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NBC Chief Slamming Apple
On the heels of the beta of NBC's and News Corp.'s less-than-killer Hulu music store, NBC's chief Jeff Zucker is speaking out and saying the darnedest things. First, news.com reports, with derision, that Zucker demanded a cut of Apple's iPod revenue. That'll sure happen. Next, AppleInsider caught Zucker urging colleagues to take a stand against Apple's iTunes, charging that the digital download service was undermining the ability of traditional media companies to set profitable rates for their content online.
I wasnt referring to Apple as monopolists, I was referring to apple as competition.
What should have happened was this ...
1)Record companies seen this coming.
Unfortunately they didn't see it coming. They thought they owned all music and so any MP3 was illegal. There will be no online stores simply because they will have no legal product.
This is the exact mistake George Lucas made with the original Star Wars. It was never going to be released to the home video market. You could only see it in theaters. They wanted to do the Disney Bambi stunt. Release it every 7 years to a new generation of kids. The pirates showed them that was a mistake. The statute of limitations has run out, but I had my copy of Star Wars 4 years before it was released to the home market.
The record industry is in the same boat for the same reasons.
1 High price on the authorised format
2 Limited Distribution in authorized channels
3 Effecient peer to peer network (Sneakernet and Internet) with low duplication costs.
The music industry didn't learn from the mistakes of Lucas and Disney
The truth shall set you free!
Your use of the word "immoral" is inconsistent with its understood meaning, because moral behavior is in accordance with what is considered good or acceptable by the society or culture in which that behavior takes place. Therefore, it is not "almost immoral" for executives to not try to use whatever means necessary to increase their control of the market or their share of the profits. To the extent that such behavior is prohibited by statute, consumer outrage, and yes, the morality of the cultural context, it is not moral to do so. In a way, you have only reinforced my claim that such behavior is juvenile and a sign of emotional and psychological underdevelopment. For you see, children (for the most part) act naively in that they will deliberately and repeatedly break rules established by authority figures, as long as they feel that there is a possibility of gaining from it. A child will push any limits set upon them, until they know 100% of the time that no benefit results from such pushing. When failure to establish firm limits occurs, the result is a very spoiled child, who never graduates to higher-level social functioning and reasoning in order to achieve their goals. Sounds a lot like some of these execs to me. Oh, and one more thing: Just because that is the way the world works, doesn't mean that's the way it should work. Otherwise, we'd be shooting people for no cause, or committing atrocities for monetary gain. Oh wait--that's already happening in the Middle East. Forgive the oil execs, because it's "almost immoral" for them not to try.
I got lazy last week and just paid the 99 cents to watch an episode of The Office that I missed on Comcast's "On Demand" service.
IT HAD COMMERCIAL INTERRUPTIONS
At each normal commercial point they showed a 30 second ad for some NBC show.
Never again. I was steaming.
You do know that the "Universal" in NBC/Universal is Universal Studios, don't you?
From Jeff Zucker's bio at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Zucker):
"Chief Executive Officer of NBC
On December 15, 2005, Zucker was again promoted by NBC, to Chief Executive Officer of NBC Universal Television Group behind Robert Charles Wright, vice chairman of General Electric and chairman & CEO of NBC Universal. Zucker was responsible for all programming across the company's television properties, including network, news, cable, and Sports and Olympics. His responsibilities also include the company's studio operations and global distribution efforts [emphasis mine]. Zucker reports to Bob Wright."
I bet you drink a lot of Maalox in a job like that.
In the "old days" the FCC's "financial interest and syndication rules" (quick history) made it unprofitable for the big-three networks to own the content-production side of the business as well. The rules prohibited the networks from selling "reruns" of programs they produced (e.g, The Johnny Carson Show) to local television stations, a practice called "program syndication." Since all the risk capital in program development is upfront, a program's profits are not made on its initial showing but in "reruns" to cable networks, local television stations, and overseas distributors. By prohibiting the networks from profiting in this aftermarket, the "fin-syn" rules made owning the production studios uneconomical.
Nowadays, anything goes. CBS created Viacom and sold it off to comply with the FCC. Now Viacom owns CBS. NBC has merged with Universal Studios, and Disney bought ABC/ESPN by first buying a multi-market TV station owner. Australian-owned Fox has interests in newspapers, movies, satellite TV, US local television stations in the US, and many more outlets I'm sure. What were once strict divisions between media production and distribution have long since fallen by the wayside. In large part these pro-business changes reflected the opinions of new FCC commissioners appointed by Republican administrations. They also represented a change in the structure of television from a world where three networks commanded 90% or more of the viewers to one where they fewer than half that number. (http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2007/10/16/cbs_network_scores_another_ratings_win/)