Less than three years ago Kazaa was the peer to peer choice for any movie or TV show one could want, free. Just about five years ago Napster was the peer to peer choice for free music. Itunes, then, is a success along the proportions of bottled water. Imagine if you will a couple of rough and tumble Hydrogen atoms suddenly approaching an Oxygen dipole and informing him that he'd have to double down in order to keep their relationship chemically bonded.
Well, scratch that analogy. What I'm trying to get at is that NBC had a good thing with iTunes: make money on something that was previously being traded for free. And then NBC got greedy.
Now, I'm not a huge fan of Steve Jobs. A good market machine... a different voice in a crowd of sameness. But iTunes is a convenience; a simple affordable method of getting something I want, when I want it. Until NBC came along.
In fact, with so few other options in movie and television show department, I'm not sure why every show isn't available on iTunes. They all were available on Kazaa. And when given a choice maybe it's not so much the price that NBC should be worried about, but the availability of their product.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Are you having trouble catching up on our TV shows even in the US? Although NBC is lagging behind ABC in the availability of entire TV episodes online, you can still catch such shows as Heroes for free!
Our problem is being a US resident outside of the US - the cable channel sites do not like our foreign IP trying to tap into their American only products, which happens to ONLY be entire episodes...we can catch all the advertising we could possibly watch, but not the shows being advertised!! How frustrating!
-Lilah
While my Brilliant wife is correct that one can go to the network websites to watch television shows, the quality is spotty based on bandwidth, the size is small, and the networks limit the ability to save these episodes for watching again. This, to me, is inconvenience. It's forcing the consumer into a model that is substandard to the iTunes product and limited in functionality.
Too, while it's not a tragedy to navigate to multiple websites to capture all the episodes a viewer wants, the season pass option of iTunes sure does make this a more pleasant experience.
Post a Comment