14 DAY TRIAL // Quietly, as always, Apple has made a selection of NBC TV shows available on the UK iTunes Store. This confirms earlier reports of NBC Universal trying to get its content back on the software-based, online digital media store operated by Apple Inc.
Heroes - Season Two, House, Eureka, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and The Incredible Hulk, is all the UK iTunes Store has to offer for now. Not much, yes, but think about it this way: up until now, not even these shows were available (via UK iTunes, of course).
"Of particular interest is the variable pricing which has appeared," the WorldOfApple website points out, revealing that current shows go for ?1.89 a piece, while episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and The Incredible Hulk are priced at just ?1.19 each.
Clues that NBC Universal wanted its TV shows distributed via Apple's service again emerged last month. A "top executive" at NBC Universal hinted (at the time) that the company would like to get back on that iTunes saddle, under one condition: that Apple took antipiracy measures "to help protect his business' revenue," sources were informing.
The media and entertainment company's chief digital officer, George Kliavkoff, didn't actually mention "iTunes" when making an antipiracy request, "but it was clear he had the iPod maker in mind when it came to combating people's consumption of pirated content," CNnet News noted at the time.
"If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets onto that device, it has to go through a gatekeeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some antipiracy measures," Kliavkoff said in an (onstage) interview at the Ad:Tech conference. "One of the big issues for NBC is piracy. We are financially harmed every day by piracy. It results in us not being able to invest as much money in the next generation of film and TV products," he concluded.