Buying into vidoegames
With their business models under threat and shares in the doldrums, game publishers like Electronic Arts look ripe for the picking by media conglomerates. Just don't bank on a quick M&A payday. Commentary
News Corp, Time to unveil digital JV: sources
New digital devices are displayed during a press conference in Caracas October 6, 2009.
Credit: Reuters/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
NEW YORK |
NEW YORK (Reuters) - News Corp, Time Warner Inc and magazine publishers Conde Nast and Hearst Corp will on Tuesday unveil a new digital joint venture aimed at readying their print titles with agreed standards for a range of devices from e-books to tablets.
The companies will reveal details of a long-expected plan to create a digital newsstand next year that would deliver their titles and content to mobile devices, according to people familiar with the plan.
Users of the service would get a digital newsstand where they could buy subscriptions, potentially by the month or year, these people said.
Time Warner's Time Inc is the largest magazine publisher in the U.S. and like Conde Nast and Hearst has been hurt by sharp decline in print advertising revenue in recent years as readers have moved to online sites for free content.
News Corp's chief executive Rupert Murdoch has in the last year been especially vocal about reversing the tide of free access to content published by his newspapers. He has joined forces with the magazine publishers as part of a number of different initiatives to get paid for Web content, one of the sources said.
The original digital newsstand initiative is being led by Time Inc executive John Squires, who earlier this year was charged with coming up with ways to help Time Inc and its titles such as Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, People and Fortune make money online as the print businesses declines.
(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke; editing by Carol Bishopric)
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Mistake #1:
A very large chunk, and growing percentage of breaking news comes from social networking sites these days. You are not going to be able to force people to pay for this. Investigative journalism like we find on Reuters or through Time have a chance at survival. News Corp “news” is a televised regurgitation of Internet chat forums.
Mistake #2:
In a day in age where we are moving every possible functionality to things we now call phones… They are going to incorporate their “agreed” standards into things? Microsoft has continually tried to do this for years too… IE has historically tired to invent its own protocols for how Internet pages are viewed instead of the advised W3 standards, and guess what they are loosing money hand over fist now too, Internet Explorer only had 38% of the users last month according to the W3 web standards organization… and it is hypothesized that this is mostly due to corporate IT departments not having moved over as of yet.
Mistake #3:
The open model works… since this is about technology, lets take Linux as our example, that hobbyist operating system of the 80’s and 90’s is now the #1 web hosting operating system, is used by 4.3% of Internet users, gains usage at about .5% annually for the last few years… Redhat is an enormous Linux company, they give there product away in the form of CentOS (previously fedora)… and they are hugely successful. So, based on this, do you think everyone is going to start trying to charge for their twitter gleaned news? They would be stupid to try.
The only thing this is going to accomplish is allowing for in roads for companies like Al Jazeera America, Current Media, and other up and coming media outlets. As I sort of haphazardly illustrated before, proprietorship does not work in technology battles.
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