Jon Miller has graced the Web 2 stage several times, most memorably when he was CEO of AOL, and both Google and Microsoft were competing for his company’s search deal (Google won, that deal is close to expiration, and now-CEO Tim Armstrong, who helped Google win the deal back then, will be discussing, at the Summit, who he might next partner with – Microsoft or Google – but I digress…for now).
Now Miller runs digital for none other than Rupert Murdoch. I’ve enjoyed my relationship with Jon over the years, he’s a straight shooter. He’s inherited a number of seemingly intractable problems – the digital model for news, for one, MySpace, for another. But when I spent an hour with him in New York a couple of weeks ago, he was unperturbed. He’s seen too much.
Since Jon agreed to submit to yet another Battelle-style interrogation, his newest report Owen Van Atta has also joined the lineup (it’s so recent that we don’t have him up yet on the speaker page). No matter, I’ll ask both Owen and Jon what the plan is for MySpace.
But let’s not forget that Newscorp is a lot bigger than MySpace. If you want to know how much bigger, pay attention to the Audience Network, a little known entity that just happens to be #2 in ad network reach after Google. Who owns it? Well, Miller and Murdoch.
This one is going to get interesting. Trust me.
So help me out, what do you want to hear from Jon Miller?
Others we’ll be interviewing (and I’ve asked for your help):
To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Again, an amazing lineup.
If you want to come, I can still get you a Searchblog discount (for a few more days). Just ping me here.
With the wealth of experience Murdoch brings around media subscriptions (DIRECTV, STARTV, WSJ, etc.), it will be interesting to hear how that model changes in a point-point infrastructure enabled by the network. What impact does it have on the release window and on the role of the studio vs. the producer/talent?
The amount of money people plunk down on a monthly cable or sat tv subscription (anywhere between $60 – $150/month) has to shift and fragment, benefiting those who produce the best content. After all, how many people subscribe to watch only one to three shows per week? That’s a lot of dough for something which I, for one, would prefer to pay a premium for only the content that’s of interest to me.
Is it possible that media companies are leaving money on the table by not offering the PPV model for all of their content?