A little bird has suggested to me that perhaps this morning’s NBC and Apple story isn’t as straightforward as it appears to be—you know, “bad NBC wants $4.99 per episode, good Apple wants $1.99 per episode.”
It is possible, the bird tweets, that NBC wasn’t attempting to raise its iTunes Store pricing; rather, Apple may have been demanding a larger cut of the $1.99 asking price, and NBC could have responded by offering to raise the per-episode price higher to give both companies as much compensation as they wanted. The part that got mentioned to the press is the crazy per-episode price, not the demand that spawned it.
If NBC had agreed, chirps the bird, then other networks could have been forced into similar deals. Instead, it walked.
The bird’s not working for Apple or NBC, so mark this off as just “speculation,” and possibly inaccurate. If true, however, it would be an interesting twist on the story as it’s presently understood.