Archive for the 'business planning' Category

The Simpsons on MySpace or The Simpsons on YouTube

simpsonsCurrently, News Corp. owned Fox shows, such as 24 and Prison Break, are available on the News Corp. owned social networking portal, MySpace. There is speculation that the media giant is planning collaboration with multiple media companies to establish an online video platform to compete with YouTube.

MySpace is the no.1 social networking site in the U.K. and Australia and successfully tapped many other international markets. News Corp. may soon allow members to embed Fox TV shows and Fox videos, on their home pages in order to monetize by rapid increase in online video distribution.

New’s Corp has a wider range and richer content as compared to other large traffic internet sites like Google and Yahoo. MySpace is growing faster than comparable sites like Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Time Warner, Microsoft and Ebay. Its unique monthly audience of 61.5 million was up 73% from January, 2006, according to comScore.

Although Fox TV served YouTube with a subpoena earlier in January demanding the Google-owned viral video site disclose the identity of a user who uploaded copies of entire recent episodes of primetime series 24 and The Simpsons, I doubt if much will change because a huge chunk of YouTube’s popularity is based on copyrighted videos viewers get to watch for free.

The choice is yours for now, would you watch News Corp. owned Fox TV shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Idol, etc. on News Corp. owned MySpace, or would you watch the same on YouTube?

Google Doesn’t Know How To Spend All Its Cash?

google Google Inc. is accumulating mounds of cash from operations, so how is it going to manage cashflows now?

At the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, Eric Schmidt ruled out big mergers and acquisitions. Currently Google invests heavily in huge data centers and networks to expand the range and depth of its Web services. In 2006, Google purchased the most popular Video Sharing site YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion. What’s left to invest in? If other big companies are going to Google, should Google bother to go to other companies? If yes, where?

Initially risks were taken and they paid off, now its time to retain the numbers that investors are clinging on to.