and there can be a vast differential:
Highway 69 Revisted – £9.99 on iTunes, £4.97 on Amazon
Bridge Over Troubled Water – £7.99 on iTunes, £4.97 on Amazon
Parallel Lines – £7.99 on iTunes, £2.97 on Amazon
Yes – Blondie is exceptionally cheap! But old songs and albums really shouldn’t be that expensive. And iTunes needs to be able adapt to variable pricing.
Of course, iTunes single price means that Brits pay 79p a track compared with 99c in the US. At the current exchange rate that should be more like 50p. Similarly TV programmes are all £1.89 a show (irrespective of whether they’re a 22 minute South Park episode made for peanuts, or 42 minute episode of Grey’s Anatomy made for millions of dollars an episode), compared with $1.99 a show in the US.
A lot has been made of Hulu, the new Fox/NBC destination to watch streaming programming. It’s basically an attempt to break YouTube’s stranglehold. But it’s going to stream shows, not let you download them to your iPod or PSP. I wouldn’t be surprised if within days of it launching somebody hasn’t built a tool to snatch a file version of the stream as you can with YouTube.
In other news, it was interesting to note in HMV today that you’ll be able to buy the pilot episode of Heroes for £2.95 on Monday. I can’t see them releasing the whole series this way, which makes it an odd experiment. Why not either give it away, or make it a covermount on something like SFX magazine if it’s just to drive DVD sales?