I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com

Media wars
Posted by rod@drury.net.nz in Microsoft, TechBiz at 9:53 am on Wednesday, 28 February 2007

Computerworld has just reported … Microsoft joins ACP Media with msn.co.nz

So Telecom (Xtra) goes with Yahoo. Microsoft goes with a collection of magazines, TV3 and Seek.

I was thinking Microsoft might go with TVNZ (wrong). So TVNZ and Fairfax are sitting out there.

Like the proposed Telecom Directory sale I don’t understand the Telecom strategy of breaking New Zealand’s main Internet franchise. With all players scores reset to zero, the question now becomes who will be the winner of New Zealand Internet chukka 2.

Trackback uri |

Comments(9)

    Comment by Juha at 12:19 pm on 28 February 2007

    I think Fairfax could make a run for it, with TradeMe. Microsoft and Telecom’s new portals appear to be almost completely Aussie-dominated, and I don’t see that going down very well in NZ.

    I’m also scratching my head as to why Telecom, which spent years and millions on building the Xtra brand, is throwing it all away now in favour of outsourcing the lot to Yahoo. Don’t understand that, which probably explains why I’m not the CEO of Telecom :)




    Comment by Glen Barnes at 12:58 pm on 28 February 2007

    I think the winner will be the ad serving companies. Those who can get the most ads in front of the biggest audience over the most media types (banner, text, audio, video, podcast, email, RSS, etc.) Who cares which site it sits on as long as you can clip the ticket on the way through.




    Comment by Richard at 2:36 pm on 28 February 2007

    Juha: Answer - Telecom/XTRA have never understood content!




    Comment by Gary at 4:17 pm on 28 February 2007

    I may not think too much of Xtra but if there’s anyone that knows how to feed locals what they want it’s Yahoo! If Yahoo! AU can understand the NZ space and not just copy their AU portal I think they could become pretty dominant in the home user market.




    Comment by Russell Brown at 10:05 am on 1 March 2007

    Glen said: I think the winner will be the ad serving companies. Those who can get the most ads in front of the biggest audience over the most media types (banner, text, audio, video, podcast, email, RSS, etc.) Who cares which site it sits on as long as you can clip the ticket on the way through

    If the signals from the US are anything to go by, I think the YahooXtra deal is quite a lot about ad-serving. Yahoo has been signing up a swathe of US newspaper websites to its ad network. So it’s not just about content for Xtra, but revenue too.




    Comment by Russell Brown at 10:06 am on 1 March 2007

    Whoops. Munged my italtics there. The first par was Glen’s, the second was mine.




    Comment by Paul at 11:34 am on 1 March 2007

    I think you will see the xtra brand continue on in much the same way as we talk about Xtra now (not Xtra MSN).

    It is an interesting play considering that localisation is probably the only (or one of the only) differentiators NZ players have.

    I think the decision to move to yahoo is based on the core offering. MSN didn’t really provide a whole bunch of other stuff and appart from google Yahoo is the only SP out there really adding value.

    I would agree that this does somewhat look dimwitted when you throw in an IPTV play
    i just don’t get that




    Comment by Sam Farrow at 11:54 am on 1 March 2007

    Are you confusing ACP with APN? I don’t see Herald (APN) content on msnnz. I do, however, see a lot of of teething issues.

    Poor Microsoft




    Comment by Rod at 12:06 pm on 1 March 2007

    Hi Sam, yes, you’re right. Changed. Thanks