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Media Businesses Apple

NBC's Zucker Hints At Return to iTunes 68

Posted by Zonk from the yay-we-can-all-just-get-along dept.
Bad corporate blood led to the collapse of the NBC/Apple business relationship in the fall of last year. Now, via the Engadget news feed, comes word that things may be thawing out between the two. A for-pay article in the Financial Times had words from NBC Universal's COE Jeff Zucker, saying: "'We've said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple.' He then unexpectedly adds, 'We're great fans of Steve Jobs.' No telling what has caused the turnabout. Perhaps the writers strike gave both parties time to reflect on their mounting lost revenue." The site also notes that NBC signed a deal as part of the recent movie rental announcement, possibly contributing to the thaw. They link to a BusinessWeek article pointing out positive statements from Jobs reciprocating these 'feelings'.
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NBC's Zucker Hints At Return to iTunes More

NBC's Zucker Hints At Return to iTunes

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  • Obviously... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dkf ( 304284 ) <donal.k.fellows@manchester.ac.uk> on Monday January 21, 2008 @06:36AM (#22125088) Homepage

    No telling what has caused the turnabout.
    Well, I bet it's called "money". If each reckons they can make more profit (or possibly just increase turnover) by tolerating the other, that's a strong incentive to grin and bear it. The details? They'll become clear over time.
    • Unsurprisingly NBC want that 14M they made when they were distributing through iTunes. NBC also were surprised that giving away shows for free was not a great business model.

      Apple pretty much did this rental thing just to win back the motion picture industry that were worried that Apple would become too powerful, as it has with music.

    • Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21, 2008 @07:51AM (#22125366)
      Absolutely. Business is all about money. NBC believes (or believed) that they had the leverage to get more money out of Apple. Conversely, Apple believes (or believed) that NBC would be accepting of the status quo in terms of money.

      And what happened? General Electric gave NBC an opportunity to create its own online video distribution service. How cool is that??? VERY cool, and it is a project I wish I worked on. Because a failure would mean that they just re-join the iTunes club, and a year or two of no iTunes sales. Sure, it had a small chance of success, but the cost was low and the potential payoff was huge. And it's a huge, unique project for those involved.

      So I don't blame NBC for going in this route. I'm sure others will try too. But the fact is, a retailer that sells all products (instead of just one class of product) is compelling to consumers, and that's just something that NBC couldn't overcome given the current old-school business model in the industry of "we only sell our own stuff".

      The record labels fell into the same trap. As Jobs knows, people certainly don't want to search 100 stores to find what they want - they want to shop at the Walmart of on-line media sales and be done with it.

      • Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:15AM (#22125502) Homepage Journal

        Absolutely. Business is all about money. NBC believes (or believed) that they had the leverage to get more money out of Apple.
        No, I don't think they were trying to get more money out of Apple -- they were just trying to cut Apple completely out of the equation and keep all the profits for themselves. In the process, they learned that it's hard to build an online buying community and that Apple's success with iTunes, despite all appearances, did not happen overnight. Apple had to take plenty of losses for a while before they gained enough of an audience to make more money. Apple leveraged the money it made from its other successful businesses -- namely computer hardware and software sales so they had plenty of time to ride out the initial slow period.

        Media companies are far less likely to do that. They expect each business unit to stand on its own and aren't as willing to leverage one business unit with another. That's why Big Media took so long to get into online distribution and why Apple had the opportunity to carve itself out a nice niche in the first place.

        • Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by jollyreaper ( 513215 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @11:40AM (#22127550)

          No, I don't think they were trying to get more money out of Apple -- they were just trying to cut Apple completely out of the equation and keep all the profits for themselves. In the process, they learned that it's hard to build an online buying community and that Apple's success with iTunes, despite all appearances, did not happen overnight. Apple had to take plenty of losses for a while before they gained enough of an audience to make more money. Apple leveraged the money it made from its other successful businesses -- namely computer hardware and software sales so they had plenty of time to ride out the initial slow period.
          Got it in one, Mr. Garibaldi. And you know what? I bet that there were people all up and down NBC telling him this and he refused to listen. What, those pretentious sweater geeks can do it over at Apple, it must be simple! Hey, Fran, your teenager likes computers, right? Tell him I'll give him a hundred bucks to whip up an iTunes replacement. Tell him it'll look good on his resume.

