Have fear, telcos - the Murdoq approaches

Rupert Murdoch, history's greatest media baron / Sun King / Lord of the Sky and the Moon and the Darkness, is thinking of buying his own wireless communications spectrum, according to this interview with The Australian.

The logic is that in an all digital future, publishers like The Murrrdoq will need to distribute their product over the airwaves direct to people's e-readers, iPhones, laptops etc. And because the telecommunications industry has been so monolithic and extortionate in its approach to outside partners (charging an arm and a leg AND demanding a big cut of any revenue), Rupert is thinking of going it alone.

There's still some fairly big questions to answer here - biggest of all is whether Murdoch seriously thinks that rolling out his own mobile broaband network purely for content delivery would be economical (I seriously doubt it). More likely, you could roll out a sort of one-way broadcast network (like radio/TV) that just constantly beams out your new content and updates people's e-readers. Even that would cost a lot, but it might be a smart long-term investment, in that it would put up a major barrier to entry for possible competitors. Gatekeepers love building gates.

For more steamy Sun King action, check out the video  below - in an interview with Sky News, he says that News Corporation may have its content removed from search results, because the kind of people that show up to a site from search engines are of little value to advertisers.