So NBC finally made good on their promise to pull tv shows from iTunes, including Battlestar Galactica. NBC wanted to charge $2.99 for each download; Apple said, “no, $1.99 is the winning number.” Hard to believe that anyone would refuse to take business advice from Apple… The whole thing reminds me a lot of trying to watch The Resistance during the 2006 hiatus - Canadians (in fact anyone not in the U.S.) were just plain out of luck trying to grab the content from the actual source and had to rely on other means to find out what the webisodes were about. (In a prelude to the writers’ strike currently ongoing in the U.S., the writers for The Resistance were in a position of uncertainty regarding whether they would make any money off the webisodes, because entertainment legislation hasn’t yet caught up to the Internet age.)

I think NBC is cutting off its nose to spite its face, because with iTunes, they were making some money (granted, not as much as they wanted), could track interest and, with a bit of data collection, really do some good work figuring out their different target audiences. Now, although they’ve decided to sell the shows through their own service, unless they do some serious work and come up with a way for people to buy them that’s just as easy and accessible as iTunes, they’re going to have a hard time controlling who does what with their intellectual property.