This past week has seen the annual International
Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happening in Las Vegas.
At this trade show, most of the broadband television companies
have had some sort of presence, and a lot of them have made
announcements concerning their future plans.
Here, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge talks about his trip to the
convention, and his views on NBC Universal pulling out of iTunes:
NBC Universal shows up at CES 2008 and online, but not on my iPod
So, the trip out to Vegas was a long one. Sherwin and I had a
stop in
Little Rock, Arkansas along the way. The total time was of the trip was
about seven hours.
Knowing this, I had planned to catch up on the
second season of Heroes
and was going to download it all to my iPhone
the night before the trip.
That’s when it sunk-in that NBC
Universal pulled out of the iTunes Store.
NBC offers their content via Hulu
and NBC’s own site
but both are just a stream – you can’t download or time shift
shows to
your Mac or PC, let alone your iPod or iPhone. So, I instead of
watching new shows (well, at least new to me), I watched older shows I
had already downloaded.
NBC Universal Booth
One of the first “booths” I discovered on
the CES map was NBC
Universal. I wondered what their content-oriented booth would be like
at a tech fair. It was pretty cool.
It had a number of touch screen
columns and there were folks handing out USB drives—nice
ones, 2GB
SanDisks. You could walk up to the column, touch on your favorite show,
connect the USB drive, and the show downloads. Pretty slick.
Unfortunately when I get back to try the files on my Mac, I
find
that they’re DRM’d and unsupported in Mac OS X, for
now. What I can
open on the USB drive is a text file with a URL in it that takes me here.
SanDisk Video Download Service
After some further investigating at CES, I find out that
Fanfare is a
site and service that SanDisk has created that is a video download
service, made to be used with the its TakeTV
device. It’s a USB drive and remote that connects to your TV,
and lets
you play back video.
The Fanfare service lets you download content to
playback on your TV or PC (yes, again, DRM’d and Windows
only).
According to the SanDisk representative, at least some, if not all of
the downloadable content will be free and will be ad supported.
I really want to give NBC credit here. I really want to praise
it
for getting over the fear of digital files and portable media. This USB
drive thing is proof, right? But the thing is, NBC has been doing this
for some time now via the iTunes Store, and more recently via Amazon
Unbox.
Licensed Downloads To Other Companies
Can we say this USB thing is anything new? All NBC has done
here is
licensed downloads to another company (which is great) while taking the
content away from the leading provider—you remember, the one
with the 70-some
percent marketshare?
This is where things don’t add up, at least to me.
Diversifying your
distribution is logical, eliminating what has to be your number one
avenue of distribution is crazy-making.
To me, NBC risks forcing
consumers back into stealing content, because it’s not
providing a
legal way to purchase content on the dominant player.
Conclusions
Instead, NBC seems to want to cut off its nose to spite its
face—you know, the one
that saved The Office. Do NBC’s management and
share holders really think that this equation holds true:
| Revenue from: | Revenue from: | |
|
Hulu + |
≥ |
Hulu + |
Maybe NBC isn’t realizing the hit at the moment
because of the
ongoing writers strike. But when the strike ends, can shunning what
consumers have made into their dominant legal provider of downloadable
video make financial sense?
Alex Curtis is an author at Public Knowledge discussing public rights in the emerging digital culture. Post has Some Rights Reserved.
