I didn't think about this but thankfully someone at BuddyTV did, and the story goes a little something like this: although House airs on Fox and Fox has no outstanding issues with iTunes, the show is not produced by Fox's sibling studio. The studio arm of NBC-Universal, Universal Media Studios produces the ratings monster which is licensed to Fox for broadcast, making NBC the true owner of the show.

Since NBC is having a price dispute with iTunes, new episodes of House won't be available once that contract expires, along with all the other shows that NBC-U produces. You can more about it at BuddyTV. NBC, according to Apple, wants to charge $4.99 per episode rather than $1.99, while Apple wants to charge even less than that. At $4.99 per ep, an entire season of House would cost you almost $120, a truly ridiculous sum when you consider that those downloads are not broadcast or DVD quality, are wrapped in DRM so you can't burn them to DVD yourself or even share them amongst other computers in most cases, and for that privilege you are paying nearly $82 more for all that crap than it'd cost you just to get the show on DVD.

Even though Apple is very anti-consumer, NBC isn't exactly setting itself apart from the crowd in that regard either.

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