Zucker blames Apple for NBC Universal failings
Jeff Zucker, chief of NBC Universal, took the stage at Syracuse University for questioning. While there he made the position of NBC Universal quite clear: they’re not making enough money, and it’s everyone else’s fault.
Reading the highlights of the public interview on Forbes, one gets the impression that Zucker stopped just short of blaming the dog for eating their profits. The reader can only hope that he was afterwards taken aside, given a big bowl of ice-cream and encouraged to be a "brave boy".
Some of the his points provide a fascinating glimpse into Universals mindset, and why that mindset is sucking so badly at modern technology. He complains that Apple has made millions "off their backs" and not paid enough for it, perhaps missing the minor facts that:
- A baker does not get a share of your paycheck for the work you do after eating a bagel
- Despite the name, Universal is not actually responsible for all music in creation. So it’s like the baker claiming payment for all bagels, not just his.
- He should count himself goddamn lucky customers are still paying for music at all given their treatment over the last ten years.
The real problem is that NBC got entirely used to charging unbelievable markups on slivers of plastic for quite a long time. They should have known it would end and prepared a folder full of emergency plans marked "Open when people can buy their own CD burners". Unfortunately if they did make such a folder it contained a piece of colouring paper with the words "Whine and sue people" crayoned on it. When a major media corporation is using the same plans as that idiot who burned herself with McDonalds coffee, you can see how they’d start to lose money.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking moment is when he complains "We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side" (reported by DigitalDaily). Excuse me while I download a free MP3 of a violin playing in sorrow for not making them enough money. This quote reveals everything they’re doing wrong – those dollars are gone, Mr Zucker, gone like the profits from selling horseshoes and leeches on the street and if you don’t get with the program you’ll follow them.
The rest of the talk is a comedy of errors, with such highlights as
- "Nobody has figured out the economic model yet"
- They think of their whole internet operation as "a small cable channel in our universe"
- It’s everyone else’s fault, damn them, and now we’re not making enough money
Related Posts:
