Jeez, and you thought Steve Jobs was bad tempered. NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker recently explained why the company told Apple/iTunes to fly a kite. If you guessed greed as being a major factor, well then you have a pulse because that’s what everyone thought.
“We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99. We made that offer for months and they said no…. Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money. They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.”
Or, even more direct, NBC Universal was afraid that going from the analog era to the digital era would mean a transformation of revenue from “dollars into pennies.”
Good luck with Hulu, guys. You’ll need it.
Zucker says Apple deal rotten [Variety]