George Kliavkoff, NBC’s chief digital officer has mentioned the possibility of NBC returning to iTunes after a nasty break-up late last year.
The chief noted during the Ad:Tech conference that the company would “love” to come back to iTunes but price and piracy points remain an issue. Speaking during the conference Kliavkoff said, “If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets on to that device, it has to go through a gatekeeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some antipiracy measures,” obviously referring to iTunes. He continued, “One of the big issues for NBC is piracy. We are financially harmed every day by piracy. It results in us not being able to invest as much money in the next generation of film and TV products.”
During the on-stage interview the chief said, “We’d love to be on iTunes. It has a great customer experience. We’d love to figure out a way to distribute our content on iTunes,” he said, but wouldn’t comment on any negotiations. “We have film distribution with iTunes so yes, we do talk to Apple,” he said.
Price also appears to be an issue for NBC as Kliavkoff noted, “They can mark up the price and make a profit or use it as a loss leader to get people in the door,”. “It’s really difficult for us to work with any distribution partner who says ‘Here’s the wholesale price and the retail price,’ especially when the price doesn’t reflect the full value of the product.”
He added “The music industry guys would have something to say about how the pricing has affected their product over the last few years.”
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dave
16th April 2008, 22.47 pm
Since iTMS already implements a DRM system that isn’t trivially cracked, the NBC seems to be saying that Apple has to implement a system in iTunes to detect video’s covered by a copyright that NBC owns [but is not necessarily offering for sale or rent], and prevent it from being played and/or copied to a portable device. If this ever were to be implemented, you wouldn’t believe how many people would switch to 3rd party managers to sync content between the computer and their iPod [at least, those who happen to download the torrent for that show they missed last night]. And their pricing is also stupid, as they seem to want to charge more per episode for downloads than they do for DVD’s of the same show!
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Chris
17th April 2008, 03.44 am
What an idiot. It’s no wonder NBC is in the state it is with “talent” like this piloting the ship!
First he says, “One of the big issues for NBC is piracy. We are financially harmed every day by piracy. It results in us not being able to invest as much money in the next generation of film and TV products.”
If piracy is still a concern after pulling your content off iTunes, then, even though the iPod was the leading player and iTunes a leading content provider, it was not the problem, was it?
Second he says “They can mark up the price and make a profit or use it as a loss leader to get people in the door”
Use it as a loss leader to get people in the door??? I never knew Apple was having problems getting people in the door. NBC and Hulu and whatever, now that may be a different story.
Finally he says, “The music industry guys would have something to say about how the pricing has affected their product over the last few years.”
With regards to the music side of iTunes, has it not been steadily climbing the ranks of digital music stores and on April 3, 2008 just recently beat out Amazon to become the #1 Music Retailer?! Somebody is buying the musicians stuff.
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