          It just galls me to see how fucking incompetents who have no understanding of their industry get put into positions of power and are pile-driven into the ground. I've got a book I'm reading right now on four important commanders who fought in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The author is sympathetic to both sides but really shows how ignorant mindsets can lead to disaster. On the Japanese side, the popular fiction was that Westerners were all lazy, cowardly, and the men henpecked by domineering wives. They lacked warrior spirit and were contemptibly unworthy of their wealth. It didn't matter that many western-educated Japanese military men knew otherwise, you simply did not speak up against the cultural myth. The Japanese could not divorce poetic license from real life. All the popular talk about going and dying for the emperor instead of kicking ass and coming home alive, insane. The obsession with forcing the Decisive Naval Battle (Germans were guilty of this sort of thinking, too) while not realizing that they were losing large chunks of their fleet trying to force it. Instead of attacking the vulnerable hand wielding the sword, they determined to punch their fists right into the swordpoint. And because Japanese culture is all about not losing face and not embarrassing your superior, nobody fought the wrongheaded notions going about. Ignorant course of action were decided upon and even people who strongly disagreed with them had no recourse. There was also plenty of stupid on the American side as well, the gun club admirals having their pissing contests with the naval aviation admirals. You had MacArthur putting his own glory ahead of the best interests of the United States, good men making terrible mistakes in the heat of battle (Halsey and Taffy-3), etc. I forget who said it but it's true: the winner in a war is the side that makes the least mistakes. The United States pulled quite a few boners but the Japanese were worse off in terms of resources and cultural mindset.

          The last company I worked for was like that. You get these crazy ideas handed down from on high and you had no idea who advocated the policy, what the rationale was, and simply assumed that the powers that be had access to better information than you and the whole thing must not be as crazy as it appeared. Well, turns out us peons were right: those were damn stupid decisions. But in this corporate culture, you had to protest the way the Japanese did, seppeku -- because if you criticized management, you were putting the "I'm asking to be fired" blade to your belly and giving it a good shove. So through fear and uncertainty, ignorant fools drove a profitable company into bankruptcy. When the first signs of danger showed, the smartest and ablest jumped ship. When the layoffs began, the smart and able who were too loyal to jump the first time started looking for work and jumped as soon as they found it. By the end, all that were left were the timid and people too specialized to easily find work outside of the industry.

          Ok, that was a little bit of thread drift...

    • Meanwhile, at command headquarters... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Evil Minion: "Sir! The RDF temporarily collapsed! We may have lost NBC."

      Captain Jobs: "Fire up the emergency generators, and reroute power from auxillary sources."

      Minion: "Yes, they are back online now."
    • NBC CEO Jeff Zucker to Lead iTunes Insurgency! I am so glad that Jeff came out of the closet with this! Apple has everyone in the media business running scared! Finally Jeff Zucker stands up to these itards during a speech at the Syracuse Newhouse School of Communications where he urged media companies to take a stand against Apple. He said: "We know that Apple has destroyed the music business -- in terms of pricing -- and if we don't take control, they'll do the same thing on the video side." He said that

  • Translation... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RyuuzakiTetsuya ( 195424 ) <taiki@co x . net> on Monday January 21, 2008 @06:45AM (#22125118)
    No one's going to the NBC site and thus sitting through ads to pay for our online venture.

    I think that it's partially because of the way the content looks zoomed in. Compressed Flash Video never looks good, atleast whatever encoding Apple was using made an effort to look good when viewed up close.

    • Re:Translation... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @07:52AM (#22125374)
      Not only aren't people using their site, their site is slow to load, the video is crappy at best, and their bandwidth bill must have been huge.

      The great thing about apple's offerings is that you can output it to a TV at full screen and sit on your couch to watch them. Try that with most flash video's. Youtube it is allowed CNN it isn't.
  • Sorry, someone had to ask...

    If apple gets NBC on board, how will they feel about DRM in the long run?
    • They already have Disneys largest single shareholder on their board in the form of Steve Jobs, and for all of his getting on the 'DRM is bad bandwagon' all the Disney output is just as DRM'd as the rest of it.
      • Steve Jobs is indeed the largest single Disney shareholder, but that means he has about 7%, which is far from being enough to let him unilaterally make decisions about any company policies.

  • Anything is better than nothing. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21, 2008 @06:50AM (#22125144)
    I no longer live in the US, and so the US iTunes Store is the easiest, most convenient way for me to get the shows I want to see.

    All that happened when NBC pulled their shows is I torrented their shows, whilst purchasing the others on iTunes. I imagine others did the same.

    I appreciate that NBC probably don't want to be bullied by Apple over the prices, but maybe now they are realising that the revenue they were receiving is better than none at all?
    • Yep, I did the same when I lived in the UK and NBC pulled their content. And I'd pay double if NBC would put them back up because with iTunes I don't have to wade through hours/days of crappy torrents until I find a good copy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mgblst ( 80109 )
        You know that there are sites around the place that hosts torrents, and that they provide a search function? Makes it a lot easier to find stuff, you know.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by stewbacca ( 1033764 )
          Yes, I am aware of this. I'm also aware that just because a site hosts something called "LOST -- s03e014" doesn't necessarily mean I'll get a high quality, English version of episode 14. Usually I get episode 12, in Norwegian with Russian subtitles (ok, hyperbole, but you get the point). I can usually find it with a little looking around, but on iTunes I could find it in 5 seconds; every episode of every season in the correct order with the correct episode title. This is the greatest strength of "legitim

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 )
        "I don't have to wade through hours/days of crappy torrents until I find a good copy"

        I don't know where you're getting your torrents from but TVrss.net and EZTV.it usually have the shows up within a half an hour after they've completed.

