Buoyed by a box office hit in Avatar and better-than-expected profits, News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch predicted a rosy future on Tuesday for content companies such as his media and entertainment giant.
“The debate over the primacy of content is over,” Murdoch told analysts after News Corp reported a US$254 million second-quarter net profit compared with a US$6.4 billion loss in the same quarter a year ago.
“The value of content is now clear,” said Murdoch, whose holdings include the Fox television networks, Avatar maker 20th Century Fox, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and newspapers in Australia and Britain.
“Content is not just king. It is the emperor of all things electronic,” the News Corp chairman and chief executive said.
Declaring News Corp “the world’s preeminent content company,” Murdoch said “devices and platforms are proliferating.”
“But this clever technology is merely an empty vessel without any great content,” he said. “Without content, the ever larger and flatter screens, the tablets, the e-readers and the increasingly sophisticated mobile phones would be lifeless.”
Murdoch repeated plans to begin charging online readers of his newspapers. The Wall Street Journal is currently the only major newspaper in the News Corp stable to charge readers a subscription fee.
“We expect to expand to other titles in the coming months,” Murdoch said. “We’ll be charging for online wherever we have publications.”
News Corp, he added, is also holding “a very substantive conversation with device makers on developing a subscription model that will provide high-quality journalism to consumers whenever and wherever they want it.”
An outspoken critic of Amazon’s Kindle, Murdoch said News Corp — owner of book publisher Harper-Collins — had entered into an agreement with Apple, which unveiled its iPad tablet computer last week.
Murdoch said the deal with Apple would allow for higher prices for e-books than the US$9.99 Amazon charges for bestsellers and hardcover releases.
Murdoch’s exuberance was boosted by second-quarter earnings per share of US$0.25, better than the US$0.20 expected by Wall Streets analysts.
Revenue during the three months to Dec. 31 also blew past the forecasts of US$8.23 billiion, rising 10 percent to US$8.7 billion.
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