Just An Online Minute... Media Biggies Vary Digital Distribution

by Wendy Davis, Sep 19, 2006, 2:15 PM

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Executives from the country's largest media companies agree that digital distribution is crucial to their growth, but differ on specific strategies to drive that distribution. That was among the key takeaways from a Goldman Sachs conference Tuesday morning.

News Corp. CEO and chairman Rupert Murdoch indicated that his company doesn't intend to distribute content on other companies' Web properties. "We're not sure that the portal model is the wave of the future at all," he said. "We think that people are going directly to the sites."

To date, News Corp. hasn't widely distributed content--but hasn't completely hoarded it either. Fox, for instance, doled out a number of its shows, including "Arrested Development," Prison Break" and "Vanished," to MSN.

At Time Warner, by contrast, the strategy is to place articles, videos and other content on as many sites as possible. "We're going to move this stuff out to every single distribution platform there is," president and COO Jeffrey Bewkes said.

CBS Corp. president and CEO Leslie Moonves also said his company dealt with portals in addition to its own properties. Moonves said CBS distributed news on Yahoo, Google and AOL. "These partnerships make sense across the board for now," he said.

At the same time, CBS also intends to continue building out its own sites, like Innertube and Sportsline.com. Moonves also threw out a tidbit about the NCAA games, which CBS streamed for free this year after offering them on a subscription-only basis in 2005. This year, the streams drew $4.5 million--compared to just $250,000 in 2005. Next year, the network expects around $9 million. And, he said, the online eyeballs didn't detract from TV. "We didn't lose a viewer," he said. "We didn't lose a dime."

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