Fans of The Office, your $50 iTunes gift card is now useless.

NBC announced yesterday that it would be distributing its programming through Unbox, Amazon’s downloading video service, and has severed its ties with the iTunes store.

NBC decided to switch to Unbox—despite the fact that their videos are incompatible with video iPods—because the service will give them greater pricing flexibility. How this will affect Hulu was not mentioned, but it’s becoming increasingly possible that the whole concept is just a digital media red herring.

Apple’s control over pricing and packages was the main cause for the switch. Jean-Briac Perrette, president of NBC Universal Digital Distribution said, "Amazon is a company that understands the value we provide as content owners to its business."

If NBC had stayed on with Apple, the iTunes would have charged $1.99 for an episode of the Bionic Woman, which if anything, overestimates NBC’s content value.