Around the Net

News Corp., NBC Venture Moves Slowly

  • Fortune, Tuesday, March 27, 2007 10:45 AM
"It's difficult enough for an incumbent to take on a scrappy pioneer," Fortune writer Adam Lashinsky says of the new News Corp.-NBC Universal online video venture, which highlighted AOL, MSN, Yahoo and News Corp.'s own MySpace as partners in its press release. "But six? I don't think so." If you ask top execs from NBC, MySpace, et al they'll tell you that the unnamed company, a video site for licensed media content that supplies a video player to its Web partners, isn't trying to compete with YouTube. Sure it isn't.

Boldface lies notwithstanding, Lashinsky wonders why the companies even bothered to make the announcement, considering that the service won't be available until this summer. The press release said something about the initiative having reached "a critical mass" in terms of media partners. It eventually hopes to add Google and Viacom--but so what? Why announce an outline of a company that doesn't even have a CEO? The WSJ made it sound like the various groups coming to an agreement after 15 months was a feat worthy of a press release. That, Lashinsky points out, is "old media speed," plain and simple--which just isn't good enough now.

Read the whole story at Fortune »

Next story loading loading..