Why Apple Is Smarter than NBC

This is getting ugly. NBC Universal, hoping to make Apple pay for its intransigence, is taking its content to Amazon and its Unbox downloads service.

I don't know what's going to happen with this in the short term -- will News Corp. follow NBC Uni's lead? Will iTunes lose its dominant market share when TV viewers can't find the shows they want there? -- but I have a pretty confident prediction about the long term.

Apple's great strength as a company is its understanding of the sometimes irrational ways consumers make their decisions. Apple knows that we'd usually prefer something easy and cool-looking to something techy-looking with a lot of bells and whistles. It understands the paradox of choice, that less is usually more, and that people confronted with too many choices often end up picking none of the above.

That's why I predict that NBC, which right now is fighting for the right to do a lot of fancy pricing and packaging of its downloads, will eventually end up selling them in a way not all that dissimilar from the way they're being sold now on iTunes -- that is, individually and at a minimum of different pricepoints.

Too bad in the meantime it's going to make fans of its shows go on a scavenger hunt to find them.

See what my (new) colleague Fred Schruers has to say about the NBC-Apple feud here.