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Murdoch's next frontier: DTV Murdoch maneuvers for digital-TV presence on a grand scale By Junko Yoshida, EE Times Heathrow, England -- Among modern-day empire builders, few are more tenacious than Rupert Murdoch, who has lately turned his relentless conquering energy toward the emerging digital-TV market in all its forms--satellite, cable and terrestrial. "Mr. Murdoch is by no means a technologist but he has a very good understanding of technology changes and what it means to content creation," said Greg Clark, president of the News Technology Group, the division of Murdoch's News Corp. that shapes technology strategies. Hired to explore, acquire and manage a number of independent technology companies to support News Corp.'s core business, Clark joined Murdoch's empire in 1994, leaving IBM Corp., where he originally worked as a solid-state-physics researcher. "He [Murdoch] sees technology change in a very opportunistic sense, while others may see it more as a threat," Clark said. "I've never seen such a positive attitude in CEOs in any other companies." Digital-TV (DTV) technology today still remains largely the province of engineers and media labs. Murdoch brings to the mix a distinct--some say notorious--instinct for mass communication. The issue is whether News Corp.'s technology division can translate Murdoch's intuition into the heart of DTV and reach the masses who have yet to hear, or care, about the technology. For starters, News Corp. has quietly collected an unprecedented range of technology companies--focused on digital video, online, Internet and special-effect technologies--during the last few years. In the field of digital-video technology alone, News Corp. recently consolidated three companies under the name NDS: a company formerly known as News Digital Systems, Digi-Media Vision and News Datacom. Digi-Media, before being acquired by News Corp., was the advanced-product division of the U.K.'s National Transcommunication Ltd. Under the NDS umbrella, News Corp. now has cutting-edge MPEG-2 video compression and multiplexing technologies from Digi-Media, News Datacom's conditional-access expertise and News Digital System's subscriber-management system. At will, News Corp. can summon and wield compression, encryption and smart-card technologies, now consolidated under NDS. Working in concert, NDS theoretically could help Murdoch's media empire distribute its own digital content as securely and broadly as possible, while establishing a mechanism to collect money from its own new services as efficiently as possible. With all these key digital pieces in hand, what does News Corp. exactly intend to do in the technology business that other high-tech companies haven't done, or couldn't do? Clark, who also serves as board chairman of NDS, is careful in describing News Corp.'s reasons for owning all these key technologies. Some critics might interpret the company's move as an attempt to build a gateway for a variety of digital-video services, so that things will be under Murdoch's control, but in Clark's view, that's not true. "This is not about control. Instead, the move is a defensive one for us," he said. "We don't want someone else to come in and establish technologies that would make an impediment to our own core business," Clark said. (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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