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Rupert Murdock has been “banging on” about copyright stuff and wants to introduce some kind of charge for reading his newspapers over the web, indeed one of his US titles already does charge for on-line subscriptions and content access. Also James Murdoch giving the the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in August complained that organisations like the BBC made it “difficult” for other media organisations by which I think he meant to charge customers money for content. I have written on this before: http://baldysblog.co.uk/2009/08/29/a-murdoch-moan/

I am not opposed to Murdoch or any other publisher or writer getting paid for their efforts, I believe that they should however, the main failing in my opinion lies in these various media organisations not evolving a new business model and in effect, wanting to live in the past which is just not going to happen, clearly either they lack imagination and good management or are just plain stupid.

The Google Spat

The CEO of Google Eric Schmidt who has been engaged in a spat with Murdoch over “Google News” getting people directly to articles on his newspaper sites (this has an impact on the advertising stats for the newspaper if they don’t ‘come in’ via the front page), wrote in an article in the Wall Street Journal: “”We also acknowledge that it has been difficult for newspapers to make money from their online content, but just as there is no single cause of the industry’s current problems, there is no single solution.” A totally correct statement, it is complex, time shift viewing, sector and interest marketing, the ‘old model’ is as dead as the Dodo.

In reality whether over Google or the BBC, the Murdoch’s are barking up the wrong tree. There have been innumerable discussions concerning “micro-payments” to pay pence for content bought over the web and it just hasn’t happened besides which, am I prepared to pay 10p just to read an article over the web ? No and neither am I prepared to pay £50 pa each to the Times, Telegraph, Independent, Guardian, Economist and the Spectator, just to read them on line either so is there a solution ?

PC Pro Magazine

These days I only read one computer related magazine a month and in the latest edition there are two articles which at first glance, may not seem related but stand back a bit and maybe they are. One is by Jon Honeyball who often writes well but seems a bit of a grump, many IT people can be and the gist of his piece can be grasped from the heading: “Content costs money, so if you want to read it be prepared to pay.” Jon works in IT as well as being a journalist writing for various magazines, he therefore has an interest and his view is perfectly valid within that context.

The second article was written by Barry Collins about the Google operating system called “Chrome OS”. Now the technical ins and outs of this, I wont bore you with except to say that regardless as to whether it is Google or Microsoft and a number of others, there is this idea that “computing tomorrow” with take place in “The Cloud”. Behind cloud computing is the concept that you don’t have applications installed locally, you want a word processor, spreadsheet and so on, the ‘application’ runs ‘out there somewhere on a distant machine’, even the documents that you produce can be stored there and obviously, this is all web based, which is all well enough but…

However and as Barry points out very well, even Adobe’s on-line version of Photoshop at photoshop.com, can’t handle RAW pictures plus on-line video as opposed to ‘stills’ is not a practical concept worth considering any time soon !

The Big Bust and But… is Bandwidth

The other month and I have supposedly an ‘unlimited deal’ with my ISP which clearly isn’t, having heavily used BBC iPlayer to watch a series that caught my attention over a couple of weeks in the evening, I received a warning email that I might exceed my “monthly limits” for bandwidth usage which would result in…not sure except that email and web browsing could be rather slow for the rest of that month. So, just what are these BT adverts about watching “Hannah Montana” and other series on demand amount to ?

If we consider that as “inbound usage”, let us look at another ‘instance’ which is concerned with the “outbound” part. Not so many years back, an American IT Expert finished writing a book on an area of IT that is definitely “expert levels” to purely “academic”, it would never ever get within spitting distance of the “Best Sellers” tables and likely sell in the 100s rather than the hundred thousands.

Being a genuine sort of chap, he bundled up his whole manuscript into an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file that people could download it for free from his personal web site, oh bugger ! Whether because people are just ‘cheap’ or there was a genuine thirst for knowledge, loads of people downloaded this file and at the end of a month, he was given a $5,000 bill for bandwidth charges ! Which matches up with a comment made by Jon Honeyball in his piece.

In Practical Terms…

What this means is that “bandwidth” which if you like, is both the diameter and speed of the ‘pipe’ that connects you and I to the Internet, is restricted and therefore rationed by whatever means. From this I can deduce that News Corporation is run by total idiots because they are hung up on the past and don’t understand the future, especially theirs.

To get their “old model income”, running printing presses and renting satellite time which were merely “delivery highways or conduits” to them and in terms of earning an income is not high-tech, it is yesterday’s news. Buy up every ‘Bus Route’ and you own all the activities associated with that in terms of support, staff employment and all other up-keep.

What they Should Do…

Buy into any business or start one that is into digging up roads and ‘planting’ fibre-optic cables UK wide to connect potential customers to “TV, Telephone, Internet and Email etc. and by doing so “buy up” the increased bandwidth which regardless of “content” means that they commercially prosper by renting it out to people who want to use it.

News Corporation can be a growing business or one on the ‘slide’ to obscurity and in the latter case, they deserve it. In the late 1980′s someone asked me (an Accountant), just how many of the top 100 UK companies in 1900 still existed then, in any form (not just the name).

I hazarded a guess at 20%, apparently the answer was just 3 which was quite a sobering thought because we were not talking about ‘family companies’ – “Clogs to clogs in 3 generations”, we were looking at massive public concerns where 100s if not 1,000s of people owned shares in the business, time for News Corporation to move on and as ever, for all of us to “Think out of the box…” to a larger degree.