Bing and News Corp

It’s interesting that this interview done about a month ago was so right in predicting the current intrigue going on between Microsoft and News Corporation. Basically, Jason Calacanis laid out his theory that one way to finally break Google’s hold on the search market was to partner with various news organizations, pay them for their content, and get them to exclusively let that content be accessed by a search engine like Bing.

The New York Times published a piece today on the negotiations that News Corp is currently in with Microsoft to do exactly that. Basically, Microsoft would pay them for the opportunity to exclusively index it’s content and News Corp would then completely remove all of it’s content from Google. This is an interesting idea that would obviously largely affect consumer’s access to all of the online video content of News’ Corp’s publications. Additionally, it could largely affect the business model of future media endeavors on the Internet from the current model to something similar to the “cable” model that we’ve been studying in class.

Is this a good business decision? Wired thinks not.