The ad:tech conference is currently going on at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and one of the most interesting things to come out of it came from the mouth of NBC’s Chief Digital Officer George Kliavkoff. In a nutshell, he said he wanted Apple to build a piracy detecting iTunes and to offer flexible pricing before NBC would allow their content to return to iTunes. Here’s what he said:
If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets onto that device, it has to go through a gate-keeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some anti-piracy measures.
When he says “leading MP3 players” of course he’s thinking Apple’s iPod devices and when he mentioned a gate-keeping piece of software, he was obviously thinking of iTunes. Kliavkoff went on to talk about how piracy really hurts NBC and that they’re not able to invest as much as they’d like into the next generation of film and TV products. So would Apple ever take such drastic measures and incorporate anti-piracy technology into iTunes? We’re doubtful.
Pricing of the shows came up as well and Kliavkoff went on to talk about how they’d love to be on iTunes but he says “It’s really difficult for us to work with any distribution partner who says ‘Here’s the wholesale price and the retail price,’ especially when the price doesn’t reflect the full value of the product.” Apple will not budge on pricing and they would be stupid if they tried to incorporate anti-piracy technology, so it looks like we won’t be seeing NBC shows on iTunes any time soon.
Source: News.com
Two words: f*** that! The stuff on my iPod is 100% legal, but I don’t want a crappy piece of software slowing down iTunes and watching every move I make!
I agree with you Pieter. It’s almost as if they have nothing else better to spend their money on, and so they figure that it would be well spent trying to come up with ways to fight piracy. Most of my friends actually buy all of their music from iTunes anyway, and so I don’t know how they think this is such a big deal.
The people who pirate probably wouldn’t pay for it anyway. They just wouldn’t get the media.
This is really getting me mad. They are losing POTENTIAL, not GUARANTEED profits. Doesn’t mean the person would have bought the item. They may even gain a customer. I can’t count how many games I downloaded than bought because I loved it.
Hm. I’m all for the anti-piracy whatnot. The question is: How will iTunes (or some other software) know that the music file was illegally obtained?
The more these big media companies try and screw the people who are trying to do the right thing and pay for stuff, the more people will think…screw them, I’ll download this album for free. They don’t get that concept, though.
It can’t, this whole idea is stupid and will never happen. It’s coming from NBC though so stupidity shouldn’t be surprising.
Big Media companies just can’t seem to get enough control over any situation to be happy and this is just one example!
Heh, I’ve never used iTunes because like most Apple stuff its about looks over function – the thing doesn’t even have a playlist or enqueue function FFS, Winamp had one of those before MP3 players were invented. Its got steadily slower and more and more focused on its store (to the length that every song contains a link to buy that song…) since the iPod became popular and its only so prevelant because the general idiot public think its the only way to get content onto their iPod/iPhone. I hope they incorporate anti-piracy measures, because it would hit 90% of iPod users and then hopefully most would get some decent software.
You can create playlists in iTunes, unless you’re wanting a special kind of playlist that I missed in your comment?