Murdoch: Paid-content bell cow for 2010

Do you hear that clanging here in the wee hours of the new year? That sound is coming from the bell cow for paid content, Rupert Murdoch.

I wasn’t surprised to wake up this morning to news that Murdoch’s News Corp. and Time Warner Cable have extended their negotiations over retransmission fees for Fox Network programming that could have resulted in the yanking of Fox from several Time Warner systems as of last midnight. Fox wants somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 per subscriber for carriage. The cable company wants to pay much less.

Murdoch has been quite vocal in the past few months about a need to change the revenue paradigm for media. The high-profile bickering over the retransmission issue is just one of three areas in which Murdoch seems to be leading the charge to charge (or charge more) for content.

In addition to demanding more for retransmission of his television content, Murdoch has telegraphed forthcoming pay walls going up on the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and other publications in his stable. And he’s threatened to block Google and other aggregators from access to New Corp. content, while exploring a possible exclusive arrangement with Microsoft’s Bing search tool.

If it was anyone other than Murdoch carrying the flag for this campaign, it might be easy to dismiss the efforts. But he seems willing to dig in and he’s also efforting to enlist others. In early December his Wall Street Journal ran an op/ed piece adapted from comments Murdoch made to the Federal Trade Commission. Here’s a link to the column. I’d recommend you read it now, while you can still do so free of charge.