Otaku Gadgets

Rupert Murdoch is the chairman of News Corporation, a company that holds a major stake in the media business of the US. He is famously known for clamping down on this websites to prevent Google from crawling them. He repeated that same sentiment in an interview with Fox Business channel. He is also one of the people responsible for making the eBooks prices rise on Amazon. Hence, the fact that he praises the iPad a lot in the video means a lot more than just a media mogul praising a new platform.

Rupert Murdoch hates Google and he makes no bones about saying it out loud. Even in this interview he is vocal about how Google is stealing his content, making it publicly available and thus hurting the revenues of the publishers. According to his earlier statements, instead of relying on the ad-supported format, content driven websites owned should go behind a pay wall and charge people subscription like it is done with physical printed content. He talks about it right in the beginning, saying that Google takes all their “expensive”, “good” content and gives it away. Yes, of course he is not happy about it!

And this makes him comment on the iPad. According to him, the iPad is a really great platform and everything in the world will come to the iPad. Starting from the books to newspapers, movies and music — everything will eventually come to the iPad. I will be great for advertisers and content publishers. He compares it [and others ] with the Kindle and it is clear which device has his preference. And since this is Rupert Murdoch we are talking about, Amazon should be really worried right about now. He specifically said “not like Kindle but things which are in color”.

He talks about the interactive experience that people can have on these new devices while reading content, like reading a newspaper where when you touch a picture, it becomes a video [related to what you have been reading about]. He says that the iPad is small to start with but it there be other iPads. He probably means that there will be larger iPads. But do note here that he is just bigwig in the media industry and has no known links with what is being developed at Cupertino. Apple is likely to have shown off the iPad to him before making it official but it is unlikely that he knows where Apple is going with it.

He talks positively about the general wave of tablets that is coming and predicts how the experience will get better as they become better. From the way he talks about them, it is clear that he sees these devices as the future of the publishing world. And with an media empire as large as his, he can actually leverage the outcome of this new wave.

Over all, it seems like Apple has the publishers all behind the iPad and no matter what happens outside the US, the iPad is sure to see a lot of powerful people and companies behind it once it starts shipping and providing content.

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