Over the last couple of months the rhetoric from the corporate media barons has been gradually heating up, particularly that coming from the Murdoch camp.

First it was the announcement that News Corp would be charging for content delivered online. Clearly Comrade Rupert wanted to put some lead in the pencils of that small group of media barons that dispense the filtered news that everyone gets every day, and try to combat the rise and rise of Google. After all, if you talk to thinking people in the content industry they will tell you that in their opinion Google is effectively the biggest pirate of them all.

Some people thought that Rupert was mad to make the announcement, because the reality is that it is impossible to build a wall around content. It leaks out whatever you do. The market liked the announcement though and the stock ticked up nicely, thanks very much.

At that time, I hypothesized that maybe Rupert was going to take a leaf out of the Universal book, seeing as there had been such big court rulings on music file sharing, and make the legal department into a profit centre at News.

Now we see the next step in the game. James Murdoch takes a shot at the Beeb.

Of course they have just woken up over there at News to the realization that while they may imagine Google as their enemy, the BBC sees the internet as its friend. Over at the BBC the model of “free” has been in place for generations. And the budget afforded by getting the people of the UK to pay – what is it – 25 pounds per household – for a license.. It produces a mind boggling amount of cash to keep delivering free content, and content that is totally unbeholden to advertisers and which is also substantially able to avoid the influence even of governments.

That is some big threat to the whole concept from News of getting to a paid for model for content.

Be interesting to see how it plays out.

To me it looks very much like this will just help build the influence of the BBC…

And by the way, the BBC is one of the pioneers of the use of P2P to deliver content on the web. Think about it.

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Posted in Main Page by Chris Gilbey No Comments Yet