First iTunes angers the Hollywood unions, now the ABC affiliates. Who’s next?
Posted by Dr. Macenstein
First iTunes angers the Hollywood unions, now the ABC affiliates. Who’s next?
Last week we reported that the 5 major unions representing Hollywood’s writers, actors and directors were a bit upset with both Apple and ABC/Disney for not including them in monetary compensation talks before announcing the deal which brought downloadable video content to iTunes 6. Well, now it’s a week later, and it seems as though the ABC affiliate stations are now jumping on the “Why weren’t WE asked about this?” bandwagon.
In a letter sent out Friday, Leon Long, the president of the association representing ABC’s affiliate stations, wrote, “It is both disappointing and unsettling that ABC would embark on a new — and competitive — network program distribution partnership without the fundamental courtesy of consultation with its affiliates.”
From the letter, it would appear the ABC affiliate stations are viewing the advent of downloadable television programming as competition. iTunes currently offers many of ABC hottest shows for download the very next day after airing. Should enough customers change their viewing habits and decide to start downloading commercial free programming to their computers, the affiliates will lose out big time.
While this is certainly not going to happen any time soon, many industry analysts are seeing this as a first step towards the eventual migration of all television content to the pay-per download model. For the moment, the videos available on iTunes are of an extremely compressed quality. These may look great on a video iPod’s 2.5 inch screen, but do not hold up nearly as well when viewed at the larger sizes most home theater buffs are used to. Depending on the success of the iTunes video store, however, many analysts predict higher-quality downloads are not far off. At that point, the affiliates really might have something worth getting upset over.
