Rarely outside of Bond films will you get to see evil geniuses aiming for world domination, but this week ABC supremo, Mark Scott has been accused of just that in his new strategy for the national broadcaster. At the Media 140 conference (perhaps while Austen Powers was dangling over a vat of genetically mutated tiger sharks) he revealed his evil plans. And what was the dark genius at the bottom of his schemes? Widgets and soft diplomacy.
I was expecting at least a laser pointed at the UN, so freeing up the ABC's content with open feeds was a let down. A lot of ABC content is already available through RSS feeds (and videos like the one used above) so the real news is, as Margaret Simons pointed out, that content will be free to anyone including commercial users like, say, News Limited. Although as it's your ABC it could be argued that you've already paid for it.
Still this is at odds with the Murdoch's talk of locking his content up behind a paywall and stopping the parasites who leach the precious news from various web properties (that's anyone who links to news stories BTW). There were some delays with milking the content cash cow. And even speculation that Murdoch would launch a search engine - another deed for evil geniuses right?
But Simons tells us from the Media 140 conference a News Limited journo 'let slip' that there would be a 'cool new toy' with which has been jokingly referred to as the iRupert and The Sunday Kingdle. News Limited journo Mark Day says there's a clue in the Times Plus which has recently stashed culture and travel content behind a membership fee of fifty quid per year. Murdoch's The Australian has recently begun its A Plus section, so it's not too difficult to join the dots. Prepare to pay for your Sunday supplements if you want 'em online.
So the future of media comes down to these two media titans slugging it out - with their widgets and toys. And here I was hoping for at least one battle of super monsters.
(Interesting in this video that one monster has "sheer brute force... while Kong is a thinking animal" - which is Murdoch or Scott?)
I was expecting at least a laser pointed at the UN, so freeing up the ABC's content with open feeds was a let down. A lot of ABC content is already available through RSS feeds (and videos like the one used above) so the real news is, as Margaret Simons pointed out, that content will be free to anyone including commercial users like, say, News Limited. Although as it's your ABC it could be argued that you've already paid for it.
Still this is at odds with the Murdoch's talk of locking his content up behind a paywall and stopping the parasites who leach the precious news from various web properties (that's anyone who links to news stories BTW). There were some delays with milking the content cash cow. And even speculation that Murdoch would launch a search engine - another deed for evil geniuses right?
But Simons tells us from the Media 140 conference a News Limited journo 'let slip' that there would be a 'cool new toy' with which has been jokingly referred to as the iRupert and The Sunday Kingdle. News Limited journo Mark Day says there's a clue in the Times Plus which has recently stashed culture and travel content behind a membership fee of fifty quid per year. Murdoch's The Australian has recently begun its A Plus section, so it's not too difficult to join the dots. Prepare to pay for your Sunday supplements if you want 'em online.
So the future of media comes down to these two media titans slugging it out - with their widgets and toys. And here I was hoping for at least one battle of super monsters.
(Interesting in this video that one monster has "sheer brute force... while Kong is a thinking animal" - which is Murdoch or Scott?)
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