Social entertainment website MySpace.com is dropping almost half of its staff in an ongoing transformation of its services.
Once the King of social networking, MySpace lost out to the phenomenal growth of Facebook over the past few years. News Corporation gave MySpace a limited time frame to turn around its loss-making services. The result was a relaunch as a “social entertainment” site aimed at “Generation Y”, which would be users aged 35 and younger.
The “restructuring” affects about 500 employees, representing 47 percent of the company. “These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product,” Chief Executive Mike Jones said.
News Corp has repeatedly indicated that it is open to selling the relaunched MySpace service to any interested parties, but reports just last week suggested that there are no ongoing talks.
Result for: interested parties
According to a WSJ report, Comcast and Time Warner are considering giving paying cable subscribers access to cable programming online, at no added cost.
Negotiations with content holders have been ongoing for months, and the report specifically notes Viacom and NBC Universal as being interested parties. Those companies own many of the most popular cable networks including TNT, USA and the MTV family.
The new Web services, which could launch as soon as the Q3 2009, should help attract new subscribers, says the cable companies although it will have to compete with free ad-supported sites such as Hulu and TV.com.
Sources familiar to the situation added that the “proposed Web services would likely be in a streaming format with ads, accessible in and out of the home, and without any additional charge to cable-TV subscribers.”
Brian Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast added, “online video is our friend, not our enemy.”
Result for: interested parties
Last week we reported that the AP had begun confronting a blogger over copyright issues, but it appears that both sides have come to a resolution in the dispute.
The AP had demanded that the site, the Drudge Retort, remove some of the new agency’s content. In a statement, Rogers Cadenhead, owner of the site, said he is “glad” that the dispute is over but said he still believes the larger conflict over the use of AP content still remains.
An AP statement added that both sides considered the matter closed and that the agency was “having a constructive exchange with a number of interested parties in the blogging community” about the current relationship between bloggers and news providers.
The agency also added it was working on developing guidelines for it considered permissible use of content by bloggers.
“I think it would be helpful for bloggers and users of social news sites to know what the AP believes to be fair use of their copyrighted work,” said Cadenhead’s lawyer, Wade Duchene. “I hope that any guidelines that are issued are not interpreted as an agreed definition of fair use under copyright law”, he added.
