Has anyone else been noticing that a lot of big companies have been screwing us, the consumer, recently? I mean more than normal and in ways that can have far-reaching effects? First there is the whole Blu-ray/HD-DVD war. Blu-ray gets its exclusive Blockbuster and Target backing, so HD-DVD goes out and gets exclusive deals with Paramount and Dreamworks (even though God himself, Spielberg, refuses to sign off). This does little but assure the format war is going to last at least a couple more years.

Then we had NBC and Apple having what basically came down to a Press Release fight. Oh no, don’t take the gloves off gentleman! Within a two day span I was on both sides of the argument, first thinking it was stupid for Apple to let NBC go, then thinking NBC was stupid for demanding way too much. As with most things in life, the truth and blame is probably somewhere down the middle. The problem is that Apple and NBC are both huge companies, they’ll be fine without one another, but it’s us, the public, who are getting screwed.

NBC has not-so-arguably the best content for network television (at least for people in the 20-39 demo…I don’t think CBS is making a killing with downloads for their 55-70 demo), Apple has not-so-arguably the best client to download content for television. Together they worked very well. Of course in the end they couldn’t work together.

Now we have NBC going to Amazon’s Unbox. Are they doing it to give the consumer a better deal? Well, that’s what they’re saying, but of course that is a lie – Unbox is more or less crap (hold the ‘less’). They’re going with them a) to try and screw Apple (not only is Unbox a competitor of iTunes, they don’t support Apple computers at all!), b) because they’ll give them more DRM which obviously the consumer loves, and c) they’ll allow for flexible price structuring, which again, consumers love (or don’t). NBC can deny the $4.99 claim all they want, they are greedy – the move to Unbox proves that. If they were really all about giving consumers the best package, they would stick to their own soon-to-be-released Hulu and give their content out for free or cheaper than Apple.

Apple, meanwhile, probably should have tried to reach some sort of compromise with NBC rather then just walking away insulted. Too long have they been in total dominance of the music industry (which, for the record, I do think is a good thing or else we’d have $4.99 hit song downloads right now), that they seem to have a very ‘our (Steve Jobs) way or the highway’ mentality. Not having NBC’s content is very bad news for iTunes. Lets face it, if it doesn’t exactly kill the TV store, it severely hampers it. Everything seemed to point to these two needing to make it work, yet it didn’t.

I really hope at their event tomorrow Apple brings out NBC’s President for a ‘just kidding” moment after some 11th hour negotiations. That’d be nice, but will it happen? I doubt it, both companies are too stubborn here. They all talk a big game about the consumer, but when it comes down to it, they don’t mind screwing us rather than swallowing some pride.

These digital and next-gen format wars are getting nasty. The stakes are large and all of these companies know it. Every single one of little format battles is turning into a Cold War of its own – and they’re going to keep ending with stalemate, stalemate, stalemate. Would you feel comfortable buying an HD-DVD or Blu-ray player right now? I sure wouldn’t. What if you buy a Blu-ray but want to watch a Paramount movie? What if you buy an HD-DVD but want a Disney one? There is no way I’m buying two players and the hybrids are too expensive, and the fact that they even exist is kind of sad.

To me, all of this brings a voice out from the back of my head. It’s a dark voice. It whispers: “BitTorrent”.