Monday, September 22, 2008

NBC iTunes Downloads Top 1 Million Since

Lots of great things were revealed at the Let’s Rock event this month. We received updated iPods, saw the unveiling of iTunes 8, and another highlight was Steve Jobs’ announcement that NBC would be returning to iTunes. Naturally, the news was received with much enthusiasm by NBC fans, and I quickly went to download some of the classic TV shows on my MacBook Pro, such as The A Team and Alfred Hitchcock. iTunes users flocked to the NBC offerings since the announcement, as NBC shows have been downloaded over one million times. Now, that’s impressive.

Taking the stage at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Steve Jobs announced the arrival of HD TV shows on the iTunes Store. Not surprisingly, the shows were priced at $2.99 a piece. "We're adding new content to iTunes. HD TV shows,” Jobs said. “You can buy them for $1.99 in SD, HD will be $2.99... and you can watch them on your computer." But Apple also revealed that NBC was returning to the iTunes Store with its most popular shows, some of them in HD.

Relations between Apple and NBC have been strained since 2007, following the duo's disagreement when trying to settle on the pricing for the TV shows. However, George Kliavkoff later emphasized that NBC was keen to get its content back up on iTunes. Therefore, Jeff Zucker, President and CEO at NBC Universal, announced the official return of their shows to Apple's iTunes Store on September 9.

World of Apple points out that, before NBC’s pull-out, the company's shows accounted for some 40 percent of all iTunes video sales. It seems NBC is just as popular now, as it was back in 2007, among iTunes users, with Hollywood Reporter stating that over 1 million NBC TV shows have been downloaded through Apple's iTunes Store, since the network's return on September 9.

It is worth noting that a good deal of the 1 million downloads can very well be HD giveaways such as Battlestar Galactica (Season 4), The Office (Season 4), Heroes (Season 2), In Plain Sight (Season 1), Monk (Season 7) and others.