September 6th, 2007
NBC to Leave iTunes for Amazon’s Unbox
There have been a lot of news in the press about NBC leaving iTunes’ video downloading service (of fresh and previous Heroes episodes) for Amazon.com’s new program, Unbox. So what’s the story? Basically, NBC was unable to come to terms with iTunes about the new pricing for episodes of its shows, so it’s decided to leave. Basically, that’s it.
More (via):
Late last week, NBC Universal all but pulled its TV shows from iTunes, unhappy with the $1.99 price tag Apple slaps on new episodes. But the media behemoth has now agreed to sell many of the same shows over Amazon’s Unbox service – at exactly the same price.
Older NBC shows are already available from the Amazon video download service at $1.99 a pop, and the world’s most popular e-tailer has confirmed that new shows from the upcoming TV season will carry the same price tag.
On Thursday, NBC told Apple it was not renewing their contract to sell “The Office,” “Heroes,” and other TV shows over iTunes. The contract wasn’t due to expire until December, but Apple got all huffy, saying it would preemptively axe NBC’s shows sometime this month.
To sum up: you can STILL get Heroes episodes on iTunes UP TO December, when NBC’s contract with iTunes expires, after which point you’ll have to go use Amazon.com’s Unbox service for all future Heroes episodes. You can find out more about Amazon’s Unbox video downloading service here.
