Almost as shocking to Apple (AAPL) watchers as the news that NBC Universal is not renewing its iTunes contract is the news that the network’s content, according to the New York Times, represents 30% to 40% of digital video downloads on Apple’s site.

When did that happen?

NBC is hardly the Must See TV powerhouse it was in the days of Friends and Seinfeld. It routinely runs fourth in the Nielsen broadcast TV ratings, and on iTunes it has to compete with not just ABC, CBS and FOX, but with 63 other networks, including youth-oriented powerhouses like Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon. Comedy Central alone offers the Daily Show with John Stewart, the Colbert Report, South Park and the Sarah Silverman Show, just to name their top sellers.

NBC’s top sellers on iTunes, as many commentators have noted, are The Office (currently the  No. 2 season download on the site, after Showtime’s Weeds) and Heroes.  But scroll down the page and you start to get a sense of how NBC could be racking up all those $1.99 charges. The network has a strong bench. Number 3, 4 and 5 downloads are Scrubs, 30 Rock and Studio 60. Below them you’ll find series like Friday Night Lights, My Name is Earl and the Law and Order franchises.

And unlike Comedy Central, which offers only the last dozen or so episodes of the Daily Show, NBC has gone for the Long Tail play, digging deep into its archives to repackage old Saturday Night Live episodes, Gen-X nostalgia like the A-Team, Xena and Saved by the Bell and Baby Boomer classics like Dragnet, Rod Sterling’s Night Gallery and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. All told, it has put some 1,500 hours of programming on iTunes, all of which could disappear in December when the two-year contract with Apple runs its course.

Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, it’s almost as if Jeff Zucker’s NBC were using the iTunes Music Store as a proving ground to test the format and audience appetite before striking out on its own — or rather with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — on Hulu.com, scheduled to launch in October.

Could Apple have made a strategic blunder, letting NBC slip through its fingers? As the Times points out, NBC’s defiance, following Universal Music’s rebellion earlier this year, could embolden other networks, whose contracts will presumably come up for renewal in the months ahead.

"No The Office, no Battlestar Galactica, no Heroes?," writes MG Siegler at ParisLemon. "Suddenly I’m starting to rethink video on iTunes. No Universal Music
Group tracks, no Fox movies? Suddenly I’m starting to rethink iTunes in
general. Apple is still in an utterly dominant position even
without NBC — its the music sales, not the video sales that drive the
service — but it could all come crumbling down rather quickly." (link)

Steve Jobs, asked recently what he most admired about Bill Gates, answered that he envied Microsoft’s ability to work with its partners (link). Both men bargain hard, but Gates seemed to be better than Jobs at keeping his frenemies inside the tent. Has Jobs learned that lesson? We may see next Wednesday, when we find out how he responds to Zucker’s challenge, and what he plans to do next with iTunes, the iPods and Apple TV.

UPDATE: Apple has called NBC’s bluff. See Apple to NBC: Drop Dead.
 

The Apple (AAPL) event set for a week from today has unleashed a torrent of speculation, including two particularly enticing rumors that surfaced overnight.

Wi-Fi Music: MacDailyNews and 9to5Mac both posted brief reports suggesting that Steve Jobs next Wednesday might introduce new iPods that could download music and other content over the airwaves. MacDailyNews  framed their tip like this:

Apple will debut "wireless-capable iPods"
next Wednesday along with "wireless iTunes Store sales," enabling users
to buy content "directly from iPod, iPhone," a single source often
familiar with Apple’s digital content plans tells MacDailyNews…. This is a rumor. We have no other information. We
cannot confirm this information independently at this time, but felt it
plausible enough to bring to your attention. (link)

"I think it would be a bold and killer move by Apple to go with a wifi iPod and begin direct to iPhone and iPod music sales," writes one Apple watcher on The Mac Observer’s Apple Finance Board. "I would be surprised and impressed by how aggressive that move would be."

High-Definition Video: Carl Howe at Blackfriar’s Marketing puts the timing of the Sept. 5 Apple event together with an Aug. 27 press release from Akamai (AKAM) and gets this:

What has gone more or less unnoticed is the fact that Akamai,
Apple’s long-time Internet content partner, has announced that it is adding high-definition video to its Internet distribution offerings.

A
coincidence? Perhaps. But add the fact that Apple TV, a product whose
revenue is being recognized as a 24-month subscription model like the
iPhone, sports high-definition outputs, yet has no high-definition
iTunes content yet, and you’ve got a high-definition shoe ready to drop
sometime; the only question is when. (link)

Two curious lines of speculation with nothing much more than wishful thinking behind them. They may not have much predictive power, but they are strong indicators of the direction Apple’s users and investors would like to see the company going.