MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp (NWS) executive–a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service.

The digital music doubters could be right with the contention that advertising revenue can’t cover the costs of licensing music. Meanwhile, illegitimate free music sources continue to proliferate, rendering paid music subscriptions irrelevant for most music fans.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Yet another News Corporation (NWS) executive is talking about Google (GOOG), and yet again, I feel like they have no concept about how Google interacts with their web pages. Which is frightening, since they’re being very vocal about how they’re supposedly wronged by Google. Please, someone, give them a search marketing 101 course.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

News Corp.’s (NWS) digital chief said Thursday that the company’s social-networking property MySpace is going in a different direction than rival Facebook, based on how its members socialize and share interests.

“Facebook, in some ways, is about what people are up to,” Jonathan Miller said during a keynote speech at the ad:tech conference in New York. MySpace, in contrast, “is about what people are into.”

MySpace in recent months has said it plans to focus on its appeal as an entertainment portal, where members can connect with their favorite bands and artists, as it has lost ground to status- and news-feed-heavy Facebook.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

We’ve already covered how Rupert Murdoch has flip flopped his position on free online news, but his recent foray into blaming search engines and aggregators is really reaching the height of hypocrisy. We’ve already looked into the issue of aggregators and found there’s no problem there at all. Most aggregators either direct traffic to the original sites or are too small to matter.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Twitter has turned out to be a useful tool for some small businesses coping with customer-service or public-relations crises.

The social-media service–where users send short “tweets” to followers who have signed up to receive the messages–came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company’s so-called relaxation beverage, which contains “calming” ingredients like valerian root and melatonin. News Corp. (NWS) owns Fox News as well as The Wall Street Journal.

Innovative Beverage notified consumers on its Twitter feed that it was working to resolve the problem. The company also did a search on Twitter for mentions of the site crash, so it could respond with tweets describing its repair efforts.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Five months ago, a group of media executives including Steven Brill seemed to have the field to itself when it said it was building a system for newspapers to charge readers for access online.

Now, that group appears have a lot of company, like the News Corporation (NWS), led by Rupert Murdoch, and the technology giants Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and I.B.M. (IBM), whose interest was first reported this week.

But publishing executives and analysts caution against concluding that this proves there is a robust competition to develop such systems, or even that newspapers will rush to join any of the projects. The contributions of Google and some others are little more than a set of ideas, written up at the request of the Newspaper Association of America, which inadvertently made them public on its Web site.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

On the web, lurid, sensationalistic news is priced at $0 (for now, at least). Maybe it’s worth exactly that. A kidnapper-rapist sicko has me thinking lately about the literal value of news. Yeah, I’m talking about the shocking story of Phillip Garrido, the California nutcase who allegedly kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard 18 years ago, apparently brainwashed her, kept her secreted away as his sex slave in his backyard shantytown, impregnated her and had her raise two daughters with no access to formal education or medical care.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Drippy Manhattan evenings aren’t usually a draw for an outdoor cocktail party but the FoundersClub NYC Internet Week soiree had something that overcomes a little rain: power. Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC (NSDQ: IACI), was hosting two of the hottest not-so-new guys in town—AOL’s Tim Armstrong and News Corp.‘s Jon Miller—in the Rooftop Garden at Rockefeller Center and the draw was irresistible for Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendy, Jeff Zucker, Sir Martin Sorrell and more from media, advertising and tech.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

As Mark Gimein noted last week in The Big Money, the media giants have put the Web’s journalistic “parasites”–blogs, aggregators, Google (GOOG)–on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement. The Associated Press has threatened legal action against thieves of its intellectual property, MediaNews executive (and AP Chairman) Dean Singleton has seconded that threat, and News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson, the top editor of News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, growl in harmony.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Hulu is stepping up its global initiatives to compete for audience and advertising dollars overseas.

On Monday, the video-streaming site added Johannes Larcher to its executive ranks as senior vice president of international. Mr. Larcher must work with each content provider to negotiate international rights for each video. Hulu has more than 130 content providers and 1,100 TV programs and movies, and its library continues to grow.

Certain snippets of content are already available outside the U.S. Tuesday evening’s news conference with President Barack Obama, for example, will be streamed internationally.

