BigShinyThing

Variety reports on how Rupert Murdoch’s recent internet acquisitions place his News Corp. at the centre of the latest DotCom era. The company has spent some $1.5 billion on Web properties since lauching the Fox Interactive unit back in July. News Corp. signed its third major net deal this week, buying online videogame media company IGN Entertainment for $650 million in cash.

The deal comes after the purchases of Myspace.com parent Intermix Media for $580 million and college sports site Scout Media. As Variety points out, with the reach and videogame content of IGN; social networking of Myspace; and sports, news and entertainment content from Fox properties, News Corp. could easily put together a portal that would rival the likes of Yahoo! and AOL.

The only missing piece of the puzzle is a search engine and Murdoch already rumoured to be stalking online video search company Blinkx. Wall Street is watching with interest to see where News Corp. goes with its online strategy. According to Richard Greenfield of Fulcrum Global Partners:

While other major media companies are simply extending their traditional media properties online, News Corp. is aggressively ‘buying’ its way into a more comprehensive Internet strategy. The big question now centres on what exactly is News Corp.’s overarching ‘vision’ for its news acquired Internet properties and how well/quickly will it be able to integrate all its Internet pieces.

When the company’s annual results were announced last week, Murdoch stated his intention to spend as much as £1bn on internet acquisitions and that online is now a key part of the media empire’s future strategy. New Corp purchased myspace.com, one of the fastest growing online community sites, last month.

The purchase of Blinkx - which in true Dotcom style was founded by Suranga Chandratillake, a Cambridge computer science graduate - would provide search capacity for the Fox internet portal and could give News Corp the edge in what could be the Next Big Thing: search engines for finding films, TV episodes and news clips.

Murdoch warned a group of US newspaper editors back in April that the industry had been ‘remarkably complacent’ about the impact of internet use of newspaper circulation. He admitted that, ‘I didn’t do as much as I should have after the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same thing, quietly hoping this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along. Well it hasn’t, it won’t, and it’s a fast-developing reality that we should grab’.

It makes perfect sense for Blinkx to link up with Fox: it already uses video clips from the network. Murdoch, amongst other media commentators, has repeatedly stressed the potential of matching the volume of content produced by a media company such as his with the possibilities of distributing it via the net. Certainly, if the content owners don’t do it there are plenty of peer to peer services, such as Bittorrent, which will do it for them and not necessarily legally. Only yesterday, the BBC found that a Swedish site was distributing unseen episodes of Ricky Gervais’s Extras.

The deal also places News Corp at the vanguard of podcasting and video blogging - services that Blinkx can facilitate.