Financial Times

Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox has offered $80bn for Time Warner – setting up the possibility of the world’s biggest merger in media since AOL bought Time Warner at the height of dotcom mania in 2000.

What would Murdoch get for his money?

Television clout, Sports prowess, A bigger bite of Hollywood, and International reach

YouTube has postponed a controversial plan to block certain record labels from its video platform, following an outcry from the creative community and growing scrutiny from European regulators.

Two weeks ago, the Google-owned company warned that “in a matter of days” it would start taking down videos from a number of record labels that had refused to sign its new licensing terms.

But the uproar that followed the revelations has prompted YouTube to make a last-minute U-turn. The world’s largest video streaming company is allowing more time to negotiate a solution with labels, although it still intends to block them if they cannot reach agreement, according to people familiar with the matter.

YouTube has already sent letters to a number of record labels giving notice that their existing contracts will be terminated.

The media industry failed in 2013 to persuade more customers to pay for its online news services, in spite of experimenting with new ways of charging for content, new research has found.

According to a survey of 19,000 people in 10 countries, conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, only one internet user in 10 was willing to pay for digital news -- exactly the same proportion as in 2012. However, the study did contain some encouraging news for media groups as, even though paying customer numbers remained flat, the proportion willing to commit to subscriptions -- as opposed to one-off payments, day passes or app downloads -- increased.

Of all those paying for online news, 59 percent now have a subscription, compared with 43 percent in 2012. As subscribers generally pay more than occasional customers, they are likely to have boosted the online revenues for many publishers. This phenomenon is consistent with the findings of another report by US research group Pew that concluded “more revenue is being squeezed out of a smaller, or at least flat, number of paying consumers.”

Digital video is making a leap from the tablet to the television. A growing number of US homes are utilizing streaming devices, such as the Apple TV box, Google’s Chromecast and Roku, or Internet connected televisions to watch online video, according to media consultancy and research group Frank N Magid Associates.

People with connected TVs are watching nearly 12 hours of video programming each week via the Internet, according to research from video advertising company Tremor Video, and Nielsen, the media measurement company. Of that, people spend about seven hours per week watching film or TV show-length programming and about five hours watching short videos, such as five-minute clips. That compares to about 33 hours per week people spend watching traditional television.

The uptick in digital video viewing on television sets comes as more people in the US cancel their pay-television subscriptions in favor of cheaper online streaming alternatives.

[Commentary] In the past few decades, Wall Street has made finance a central feature of both the global economy and of our everyday lives -- a process often described as “financialisation”. Silicon Valley, almost contemporaneously, has done the same for digital media technologies. That process, too, has a fancy name: “mediatisation”.

With reports that Facebook is seeking to buy a drone-manufacturing company, ostensibly to connect the most remote corners of the globe, the days of blessed disconnection seem firmly behind us.

Understandably, many social critics find this troublesome, blaming technology for invading our lives. But it is a false target: mediatisation is actually financialisation in disguise. Having disrupted Madison Avenue, the likes of Google and Facebook -- armed with better data, better engineers and better databases -- will disrupt Wall Street next.

Silicon Valley companies sit on a trove of data about our most banal daily pursuits. And the kind of data that they gather will only grow more diverse, as the Faustian bargain that we first accepted in our browsers -- letting strangers monitor what we do online in exchange for nominally free services -- will be accepted in many other domains, especially as the rise of the “Internet of things” makes daily interaction with sensors, screens and other data-capturing devices unavoidable.

[Morozov is the author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’ and is senior editor at The New Republic]