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We Want Your Money... And Your Soul!!!

As Felix, along with just about everyone else in the blogosphere has already mentioned, the late week brouhaha between NBC and Apple is quite the made-for-TV drama. My thoughts on this align closely with those of John Gruber's over at Daring Fireball and as far as I can tell, it's NBC that's being hammered overwhelmingly over it. This is another one of those instances where NBC should have just shut the hell up since their posted response didn't exactly make things better.

Regarding the price increase issue, it's pretty apparent that Apple was just throwing out an alarmist, worst-case scenario to put pressure on NBC. NBC's response that they "never asked to double the wholesale price" but just wanted to "request for flexibility in wholesale pricing" sounds somewhat reasonable but Interweb denizens are obviously some of the most jaded and cynical folk around, especially when it comes to anything that has to do with DRM and/or having to pay (even more) money for stuff that can be easily/illegally obtained for free. But this "request" is obviously a prelude to a slippery slope that Apple definitely doesn't want to get anywhere close to. If actually given the opportunity, does anyone doubt NBC wouldn't take it to see how much they can push the prices before they start losing a significant amount of customers? And once the prices do start escalating at the Apple iTunes store, who do you think will be the first to be blamed? If you were Apple, would you want to deal with that crap?

As for the other request to Apple "to take concrete steps to protect content from piracy," that sounds fine in and of itself cause ok, they just want Apple to work on strengthening the existing DRM or something. But then they continue with "since it is estimated that the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material." Are they out of their bleepin' minds??? Not only did they just call every iPod user a law-breaking pirate (which I'll admit is probably true to various degrees for the most part), but they want Apple to somehow restrict what their customers can and can't put in their iPods. Is this the Apple iPod or the NBC iPod? Yeah, kiss my ass is pretty much the appropriate response.

But I must say, NBC's got cajones for trying to pull this off against Apple. As Conan often likes to joke about, their primetime lineup had been stuck down in 4th place for years following the end of Friends. Suddenly they get a few decent shows going and they start acting too big for their britches. Hey NBC, if you want to do what you want Apple to do, then go design your own portable entertainment device, open your own online store, and find a way to convince millions of people that they'd really enjoy living by your benevolent, completely un-selfish rules. C'mon, you guys are part of GE! You bring good things to life, remember? Oh right, it's "imagination at work" now. Just don't overdo it, ok? Your imagination's starting to look more like delusions.

And as usual, FSJ pulls no punches.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on September 3, 2007 12:09 AM.

The previous post in this blog was Creepy, Just Creepy.

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