What exactly would a Star Trek version of a newspaper look like. News Corp CEO, Rupert Murdoch obviously thinks it would look like an Amazon Kindle, and says that his company is in the process of developing one.
Eventually we all might imagine that the scrollable screens that have been in development at Philips forever, and which said five years ago would be ready to come to market in say’ five years, might be even better, which might put a Kindle class device in your pocket weighing a few ounces and taking up less space than a handset.
But until then Murdoch’s vision extends as far as a Kindle, a relatively large flat screen device, probably using a 600 by 800 pixel display around six inches diagonally across, same as the Kindle 2, in order to change analog newspapers into a purely digital distribution (see article on publishers and the Faultline elsewhere in this issue).
Murdoch is seldom one to miss a major communications trend. He said last week that his firm is investing in a mobile device for reading newspapers, which like Kindle and many other examples, would create new revenue streams and channels to market for established businesses, with content being invisibly delivered via a wireless carrier every day.
Murdoch offered few details, but said the device would have a larger, color screen than other handhelds. In return for an experience optimized for reading newspapers on the move, users would be expected to pay a subscription. “People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that’s going to have to change,” Murdoch told a cable conference in Washington DC.
We’re not so sure. We have had Comes with Music, from Nokia where the price of the device includes free music for a year, and we have ourselves suggested video models which would effectively be Comes with Video, so why not Comes with a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, as a device business model.
Murdoch also used his speech to throw some mud at Google, pointing out that a dedicated single-application device like a newspaper reader, priced low enough, could keep individual brands in power and stop Google from offering newspaper content without paying fees for it.
‘Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights? If you have a brand like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, you don’t have to,’ he went on, ‘You can say thanks but no thanks.’ The WSJ, which Murdoch’s company owns, has succeeded with a subscription model ‘ and is also the second most requested newspaper on Amazon Kindle. Murdoch pulled back from a plan to make the WSJ’s content free when he took over the paper in 2007.
So how does Murdoch sell a newspaper reader? Well for a start he can do a deal with other newspapers, all of which are in the same boat. Though he may choose to go it alone. They have a variety of distribution mechanisms right down to newsagent retail outfits. Newsagents may choose to have nothing to do with a device which might put them all out of a job, but if they can be assured a continued revenue stream from distributing them, suddenly all US newspapers might move overnight to these new readers. One way might be to sell devices with one year’s news, and then sell upgrades once that first year had run out, like selling pre-pay cellular tokens, which when keyed trigger another year’s subscription.
Obviously there are the pages of the newspapers themselves to advertise such a device, and where people choose to read online, those web sites. It really depends upon the depth of Murdoch’s vision and thinking.
Will it come with the ability to search archives or follow links back and order previous stories? Will it allow other newspapers to share in the same distribution channel? Will it extend to books and take on the power of Amazon.
Naturally there are devices and devices ‘ such an application could be used to download a newspaper over the cellular network to a specialist device or to any device which also has the right software ‘ so a netbook, an iPhone or another form of handset could also be used.
News Corp will almost certainly leverage its relationship with NDS, which has designed almost all of the equipment that it uses, including its set tops for pay TV services, as well as its encryption for conditional access. It would be but a moment’s work for NDS to create both the device design and the software to run on it and push it out to one of its favorite Consumer Electronics manufacturers, such as Samsung or Humax, to build the thing, and stack it with Flash memory.
For the cellular distribution it should be noted that News Corp once had a MySpace MVNO, which was a subset of the Helio US network on Sprint.
However since 2006 when that deal closed down, MySpace has been best of friends with AT&T Mobility, so News Corp should be able to speak to either network about incorporating cellular capability.
Yesterday saw Google CEO Eric Schmidt responding to Murdoch’s attach in a speech at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual meeting in San Diego. He said internet players should not be blamed for the decline of newspaper readership, but a failure of publishers to keep up with the pace of change and listen to their readers. “I would encourage everybody: think in terms of what your reader wants,” he said. “These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.”
He pointed out that Google has a multimillion dollar deal to distributed Associated Press content and host it on Google servers, and said he believed most newspaper circulation should be online and/or mobile, not printed. ‘There should be five times, 10 times more circulation because there’s no distribution cost,” he said.
Our own personal favorite is a device which spends time as an electronic photo frame, which doubles as a Newspaper and Book reader at bed time, and which supports ATSC or DVB-T TV when you’re on the road and want to watch some TV. The chips are available, and in volume to create it, but then if it also had a cellular connection for content download, why not add voice, call it a phone and be done with it.