Apple, NBC Blow Kisses at Each Other

NBC shows are still MIA on iTunes, but the top dogs at the Peacock network and Apple are sure saying nice things about each other.

According to the Financial Times (by way of MacRumors), NBC chief exec Jeff Zucker "appears to have patched things up" with Apple. "We've said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple...we're great fans of Steve Jobs," Zucker reportedly said.

Meanwhile, we have BusinessWeek quoting Steve Jobs shortly after his Macworld keynote last week: "We'll put it back together on the TV thing. Everybody lost (when NBC pulled its shows off iTunes). But NBC is a great company, and Apple is a great company."

Hmmmmm...that's a far cry from just a few months ago, when Zucker sniped that Apple had "destroyed the music business...and if we don't take control, they'll do the same thing on the video side." For its part, Apple fired back that NBC was trying to foist "a dramatic price increase" on customers.

The apparent thaw comes at a significant time: within about a week, we'll be seeing the launch of the revitalized Apple TV, which could bring a lot more customers to the iTunes video store. NBC probably wants a piece of the action, and Steve Jobs would like to fill the gaping hole that was left in iTunes' TV catalog when NBC broke off contract talks back in August. But will the reunion actually happen (and if so, will Apple have to make some pricing concessions)? We'll have to wait and see.

What do you think? You ready to download "The Office" from iTunes again?

Related:
Apple, NBC Universal Repairing Relations? [MacRumors]