Did anyone notice the announcement today from Disney that they would soon be giving away their broadcast content on the Internet? Some might think this means that the Disney deal to sell “Lost” and other TV show episodes on ITunes is a dead duck – after all, who would buy these shows from Apple when you can download them for free?
But are things really as they appear? One Silicon Valley dealmaker sees the signs of a bigger deal pending. “It’s all about ‘Who’s the Big Dog’. The ITunes model breaks a lot of things for distribution. When the content biz takes it seriously, they won’t do the $1.99 per video pricing model anymore. They can’t vary the pricing – you’ve got to play pricing games to profit off of premium offerings at least some of the time, and begin the process of moving to value pricing.” So what’s going on here? It’s pretty simple…