The almighty GOOGLE is teaming up with the almighty NBC Universal to act as a broker to sell TV advertising on some NBC cable channels. In a joint collaboration agreement, the two larger than life companies state that NBC Universal will offer advertising time from several of its cable networks for Google to sell advertising through its Google TV Ads service.

“Advertisers using the Google TV Ads platform can reach NBCU Cable’s national audience and gain access to viewership data at an unprecedented scale,” the NBC Universal and Google statement said.

According to Mike Pilot, president of NBC Universal sales and marketing, and Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of advertising and commerce for North America, the partnership will make “TV ads more accountable.”

Due to Google’s deal with DISH Network, they are better able to report each second of TV usage data allowing advertisers the ability to measure viewership of their ads more precisely.

Along with this new merger, NBC Universal and Google are also going to work together to adapt the Google TV Ad service for use in local TV markets and are collaborating on custom marketing and research projects using Google TV Ads to survey audience trends.

In conclusion, first Google took over the Internet and now….Google and NBC plot on taking over the world of technology. Move over AOL, there’s something much meaner and leaner!

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Apple announced back in August of 2007 that it would no longer be providing NBC’s TV shows after NBC demanded they jack up the price. In a sort of response to this, NBC created it’s own direct download service which allows users to grab a limited amount of TV shows which are encoded with an expiration. This service is currently in beta and once it is finished should cost something for the user.

Most people agree, this was a pretty silly move for NBC and Apple. Both were mutually benefiting from their arrangement, and now neither is able to benefit. NBC’s service has been in development for almost 6 months now and still doesn’t seem really useful. The rational behind this from what I can tell was that NBC’s TV shows held a large market share of the TV Shows purchased on iTunes. However, what NBC doesn’t seem to realize is that the reason people use iTunes at all is mainly their native support of their iPod devices and the marketing done by Apple promoting their service as being tied in with all of their other products. NBC’s move will more than likely just move more users towards simply pirating their content, which will damage them far more in the long run.

Some of the documents relating to Apple’s iTunes service are available on http://RealDealDocs.com. An example of this is Apple’s Digital Music Download Agreement. The document filed with the SCC appears to be a sort of template which can be used between Apple and various companies to license their content for use on Apple’s iTunes service.

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