Feb 5 2006
News Corp’s Keith Rupert Murdoch prefers ”mobisodes” over iTMS for FOX TV
In a Newsweek article, the 74 years old chairman of News Corp., Keith Rupert Murdoch, was quoted as saying:
We’re not knocked out by iPod so far. We’ve talked to them, to Google and others. But how many people really want to get video on a tiny screen when they already have TiVo or a similar service from their cable company or DirecTV? How many will want to pay $1.99 on Monday morning if they missed “Desperate Housewives” the night before? What’s been announced so far with iPod and Disney and NBC is very small-time at the moment.
Okay, so what does Murdoch have planned for mobile media? The interview goes on:
There are so many things you can do, particularly in other parts of the world, where mobile-telephone service is a lot more developed. We’re downloading minute segments–original “mobisodes”–of the Fox hit “24.” Soon we’ll be downloading the funniest joke of the week in “Family Guy.” People will be sitting in bars and holding up their phones and laughing. It’ll be a pretty serious piece of revenue for us someday, probably. We’ll be into all these things, some quite original and some of what others are doing.
So, I guess, we won’t be seeing Simpsons episodes on the iTunes Music Store any time soon. But if Murdoch is right, we really don’t want them anyway…hmm…I thought I did.
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