        I use rtorrent and pytvshows to grab the torrents. Occasionally they nuke a release, but it's rare.

        BTJunkie automatically sorts by seeds. Please point me to one of these so called 'crappy' torrents.
        • Thanks for the tips--I'll check them out. I can't say for sure where mine come from because my client (Xtorrent for MacOSX) just goes out and finds them (most of them crappy...guess it's the content..South Park, Ultimate Fighting...ya know, the stuff kiddies like, and kiddies upload). I'm too lazy to figure out how to point it to better sites than whatever it defaults to.
          • Go to the preferences for XTorrent, select the Searching panel and add the string below to the Search Tab list:

            http://tvrss.net/search/?distribution_group=combined&show_name=%@&filename=&date=&quality=&release_group=&mode=simple
            I can't work the other one out quickly enough to be bothered with.

            Have fun!

    • Re:Anything is better than nothing. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Generic Guy ( 678542 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @03:12PM (#22130088)

      NBC probably don't want to be bullied by Apple over the prices...

      It is arguable who 'bullied' whom. My back of the napkin recollection is more like this:
      NBC got essentially 'free' money by simply providing the episodes to iTunes and sitting back while Apple does all the work. Apple handles the cataloging, payment collection, file servers and network bandwidth. NBC sat and collected a large portion of each sale.

      Then NBC got even more greedy. To buy a single episode of something, NBC is rumored to have wanted to force bundles. Instead of one episode for $1.99, they would for example 'force' you to buy another unrelated or perhaps two other unrelated programs for more like $4.99. My guess is this was a gambit to try and generate interest in NBC's other titles. In their twisted logic one show you actually want with two attached throwaways (you would be forced into purchasing) is somehow "cheaper" for the end customer. In my book, that simply makes the one show I want $4.99 instead of $1.99.

      Apple apparently balked at the idea of these forced bundles, which would ruin iTunes' straight-forward simplicity (among other things), and told NBC to take a hike. I suppose you could say while NBC was busy strangling their golden goose, the goose realized its own long-term interest was to get up and leave.

  • They link to a BusinessWeek article pointing out positive statements from Jobs reciprocating these 'feelings'.

    Is 'greed' a feeling? Do big companies have feelings? Maybe a better choice instead is "vices".
  • I used to watch NBC Universal content on iTunes all the time, probably about $50/year worth of content. Now I either watch it for free on Netflix, or I can't find it. Anybody know where I can legally obtain Sci-Fi channel content?
    • Probably the Sci-Fi Channel? Cable box + $130 video capture box = all the legally obtained content you want.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by joshv ( 13017 )
        I have the Sci-Fi channel - don't want or need a Tivo as I get almost everything I want to watch on demand or online if I miss it at it's appointed time slot. At least I used to be able to until NBC/Universal decided they didn't want my money any longer.
    • You could use NBC/Universal's partnership site Hulu [hulu.com] Join the Beta.

      Or you could use this site OpenHulu [openhulu.com]

      OpenHulu uses the embedding capability of Hulu for the poor souls not in the beta. You get a few ads but as opposed to nothing it's not too bad. Legally watch Simpsons, Family Guy, Heroes, Battlestar Gallactica, Bionic Woman and more.

      If you configure it right, it even works in Linux. (I have to use Mozilla IceApe)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by joshv ( 13017 )
        Looked at Hulu. iTunes had every single Episode of BSG. Hulu doesn't. In general Hulu's depth is lacking. I wanted to catch up on some episode's I missed, and was more than willing to pay for them. NBC/Universal just doesn't seem to want my money.

        Bionic woman? Pheww.
  • Battlestar Galactica.
    • No kidding man, but don't forget The Office. I am stuck somewhere in the middle of Season 3 for BSG because my iTunes dealer has left me high and dry. I suppose I should run of to torrent land and catch up.

