After just two years NBC has put an end to its relationship with iTunes Movie Store, reports New York Times. The media company, which is one of the major content providers of Apple’s iTunes notified the Cupertino company late Thursday about its intentions.

Contacted by the New York Times, an NBC official confirmed the information, but declined to elaborate.

But the reason behind NBC’s decision seems to be the fact that the company is unhappy about Apple pricing policy and the piracy control.

NBC signed its contract with Apple in 2005, being the second major company who has agreed to deliver its content through iTunes. Apple’s iTunes initial TV and media partner was ABC.

Still, as the New York Times reported, there are undergoing negotiations between the two companies, which means then after all maybe NBC is just playing hard ball and it won’t pull out its 1500 hours of entertainment shows, movies and TV series from the iTunes catalog.

On July 6, Universal axed its long term contract with Apple, despite sales estimated at around $200 million through the iTunes channel. UMG is holding approximately 30% of the world’s music market, with one-in-three tracks being released under its umbrella.

Earlier this month, Universal Music Group the record company behind high-profile names like 50 Cent, Black Eyed Peas or Amy Whinehouse, announced that a significant portion of its music catalogue will be available without the DRM protection.

UMG will offer the songs and the albums in the unprotected MP3 format at several online retailers, including RealNetworks, Wal-Mart, Amazon and even Google, but the big surprise is that Apple’s iTunes service, the largest online-music vendor in the US and third-largest offline or online vendor on the same market, wasn’t included in this “promotion”.

Instead, Universal Music said it would market music to Apple at will, which would allow it to remove its songs from iTunes on short notice.

iTunes Music Store opened in April 2003 and in September 2006 Apple decided to expand iTunes’ catalog by adding TV shows and movies. In April 2007 the company announced that 50 million TV shows and over 1.3 million movies were sold through its digital store, but it didn’t revealed any details about the companies specific content.

Also in April 2007 Apple announced that the 100 millionth iPod has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history.

Currently, iTunes catalog features five million songs, 550 television shows and 500 movies.