HBO, Time Warner’s Inc cable company, is reportedly about to close an agreement with ITunes to sell some of its shows on the popular online store. Shows like ’The Sopranos’, ‘Sex and the City’ or ‘The Wire’ may be added to the ITunes service.
The shows will not be made available as soon as they will be aired since HBO wants to remain in good terms with the cable companies that are paying a fee for every new subscriber. However, the shows will be made ready for download as soon as they will be released on DVD, a person familiar with the negotiations but who wanted to remain anonymous said for The New York Times.
The surprising part of the deal is the fact that Apple will change its traditional policy of selling all the shows at the same price. Thus, some of HBO’s popular TV series might be sold for more than the regular $1.99. This may be due to Apple’s emphasizing on the video content in order to back up its PC-to-TV-screen product Apple TV, and the fact that NBC has canceled selling its shows on ITunes because of the pricing structure.
The deal raises big questions about what may happen to the prices for other areas of content on the ITunes site. At this moment, all songs on ITunes have a fixed price of 99 cents, but more companies have tried to convince Apple to adopt a flexible sales format and it is possible to use the fact that their contracts will come up for renewal in order to do this.
Apple’s spokesman Tom Neumayr and Time Warner spokesman Ed Adler refused to comment.