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TV Torrents — When Piracy Is Easier Than Purchase
An anonymous reader writes "NBC's recent withdrawal from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. Online media stores such as iTunes, Amazon and Walmart have never been able to compete with the pirates on price, or freedom and flexibility — as the content they sell is typically wrapped in restrictive DRM. The one advantage that legal purchase offered was ease of use. CNET looks into the issue, and discovers that with mature open-source media players such as Miro supporting BitTorrent RSS feeds, it is actually trivially easy for users to subscribe to their favorite shows. Want to wake up to the latest episode of The Colbert Report, Top Gear or any of hundreds of TV shows automatically downloaded and waiting for you? CNET offers an easy three step guide."
you're welcome!
Two huge differences:
1) Steve Jobs has a proven track record of actually being right and far exceeding the expectations for him that people place in him.
2) We don't really expect the media companies to put blind faith in Steve. If things start going south, by all means, they're justified in pulling their content. But that wasn't the case here. NBC was making a lot of money from their iTunes sales, and was contributing to an exciting new distribution medium. An equivalent analogy would be if the Iraquis really were greeting us with flowers and candy, and Bush decided to pull everyone out halfway through and let the place go to hell anyway.