So, got the new Apple TV in your living room? Hoping to rent episodes of, say, “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Pacific” or “Gossip Girl” for 99 cents a pop? Don’t hold your breath.
As I blogged last week, TV executives have been lining up against the idea of 99-cent TV show rentals — an idea that’s one of the big selling points of the revamped Apple TV. Now we can add Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes to the list.
As the chief executive of Time Warner, Bewkes’ word holds quite a bit of sway in the television industry: Time Warner owns or has a stake in some of the biggest TV properties in the business, including HBO, Turner Broadcasting System, the CW network and Warner Bros. Entertainment (whose CEO, Barry Meyer, has already come out against 99-cent TV show rentals).
Speaking at a recent television conference in London, Bewkes warned that the big networks would be putting their lucrative syndication deals at risk by renting their latest shows for 99 cents apiece, according to the Hollywood Reporter (by way of the Mac Observer).
“How can you justify renting your first-run TV shows individually for 99 cents an episode and thereby jeopardize the sale of the same show as a series to branded networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars and make those shows available to loyal viewers for free?” said Bewkes, as quoted by the Hollywood Reporter.
Bewkes added that he believes “new entrants” in the TV marketplace — such as, presumably, online TV show rentals — “must either support or improve the overall economics that funds and create the programming in the first place.”
In other words: 99 cents for a TV show rental is just too cheap, according to Bewkes.
The Time Warner CEO has plenty of company in his disdain for the 99-cent TV rentals on iTunes. Among them: Jeff Zucker, the soon-to-be-ex-CEO of NBC Universal, who said last week that a 99-cent episode rental would “devalue our content.”
Also opposed: Phillippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom (the parent company of Paramount, MTV Networks and Comedy Central, home of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”), as well as the aforementioned Barry Meyer of Warner Bros. Entertainment.
CBS, meanwhile, is on the fence about 99-cent TV show rentals, while ABC and Fox are on board — although Fox has recently been making noises about how its participation in the iTunes TV rental plan is just a “short-term test.”
Of course, as I’ve written before, the big TV networks were also initially leery of TV show purchases on iTunes (which go for $1.99 each, or $2.99 for the HD versions), with NBC pulling all its shows off iTunes for more than a year before ultimately coming back into the fold.
But while network executives finally decided that they could live with $1.99 price tags for their shows, the 99-cent rental price has clearly thrown them for a loop — and for now, the list of TV execs solidly in favor of said rentals is looking decidedly short.
• The Hollywood Reporter: Jeff Bewkes: Beware of Apple, Amazon deals (via The Mac Observer)
— Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.
Nice post mate. What theme are you using by the way though? Sorry to go off topic and all that :D.If you need to find rooms to rent during the games, then check out rentmyroom2012.com