If Fox believes that withdrawing programming from 4 million households is its best negotiating tactic, then I would ask the FCC to intervene and mandate continued carriage and arbitration.
Sen. John Kerry • Threatening to get in the middle of the spat between Time Warner Cable and News Corp. over licensing fees. Rupert Murdoch’s crew wants a bigger share of the pie, and have forced the cable company to the edge. If they don’t come to an agreement tonight, Time Warner Cable channels will go black. If they do, that means a number of prominent college football bowls won’t be seen, all because of greed. We hope Kerry successfully gets the FCC involved, because these petulant children need it. source
Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.
A statement from Google • Describing its stance on the whole Rupert Murdoch thing we posted about yesterday. That sounds like a dare to us. Will News Corp. match Google’s dare with a double dare? Will Murdoch then pull out a double dog dare, or will he go straight to the triple dog dare? We don’t know, but we’re glued to our seats in excitement. • source
News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is ready drop Google, based on this interview. (It’s long but the meat of what we care about is right at the beginning.) However, as paidContent points out, he doesn’t completely understand how the Wall Street Journal uses Google to promote stories even with its pay wall. (Instead of just getting chunks of stories, you get the first couple free, then get blocked.) Regarding the evolution of newspapers to paid content, Murdoch says, “Everyone can afford a newspaper. They’re the cheapest things in the world and what you get out of it is fabulous. And it will be even cheaper when you get it electronically.” We hope so, Rupe.source
I think we got spread a bit wide and thin and what we’re focusing on is sort of the heart of our business going forward really being a social network around key content. We’re not trying to compete with Facebook or beat Twitter. We’re trying to create a unique experience.
News Corp. President and Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey • Describing the ball of (#^(@-up the company’s 2005 acquisition of MySpace turned into. They let the site get lazy and fat and flabby. Now they’re just trying to turn it into a music and entertainment company or something. Tom is probably crying himself to sleep knowing that most of his friends are on Facebook now. • source
Everybody in the company is upset that we didn’t keep going when we had the real momentum. Regaining momentum is always much harder than keeping momentum going.
News Corp.’s Jonathan Miller • On losing the momentum that made MySpace one of the Internet’s hottest stars for about a year, until they screwed that up and nobody cared anymore. How does the social media company plan to get it back? By differentiating itself in the marketplace. They have some pretty good music offerings down the pipe, and they want to open up their infrastructure to developers (who aren’t 13-year-old girls that know how to put sparkles on their page). But – much like every Internet-related articlewe post that mentions News Corp. – Miller suggests they’re gonna charge for certain parts of MySpace. That’s OK man – we’ll just use Facebook instead. That’s where all our friends are. Just continue to follow the News Corp. party line. • source
It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online. I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content. I think what we need to do is deliver that content to consumers in a way where they will appreciate the value.
News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey • Describing the necessity to make a really smart and cool service incredibly lame and not awesome. Carey’s talking about Hulu, of course, and he hopes to see the company charge for some of the same content that’s available for free over the airwaves in 2010. However, it could get worse as time goes on – with the possibility of Comcast taking over NBC Universal, they could stick an even deeper fork into one of big media’s best forays into the online world. Don’t screw this up, jerks. • source