iTunes To Stop Selling NBC Shows

I was a little disappointed to hear Apple’s latest announcement last week – the iTunes Store will stop selling NBC television shows for the next season!

That’s a bummer since NBC’s Heroes is one of my favorites. I have all the Heroes episodes from the first season on my iPod, and it would have been nice to have the next season too.

This decision is not Apple’s fault, and came after NBC decided not to renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple refused to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC episode. This would have resulted in us consumers paying $4.99 per episode as opposed to the current $1.99.

I respect that decision, since I definitely would not pay no $5 for one TV show! “We are disappointed to see NBC leave iTunes because we would not agree to their dramatic price increase,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “We hope they will change their minds and offer their TV shows to the tens of millions of iTunes customers,” he added.

I think NBC is shooting themselves in the foot a little since it supplied iTunes with three of its 10 best selling TV shows last season. That accounted for 30 percent of iTunes TV show sales. Despite this dispute with NBC, the other big guys – ABC, CBS, FOX, the CW and fifty other cable networks are signed up to still sell TV shows at the $1.99 rate. Anything can change, so we’ll see what happens.