[the following is from an email I sent NBC this morning]

I just wanted to let you know that I’m terribly disappointed in NBC’s decision to pull out of iTunes.  It is a choice that the company has to make as a business decision but it puts customers at a disadvantage and I wanted to make sure that you knew customers were watching.  I would also like for NBC to publicly announce what exact measures they expected Apple to take to prevent the ‘estimated’ illegal content from being distributed.

I don’t know what shows are on NBC that I will be watching this upcoming season, but I would have liked to have grabbed the missed episodes on iTunes for $1.99.  I know you wanted to double the price, but that’s rather ridiculous.  As it stands I will now have to just wait and watch them when I get home from trips on my DVR, which will record them, allow me to skip commercials, and watch them on my own schedule for the $5.00 a month Qwest/DirecTV charge me.  NBC will not get any of that money instead of making some money off of the iTunes download that I would have given them periodically.

Please re-consider your position with Apple because it would be more than fruitful for you to make things available to your customers in a convenient, legal manner, without being invasive to their normal patterns for content acquisition.  The assumption that was made in the Press Release assumes that the United State’s legal policy of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is just not part of the way NBC thinks.  This makes me very concerned for the future of the network because it makes the consumer the bad guy immediately.  Customer centric companies that buy advertising will identify this and may remove or adjust advertising budgets over time to reduce NBC’s income from commercials.

Please don’t distance yourself from customers.  The networks operate and exist because of the customers who pay for content through watching advertisements, buying TV series in DVD box sets, and through word of mouth talking about content put out by the network, hopefully building up a fan base for the network’s shows.  NBC has indicated to the public that they are not valuable as people, but only as income sources.  I know you’re a business, but if you compare this to a restaurant experience this is the scenario that you would find:
The customer comes into a Denny’s every week on Tuesday and orders a grand slam breakfast [chosen as a low cost dining experience, we’re not talking about premium channel television like HBO].  The customer comes regularly and establishes an emotional connection with the routine, Denny’s wins, the customer feels they’re winning and the waitresses become friends.  One day the customer comes in only to discover that all of the waitresses were fired because their content delivery method was deemed too susceptible to the fact that people could also smuggle in food from home for their children.  The customer who was not smuggling in food for children is immediately shocked that there is a farmer standing outside saying, “We had the owner fire the waitresses because their content delivery mechanism was not bringing in enough for us.  Now instead of us getting money for our eggs, poultry, pigs and produce, we’ll get nothing and you’ll have to go other routes to get food!  We win!”

The customer loses, the waitresses lose (iTunes), the farmers lose (NBC) and yet the customer will go to another restaurant or a store and get their own food – maybe from other sources that will continue to cut out the very farmers that killed Denny’s supply chain due to the waitresses not being effective at stopping people from smuggling in food, a minority of customers.

I buy legal copies of everything I own.  I don’t steel music, I don’t steel movies, I don’t steel software and I’m offended that NBC would imply such a thing.  I am a software developer that has to make a living through people buying legal versions of the software I work on.