Apple v. NBC Universal

So, NBC Universal announced it would not be releasing any of its new season's shows on iTunes. Then Apple announced it would pull all of NBC's shows immediately.

Clearly, since Universal has elected not to renew its contract with Apple to make its music available online, Universal has decided that Apple has too much power over the distribution of its digital assets.

How important is it to control the distribution as well as what is being distributed? Until 1948, the five major movie studios owned their own respective chains of theaters, which they used to exhibit their own studios' movies. That was until it was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court that the studios should divest themselves of their theater chains and allow independently owned theater chains to exhibit movies from any studio. It was thought this would promote competition amongst film makers/studios.

What if the film maker/television content producer owned the distribution channel as well as the content being distributed, as Universal is attempting to do? Several problems come to mind: differing file formats depending on where you downloaded your content; differing price structures/bundles; varying encoding schemes/settings, etc. Didn't NBC Universal learn anything from Napster? If consumers can purchase the digital content at a reasonable price, they will. If they can't, they'll simply share/download the content via Bittorrent, Kazaa, or other means, and the studios won't get a penny. As Jim Cramer likes to say, "Pigs get rich, hogs get slaughtered."

Let's face it. The real losers are you and me, and anyone who is willing to pay a reasonable sum for convenience and a large catalog of content to choose from. If Apple truly was trying to stay with a universal pricing scheme, then good for them. Either way, this looks like a huge step backwards for the rest of us.