  • NBC was paying attention... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OSXCPA ( 805476 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:04AM (#22125436) Journal
    ...to the fact that .torrent activity for their shows went through the roof when they pulled out of iTunes, taking their shows and affiliates with them. I know people (cough) who used to happily pay $1.99 an episode for Law and Order, Project Runway and Battlestar Galactica who discovered that those shows were available 'free'. Considering the only other option was buy a Tivo and / or upgrade cable to get Bravo and SciFi - what do you think they did? They would certainly go back to paying the $1.99 if the option were available.
    • How much would you bet that a sizable %age of non-techies, when they noticed that $SHOW could no longer be downloaded, plugged "$SHOW download" into google and found no less than three torrent sites on the first page?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by putaro ( 235078 )
        Or, the other way around. I live outside the country and was downloading Battlestar Galactica via Bittorrent. When it became available on iTunes I was happy to pay the fee for the show - I enjoyed it a lot more than most television and wanted Universal and the creators to get some $$ and a "vote" for the show. Pulling it off iTunes sent me back to bittorrent.
    • I too am well aquatinted with someone (cough) in exactly the same boat. Who was just three shows away from finishing Eureka season 2 and Dresden when NBC shows were yanked. The shows were found by other means, and NBC/Apple were about ten dollars less rich than they might have been. Multiply that by a few million people...

      The "friend" would love to go back paying for NBC shows. Heck, they might even catch up on shows like Bionic Woman that they simply stopped watching once they forgot to record a week.
    • Of course, they *might* have wandered over to Amazon Unbox, where they would find the shows available for the same $1.99. And Amazon would happily accept the $1.99 from them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OSXCPA ( 805476 )
        The might have, and noticed that Amazon Unbox does not support Macs or Linux, nor does it stock Project Runway...

        Thanks though - good thought.

  • Feeewings... (Score:5, Funny)

    by LaminatorX ( 410794 ) <sabotage.praecantator@com> on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:09AM (#22125464) Homepage
    NBC is reported to have asked Disney if Disney's friend, Apple, still liked NBC; and if so, did Apple just like NBC, or did it, you know, "like" like NBC.

  • He then unexpectedly adds, (Score:3, Funny)

    by cbart387 ( 1192883 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:45AM (#22125762)

    'We're great fans of Steve Jobs. So pick me to be on your kickball team!'
    There, fixed that for you.

  • An interesting note (Score:5, Funny)

    by RalphBNumbers ( 655475 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @11:11AM (#22127166)
    Andrea Jung joined Apple's board of directors a couple of weeks ago.

    She's also on GE's board of directors.

    GE owns 80% of NBC Universal.

    (and since Kevin Bacon has no doubt worked for NBC Universal, I can connect Steve Jobs to Kevin Bacon in four steps)
  • Time and time again, I'd look at the iTunes store and NBC's shows would be some of the top sellers. The Office, Battlestar Galactica, Monk, and Heroes were continuously four of the best-selling shows on iTunes, which means that people actually wanted to buy them from there.

    I'm not sure why NBC thought it would be a good idea to try an ad-based streaming service, or how they thought it'd be comparable at all to allowing you to download shows onto an iPod or iPhone and watch them while you're stuck on a plan
    • First, NBC PLANNED to ditch Apple before they ever started talking last time... Apple negotiated in "good faith", NBC didn't, it was just "noise" to market the new service.

      You do have point about the writers strike. One of the negotiations is that they want iTunes downloads counted the same as a DVD sale of an episode for royalty purposes. Right now under the ad-supported model they get NOTHING for royalties. Ouch!) I'd almost think NBC was trying to "move the cheese" .. to give in on DVD, but not streami
  • Feelings mean only one thing in businesspeak: money. The only reason somebody at NBC Universal admires Apple and is a fan of Steve Jobs is that Apple and Steve will fill their coffers with pure gold.
  • ``No telling what has caused the turnabout. Perhaps the writers strike gave both parties time to reflect on their mounting lost revenue.''

    I can see it now. We can't buy these iPods because writers are on strike. Not! They [NBC Universal] are losing lots of revenue from the writers strike who drive the advertisers to brand on their network because of volume ratings. Without the writers and no longer having the contract with Apple to sell re-runs it's clear they are leaking badly.

  • I like watching free shows at hulu. But I can see how getting paid $4 a show would be better than being paid $0 a show. Did it take NBC 6 months to figure that out?

    Disclaimer: none of the shows I like to watch are on NBC (though USA has some that I approve of).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by slapout ( 93640 )
      Another things is Some of use don't have the bandwidth to watch streaming shows. I tried the free thing NBC had (not hulu), and it was just to jerky. Now, with iTunes I could just download the show and watch it when I want.
  • that online sales are part of the problem with the writer's strike?

    Seriously. This is the sort of thing that is causing the writers to strike. If it doesn't stop, all we'll be able to download from iTunes is reruns of "The Today Show", and "The Running Man" -- The new reality show where criminals are released into a deathtrap maze. You think I'm joking, but I'm pretty sure that that'll be the last line of reality TV.

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