Unhappy with iTunes pricing, NBC chooses Amazon as content partner

NBC Universal, a media and entertainment company that recently went head-to-head with Apple Inc. over an iTunes contract, on Wednesday announced a deal with the online heavyweight Amazon.com to sell episodes of new fall television shows through latter company’s Unbox digital download service.

Announcing their Unbox agreement with Amazon yesterday, NBC said it will sell the wide selection of its television line-up on the relatively young Unbox download portal in a "variety of packages". Episodes of old programs are currently available to sitcom-lovers on Unbox, while new episodes will be added the day after they are aired.

"With the addition of NBC Universal TV content to Amazon Unbox, fans now have the ultimate convenience for enjoying their favorite shows whenever or wherever they want," said Jean-Briac Perrette, NBC president of digital distribution. "This further expands our longstanding relationship to bring a robust content offering to the marketplace in a variety of ways that will benefit the consumer and, at the same time, protects our content."

The two companies have not yet disclosed a price for new episodes under the agreement, but they stated that there would be discounts to customers purchasing entire seasons of NBC TV shows. They are charging $1.99 for each old episode.

On their content agreement with NBC, Bill Carr, Amazon.com’s Vice President for Digital Music and Video said, "We are excited to bring NBC Universal shows like the award-winning The Office, 30 Rock and Battlestar Galactica to our Amazon Unbox customers. Our customers can now enjoy their favorite NBC Universal shows either on their personal computer or on their TV through the Amazon Unbox on TiVo service."

NBC’s agreement with Amazon comes days after it declined to renew its contract to sell downloads of its TV shows on iTunes because of a dispute with Apple over pricing.

Unhappy with the $1.99 price tag Apple charges for its new episodes, the media conglomerate reportedly demanded additional money from Apple, forcing the iPod/Mac maker to charge more for downloads of its TV shows. Eventually, it pulled downloads of its video content from iTunes after it failed to reach a new price agreement for the digital download service.

Last year on Sept. 7, the leading purveyor of goods online, Amazon.com rolled out its long awaited online video service long awaited online video service, called Amazon Unbox, through which the widely known e-commerce site sells digital products, offering movies and television shows that can be downloaded and watched on a computer or portable video player.

The Amazon Unbox retails most movies for $7.99 to $14.99 and most television shows for $1.99 (the same price as Apple’s iTunes Music Store). The service offers TV shows from such networks as CBS, Fox, A&E and MTV and the films. Consumers can take movies on rent for a 24-hour period for $3.99.

Amazon’s video download service competes with an array of digital video stores including iTunes Music Store of Apple, Google, Movielink, CinemaNow Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL. The Amazon Unbox video service until now has offered thousands of movies, television shows and other videos for download to PCs and any Windows Media Video-compatible portable devices.

This year in February, the online retailer Amazon joined hands with digital video recording service TiVo to make the video content available to download directly to a customer’s TiVo box for playback on their television set.