Zucker: Selective Memories, Light the Corners of My Mind
I got into a pretty public fight with Steve Jobs about our TV. We were the market share leader at iTunes, we had 35% of the market share at the iTunes store. What we said to Steve and his team was that we wanted there to be some variable pricing. There’s no example in the world of where the retailer sets the price–there’s no example, except at Apple. We’re very conscious of what happened in the music industry. … We offered do a test with one show, you pick the show, I don’t care, and charge $2.99 for that and everything else at $1.99, and in fact we’ll give you the whole library at $0.99, and they didn’t want to do it. Granted none of it is as mobile and successful as iTunes. … We agreed to put up our film stuff on Apple just a few weeks ago and the reason we did that is variable pricing.”
Apple today announced that it will not be selling NBC television shows for the upcoming television season on its online iTunes Store. The move follows NBC’s decision to not renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99.”
We’ve said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple. We’re great fans of Steve Jobs.”
Apple has destroyed the music business–in terms of pricing–and if we don’t take control, they’ll do the same thing on the video side.”
