• CNET News.com, Thursday, December 6, 2007 10:32 AM

Has Apple missed a golden chance to do for Web video what it did for digital music? Apple's iTunes might sell about 20 percent of all music sold in the U.S., but it's not going to do the same with video. Let's be honest: the iPod became a sensation mostly because consumers could fill the device with their entire CD collection. But you can't fill your iPod video with movies, because you can't download movies to iTunes.

Worse for Apple, NBC Universal, its biggest provider of television content, is defecting. Despite constituting 40 percent of video sales on iTunes, chief Jeff Zucker has said that NBC's iTunes business brought in a paltry 416 million in revenue.

Sure, NBC and other traditional media companies fear building an "Apple monster," but they also sense a distribution opportunity for themselves. Soon, all mobile devices will connect to wireless hotspots and/or mobile wireless networks, which means consumers can then watch free, ad-supported video provided by the major networks, not to mention video clips on YouTube and MySpace.

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