Hulu is a partnership between General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal and News Corp. (NWS), owner of Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal.

In international activities, Hulu trails behind Joost, an independent start-up competing in the premium online content space. Joost has a localized site for the U.K. and is viewable around the world, though content availability varies from country to country.

Read the rest of this post

Is more always better?

Hulu has expanded its content library considerably since its launch a year ago. The Internet video site has grown from 50 content partners to more than 130 and has nearly 40,000 pieces of video.

Now, in addition to the full-length TV shows that made the site popular, it has an expansive, somewhat chaotic library. The site contains everything from two-hour feature films such as Universal’s “Liar, Liar,” starring Jim Carrey, to short instructional Web videos such as “How to Make Stuffed Crust Pizza.”

Andy Forssell, Hulu’s senior vice president of content and distribution, says the goal is to provide users and advertisers with more options. Hulu is a joint venture of General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal and News Corp., (NWS) which owns Wall Street Journal (and AllThingsD.com) publisher Dow Jones.

Among the newest content partners is Condé Nast Publications Inc., the people behind magazines like Vogue and Wired. Videos from the company’s online destinations, such as Epicurious.com, a site for food aficionados, are now appearing on Hulu. They’ve added content from four sites: Epicurious, Wired.com, Style.com and Men.Style.com.

Read the rest of this post

When NBC Universal and News Corp. created Hulu, they gave the video portal a valuable but short-term asset: exclusive rights to distribute NBC and Fox shows outside of the media giants’ own websites.

From that base of content, Hulu.com has become the fourth-biggest online video distributor by unique visitors in January, behind YouTube, Yahoo and MySpace, according to the latest from Nielsen VideoCensus. In total video streams, it’s No. 3, with 232 million, behind YouTube (5.8 billion) and Yahoo (277 million).

But the exclusive part of that NBC-News Corp. deal lasts only two years, and Hulu knows all too well that the scarcity that helped it establish an audience (and brand) is going away soon. Hulu has never said exactly when the deal expires, but it’s likely within a year after the first anniversary of Hulu’s public launch, in March.

Read the rest of this post

News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox Interactive Media digital division is laying off about five percent of its workforce, or about 100 people, amid continued cost-cutting efforts, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The cuts, which started in the last month, are happening gradually unit by unit, the person said. The layoffs include all groups, from social-networking site MySpace to photo-sharing site Photobucket to mobile. (News Corp. owns Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal and the owner of AllThingsD.com.)

“I can confirm that several of the groups within FIM are eliminating some jobs and repurposing others,” a FIM spokesman said in a statement. “This is part of a larger effort we’re making to put FIM in the best possible position to succeed now and, more importantly, to emerge even stronger once the markets recover. It’s important to note that we continue to hire in many areas.”

Read the rest of this post

On TV, content is king. But on the Web, community may reign supreme. Throughout television history, the way to lure most viewers was to air the best shows. It doesn’t necessarily work that way on the Web, where many shows can be seen on multiple sites.

Take the recent announcement by CBS (CBS) that it would begin airing shows like Showtime’s “Dexter” and Sony Pictures Television’s (SNE) “Bewitched” on TV.com, CBS’s online site for full-length video. But none of the more than 1,000 new programs are exclusive to TV.com. And the episodes of “Bewitched,” the classic sitcom featuring the nose-wrinkling witch Samantha, are already on rival Hulu, the joint site of NBC Universal and News Corp. (NWS). “Every major studio right now is following a nonexclusive strategy” online, says Arash Amel, senior analyst with London-based media researcher Screen Digest. “The question for these sites is beginning to be, ‘how do you differentiate yourself beyond the content you have?’”

Read the rest of this post

I got WebEx’d. I saw a well-practiced demo of the new MySpace Music last night, and fell under the impression that the News Corp (NWS) JV with the labels was a simple, straightforward music destination: You search out a song, you add it to your playlist and you listen to it as much as you want, voila. After playing with it through much of the morning, I’m glad I left myself an out, acknowledging that a demo was not the same thing as a test drive.

But let’s start with something good: This is that rare bird, an ambitious new music site not crushed under the weight of legal limitations and lawsuit avoidance.

Read the rest of this post