NBC in full panic mode
So the other shoe dropped, ok, not the first shoe, well, not the second shoe, the third? no… ok, the fourth shoe finally dropped. NBC is scrambling desperately for a coherent digital media strategy and has gone through a bunch of them already - apparently they’d been stewing about giving Apple so much power in the equation for awhile, but just didn’t know what to do about. I guess they decided they should just half ass it and see what happens. That’s a great plan.
Let’s see… first they want to bust out the laughably ironically named Hulu. This was going to be their means to reach the masses, sort of a big FU to the iTunes Music Store and YouTube at the same time. It was a stupid idea, thinking that they could come up with something all on their own that would compete with the two behemoths of the industry, but you know.. that’s how it goes.
After the big breakup with Apple - Hulu wasn’t cutting it for NBC no mo’ - don’t know why. So they decided to hook up with Amazon. Amazon obliged them with some heavy DRM action and that seemed pretty final, they’ve got some pilots up on Unbox already.
But wait, what? Now they’re ditching both of those guys and just coming up with their whole new NBC Direct thing? Going direct to the customers! How consumer friendly. Wait, what? Not on Macs or iPods? Well, that’s not very good. It only lasts 7 days? Huh? So if I miss it because I’m away, I’m still just going to miss it? Hmm.. it’s going to come with commercials that can not be fast forwarded through? Why exactly is this good, again? The best part is this quote from the NBC stooges:
“With the creation of this new service, we are acknowledging that now, more than ever, viewers want to be in control of how, when and where they consume their favorite entertainment,†said Vivi Zigler, the executive vice president of NBC Digital Entertainment.
Except if they want to watch it on their macs or iPods. Or if they want to watch it more than 7 days later. Or if they want to control whether or not they see the commercials, or waste bandwidth/storage on having the commercials at all. How exactly is this giving consumers more of any of the things they said? Or was the second part of the quote “We acknowledge that they want this, we, however, have no intention of giving them any of what they want, in fact we will be going in the opposite direction…”
NBC’s lack of strategy or vision is really showing through. Is it a lack of strategy to have so many strategies? Well, you know what I mean. Here’s what I think what happened - they thought they had Apple over a barrel what with their content representing so much of Apple’s video success. So they were bluffing when they went to Apple with their strong words and Apple sooooo called the bluff and cut them off. Then with no digital distribution anymore they were caught with their pants down and are now desperately trying to figure out what to do. And not doing a very good job of it. Unless in their management books, it says “When launching new strategies try and do as many different things as possible to cause as much confusion as possible in the marketplace.” In which case they are spot on.
In all this, I suspect the viewers are the ones who lose out. Right now online video represents, essentially, no revenue for Apple or NBC. This is all about figuring out how the future’s going to be, so no one cares if there’s collateral damage to we poor viewers right now. We could all stop buying videos online and neither company would suffer financially. So, it’s enough for NBC to try to deny Apple the equivalent of it’s monopoly on selling music in the video world. It isn’t important what replaces that - as long as NBC has more power in whatever comes next than they would with Apple.
Strangely though, in the end maybe they’re right (though for all the wrong reasons, natch). Every company needs competition to stay right with the world, even Apple. If Apple just rolled right on into having the strength in video as it does with audio, who knows how things would turn out - no monopoly is good. Already some are questioning if Apple’s already behaving badly - while I don’t agree with everything Shipley says he’s right about a lot of things. So if Apple starts having competitors (probably not NBC Direct, but maybe) ultimately it will be the viewers who win. Leastways, I’ve got my fingers crossed.
September 21st, 2007 at 10:42 am
The higher ups at NBC really have a hard on for “piracy”. I like how their NBC Direct player won’t play any non-DRM’ed media. I seriously think they believe they’re fighting the good fight and are out to educate us that “piracy is bad.” And the only possible reason they’re doing this is because they want to start making more money out of their online content. They must be bleeding money by the bucketful elsewhere if they’re going to such extremes. I don’t really blame them for wanting to make money but they’re coming off as such arrogant buttwipes while doing so that you can’t help but want them to fail.
September 21st, 2007 at 11:32 am
When the first ep of Battlestar Galactica isn’t on the ITMS a very large group of people are going to try to find it somewhere else and I’ll bet at least half of them will find it, and then after that it is all history. Espeically since the rips that they will find will be in pristine HD with no access controls which means they can play anywhere.
The ITMS store was winning in that sector because of the integration with devices, the consolidation of all the offerings into one place and the convienence (even easier than tivo.) At one point in time it looked like a sure thing that by 2009 or so cable subscriptions would decline because people would be purchasing their programming a la carte and without advertisements, while the networks made more money per viewer than ever before.
But alas complete dipshits run the world–like that was any big surprise.
September 21st, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Yeah, I always kinda thought that piracy was a smokescreen for all sorts of extra laws and boondoggles for the networks and labels. They didn’t actually believe the crap they were spouting, but maybe they actually do believe it.
I dunno… if the new system isn’t as convenient as iTunes (which it won’t be, of course), people will surely start downloading the episodes. But that’s no different than before the vids were on iTMS - BSG was doing great because so many people were downloading it. It was the magic if iTunes that people stopped doing that and actually paying for it - and I think it’s just a matter of convenience and just cheap enough pricing.
If something else comes along that’s just as easy and cheap, the people will - I believe - generally move back to buying. Know what I mean? Who knows who’ll win in the end, Disney didn’t go with Apple, but Fox did? Wierd.
September 26th, 2007 at 9:52 am
[...] poor NBC. First they screw up their digital distribution strategy and start running around making all sorts of fuss and noise and not really accomplishing much. Now [...]