With the iTunes pricing debate, the television industry is facing the same question that music labels and publishers are: just how much is our content worth in a digital world?
iTunes remains, predominately, a music store. Consumers have downloaded nearly 10 billion songs and about 375 million TV episodes.
Analysts say the TV revenue from iTunes has been marginal for producers and distributors.
I believe that the anticipated price change of television shows is well needed for Apple's new "iPad" to succeed. To begin with, I believe that the product is over priced and its release was poorly timed. For apple to take advantage of the "buzz" that their products usually produce, I believe that the company should have waited for further recovery of the economy. Additionally, The cheapest model $500 and offers limited memory and connectivity. I believe to take full advantage of the iPad, one will need to purchase the model that offers 64GB of space and 3G+Wifi. This would ensure that you would have some amount of storage space in which you could keep your TV episodes. Unfortunately, This model runs at $830. With the high cost of the product, buyers of television episodes will be in need of cheap shows. Nobody will want to spend nearly $900 on an item that will require marginal costs in order to use it.
ReplyDeleteThe push for cheaper TV episodes is inevitable, Hulu offers shows for free and pays producers with purely ad revenue, Netflix charges a user $8 a month for unlimited access to a growing number of TV shows. The lucrative TV/movie industry is no doubt dwindling, but thats how economies operate, by increasing efficiency. In this case, the efficiency is increasing through faster and cheap distribution channels.
ReplyDeleteTed, in the case of apple, the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, apple laptops, and apple desktops are all priced well above the competition, but apple still reports phenomenal growth in sales quarter after quarter (regardless of economic climate). The price of movies, songs, and tv shows has little to do with how well their products sell. This move towards a lower price it to increase the sales of TV shows through the iTunes store, not the iPad which has yet to hit the markets.