Rupert Murdoch Eyes Blinkx
Last week the big news was that Rupert Murdoch's
News Corp was in talks to acquire an established but unnamed entity. This
week, the big news is not so much that News Corp is looking to acquire
a search player; it's whom they are trying to acquire. According to an
article published in Tuesday's New York Times , Murdoch and Co. are in
discussions with Blinkx , a search tool that spiders the web looking for
video or audio content to organize into user-specific folders.
While talks between Blinkx and News Corp may not be as advanced as Murdoch implied last week, most observers believe it might be a more natural fit for the media content rich News Corp than the traditional text-based search tools such as LookSmart or Mamma.com that were mentioned last week in relation to News Corp. As the Internet becomes more robust and consumer broadband usage increases, video and audio search is expected to become more popular among users. Both Google and Yahoo are competitors in the field of video and audio search however neither has the direct multi-media resources News Corp brings from its global network of media companies. News Corp has been bulking its Internet holdings up over the past few months while consolidating them under the awning of Fox Interactive, the new Internet division introduced earlier this summer. Through Fox Interactive, News Corp has acquired sports tracking site Scout.com for an undisclosed sum, and the popular social networking tool MySpace.Com in its $580million purchase of Intermix Media. Even if talks with Blinkx fail, Murdoch is almost certainly going to make a move into the search sphere before the year is over. An announcement of another paid-ad distribution network is obviously anticipated shortly thereafter. |