Citing “three people familiar with the proposal,” Variety says that Apple is floating a proposal to the TV networks to cut the price of shows for sale in the iTunes Store by half, from $1.99 down to 99 cents. Reports Josef Adalian:

But entertainment companies don’t seem to be rushing to embrace the idea. Indeed, the half-price plan may have contributed to NBC’s decision last week not to renew its current deal with Apple (though if NBC had simply let its contract automatically renew, the current price of $1.99 would’ve stayed in place).

Apple’s argument to studios and nets has been that they will end up making more money from digital downloads under the new proposal. Company believes the volume of sales for TV shows will rise dramatically, offsetting the impact of the price cut.

Among the concerns is that at 99¢, iTunes downloads could impact sales of DVD boxed sets, an important revenue source for TV congloms.

They are also a big part of the way the Big Box stores do business. Variety does the math those stores wouldn’t like to see, saying that in theory consumers would be able to buy an entire season of a show more cheaply online than in hard copy.

Unasked—and it’s a sign both of how the entertainment companies still need to be slapped and of how the media sometimes reports on these things from an overly industry-driven perspective—is the question of why we should have to buy a show on iTunes and then on DVD separately. Why should I have to pay twice for the same collection of ones and zeros? The one thing the DVD makers have going for them thus far is that the DVD is a superior product that is sold, for the most part*, at an eminently reasonable price.

But as computer storage space and download speeds increase, the TV and movie industries will be affected the same way the record companies were by illegal downloading. There’s nothing they can do to stop the phenomenon; it might be that the Apple plan is the smartest step they could take.

* Note this look-ahead from the same Variety story:

If cooler heads prevail, it seems possible Apple and the nets will come to a settlement in which shows are sold via tiered pricing, perhaps 99¢ for library titles, $1.99 for current hits and $2.99 for megahits or shows on premium cablers such as HBO or Showtime.

It reminds one that HBO simply mints money from its DVD sales. “Deadwood” and “Sopranos” sets have a list price of $100; my anecdotal impression is that “Sopranos” sets are generally steeply discounted (to the mere “very pricey,” down from “unbelievably high”) but that “Deadwood” rarely is. The profits from the DVDs, of course, are all found money—an unceasing new revenue stream that didn’t exist ten years ago.