NBC is doing its best to spin the return-to-iTunes story in its favor. Here’s Cnet’s take, which makes it sound like Apple caved:

To get TV shows from NBC Universal back on iTunes, Apple yielded to some demands on pricing and packaging made by the media conglomerate, NBC executives said Tuesday.
[…]
Apple stuck to its guns for a long time, say sources close to the negotiations.

Read carefully and you can see that the sources for the story were exclusively NBC executives; not surprisingly, they tell the story that NBC had originally wanted to lower prices on shows and Apple wouldn’t let it, a situation heroically rectified by the crusading suits at the network:

JB Perrette, NBC’s president of digital distribution, said in addition the company will be allowed to set its own prices on special packages. For example, NBC could elect to offer a best-of Heroes compilation at a price that might offer consumers a better value than buying individual shows for $1.99.

Unsaid is the fact that NBC can’t “elect to offer” a worse value; in truth, NBC had wanted to charge $4.99 for Heroes episodes.

The NYT, in one of its digital blogs, tells a similar tale …

Apple likes to remake the world to its own aesthetic, but when parts of the world assert their natural ugliness, Apple will in fact back down. The latest example is the re-emergence of NBC shows on the iTunes store for download.

… from a similar source:

According to Jean-Briac Perrette, who runs digital distribution for NBC Universal, Apple has now given the network much of what it wanted. NBC can choose from three price points for shows: 99 cents, $1.99 and $2.99. In his product presentation Tuesday, Steve Jobs mentioned the $2.99 price point would be for high-definition programs. But Mr. Perette said the network could use that price as the base price for certain programs, such as two-hour specials.

In that single blog entry, the word “flexibility” is used four times. As we have seen in the past, the word is code for “raising prices.” With the few exceptions noted in that last excerpt, NBC isn’t.

Now, besides the journalistic issues involved in allowing the network to use that “flexibility” euphemism, the reason this matters is simple: The big content companies are obsessed with fighting puny battles on fields that are familiar to them, in this case weaseling incremental (or in this case, much larger than incremental) price increases wherever possible.

The problem is that, bureaucratically, they are not equipped to think in terms of a big picture in a transitional time. Hulu is a step in the right direction, of course, but many other basic mechanical opportunities aren’t being tried.

For example, nearly ten years after it became obvious that digital distribution of media would be the norm, why haven’t the networks created a simple YouTube-like standard for sharing and allowing bloggers to embed video from TV shows? The first five minutes could be free, or the whole thing could be free with attached commercials, or the whole thing could be free in degraded quality—each with one-click $1.99 download available with payment through, say, PayPal that would automatically route the thing into your iTunes or WMP. These could be packaged with the equivalent of whatever the DRM is on iTunes, and in a stroke the networks would be leveraging the power of the net in its favor, rather than fighting, futilely, against it.

Wouldn’t the development of that have benefitted NBC more than a year-long exile from the iTunes Store, where many of its shows were among the service’s most popular?