Law & Order, Surface, Hitchcock Presents and More
Join ABC's Housewives and Lost on iTunes
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| The Tonight Show with Jay Leno is just one of many new offerings from NBC Universal available on iTunes. Jay Leno (r.) and actor Johnny Depp (l.), pictured above. |
Los Angeles, CA – In the latest in a spate of partnerships between television broadcasters and technology companies, NBC Universal is now selling downloadable versions of some of its programs at Apple Computer’s iTunes store.
Tuesday’s joint announcement follows a similar co-venture between ABC and iTunes, which was announced last month.
The new offerings include episodes of such current NBC series as Law & Order, Surface and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. and older shows such as Dragnet, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Knight Rider. The deal also makes programs from the USA Network and the Sci-Fi Channel available for download.
All titles are available for $1.99, the same price as such ABC programs as Lost and Desperate Housewives. Current prime-time programs will be available the morning after they air.
In an effort to transcend the traditional television business model and to expand their audiences, networks have been seeking alternative distribution platforms with increasing frequency. Hence, the aforementioned ABC-Apple deal, and the announcement of In2TV—a partnership between Warner Bros. and its Time Warner counterpart America Online, via which thousands of episodes of more than 300 vintage series may be viewed on AOL.com.
Similarly, both NBC and CBS announced that they would sell repeats of new shows for 99 cents per episode through video-on-demand on DirecTV and Comcast, respectively.
“The digital strategy is for our content to be available anywhere [and] everywhere,” Jeff Zucker, president of NBC-Universal Television Group, told Reuters. “And so this is just the next step in that strategy.”