chano

Apple's iTunes Chump Change for Hollywood

Your article proudly exhibits your naivete and ignorance of market matters. Funny that. Sorry to say so but your words are the best testament to the hollowness of your arguments. TV in its traditional sense is finished. Record companies, in their traditional business formats are finished. DVD has seen its best days a long time ago and, oh shock, oh horror, Blu Ray got all dressed up to party only to find that the party's nearly over. If you want to write about such things, you should know all this, unless you have migrated to this topic from writing about the vibrancy of the Betamax market these days, or commenting on the ever-blossoming sales of film and film-based cameras.
The point is, people have wised up and they don't want packaged media, they want to pick and mix what they watch, read and listen to. This is wonderful news for us ordinary folks whose money keeps all biz ticking over. It is a death knell for all media 'publicasters' who think that their exploitative business model will survive. When, as is already happening, TV, radio, mags and papers see their revenues tank, albeit slowly to begin with, they will holler and wail and rail at Apple and iTMS because life is just so unfair, boo hoo. Fools like Jeff Zucker, (now what does that rhyme with in his case?) who are still reeling drunk on the excesses of their old biz model, suddenly find that they have lost control and the damn consumers have somehow stopped being their doormat and taken charge of how they watch, listen and read. Only a truly desperate dolt like Zucker would suggest that Apple should pay NBC a royalty on every iPod sold. Why? Where does that entitlement come from? Apple is doing them and all the studios and all the record companies a huge favour by slightly extending their failing biz model. The point that they, and you, are missing is that any revenue they make from iTMS is a pure opportunity value. It came from Apple's innovations - they needed to make very little effort to achieve those added, windfall, profits. All they needed to do really was simply to sign wherever Steve Jobs told them to sign and then disappear and let Apple do what they themselves (i.e. the Zuckerati) never ever imagined could be done to generate sales with no traditional pressing, printing, sales and negligible distribution costs. Beautiful really. But these greedy (Z)uckers are never satisfied and for the usual 30 pieces of dollar, they can find talentless shills like you to do their pathetic bleating for them. You should be ashamed. Really.
GE's market cap is an irrelevance. Market cap can evaporate overnight as many many companies are realising this month - GE and Apple included. These royalties are a windfall bonus to NBC and others, whose traditional channels of distribution, and profit models, are failing fast. Seen in this light, these revenues from Apple are a Godsend, an air supply to a drowning ingrate. You should know this and avoid making such a comprehensive fool of yourself, Portfolio.com and Conde Nast.
Compare these royalties as additions to GE's net revenues and then let us hear what you have to say. If you want to know the difference between market cap and revenues, I will be happy to enlighten you but, in the meantime, why not write for a column on comparison grocery shopping or similar. It's much safer ground for your skill level and you may have something useful to say.
I stand by what I said elsewhere, in another post against your shill nonsense:
Your article is chump change in the world of journalism. Ad revenues are going to rapidly decline as broadcast tv loses its relevance to a world that is moving on to user-driven tv. In the future , the insidious cancer of advertising will be beaten down to acceptable, non-intrusive levels as users realise what a distraction it is from a program's entertainment value; how much it adds to the cost of everything they buy and how it pollutes the airwaves with noise. I fully expect that as TV and all news media gravitate to the web, software will become available to filter out the ads. I would pay up to $500 and $50 in annual subs and updates to buy such software if it was available. So, when you factor out the rapid decline of tv ad revenues and factor in the rapid growth in sales of anything that sells on iTunes, your views will change, you chump.
Your article is entirely untrue in terms of biz model trends and so it is worthless. Find me any CEO anywhere on the planet who would say no to hundreds of millions in added revenue with no additional effort. then I might listen to you. Which planet are you on btw?