NBC Now Offers TV Shows on Amazon’s Unbox

Follows it much publicized dispute with iTunes and subsequent decision by Apple to stop selling NBC TV shows for the upcoming Fall TV season, but will it work?

I mentioned last week how the dispute between NBC Universal and Apple over lack of pricing control, piracy protection, and inability to bundle videos to increase revenue heated up to the point where NBC decided not to renew its licensing agreement with Apple after it expires in December.

In response, Apple then, in turn, announced that iTunes will no longer be selling NBC TV shows for the upcoming Fall TV season. According to Apple NBC was demanding that it pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99.

The demand was a nonstarter for Apple and really should have never even graced the negotiating table if NBC is as serious about viewership and piracy as they claim they to be.

With TV shows essentially a "free" commodity that flows into viewers homes via a subscription fee they are already paying to cable providers, it’s ludicrous to ask people to then shell out $5 bucks an episode – especially when people can find them for nothing at all on P2P and file-sharing networks.

Now it’s being reported that NBC plans to immediately begin offering TV content on Amazon’s Unbox, the digital video download service.

"With the addition of NBC Universal TV content to Amazon Unbox, fans now have the ultimate convenience for enjoying their favorite shows whenever or wherever they want," said Jean-Briac Perrette, President, NBC Universal Digital Distribution. "This further expands our longstanding relationship to bring a robust content offering to the marketplace in a variety of ways that will benefit the consumer and, at the same time, protects our content."

I’m not sure how they can feel so comforted that their content is "protected" when it can so easily be found on P2P and file-sharing networks everywhere. Are they really that scared about the non-tech savvy crowd out there who resorts to actually purchasing content in the first place? Something tells me that this crowd won’t be setting up FTP sites or uploading them to the Pirate Bay anytime soon.

"We are excited to bring NBC Universal shows like the award-winning The Office, 30 Rock and Battlestar Galactica to our Amazon Unbox customers," said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President for Digital Music and Video. "Our customers can now enjoy their favorite NBC Universal shows either on their personal computer or on their TV through the Amazon Unbox on TiVo service."

In another twist of irony, the press release also notes that beginning on September 10, Amazon Unbox customers can download for free — in advance of their network premieres — the pilot episodes of NBC’s new shows Bionic Woman, Chuck, Journeyman and Life. I guess nobody’s told them yet that they’ve been on BitTorrent for months now.

If viewership and piracy is truly important to them then pricing, which is what a content download service either lives or dies by, should be the the most important concern, and although they haven’t mentioned a price for new episodes yet, older ones are currently going for $1.99.

It remains to be seen if it was a smart move or not, but considering they’ve decided to leave the number 1 video download service around something tells me shareholders won’t be too happy come December.

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