Apple announced that they have decided to no longer sell NBC television shows in the iTunes Store. Anything from this September’s season on, will not be available for purchase on iTunes because of this decision. For iTunes users it basically means you will not be able to download the popular NBC shows, like Battlestar Galactica, The Office and Heroes, to iPods or AppleTV. That’s disappointing, I really liked the Heros series.

Is NBC just being greedy by asking Apple to pay outrageous prices for their new TV episodes this upcoming season? Or could there be an underlying reason for them to bail out of iTunes now? Makes you wonder if NBC’s ownership stake in hulu, an upcoming iTunes competitor has motivated this drastic move.

Luckily for Apple, they seem to have the upper hand right now. They claim to have signed up ABC, CBS, FOX and The CW, along with more than 50 cable networks, to sell TV shows on iTunes from their upcoming season in NBC’s place. Who knows…maybe NBC really won’t be missed much at all, we’ll see. It’s too bad a reasonable agreement couldn’t be drawn up. I’m looking forward to see what Apple will integrate into iTunes in the future.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 10:00 amand is filed under Business, Social Media, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.