News Corp's Buyout of BSkyB Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

News Corp's Buyout of BSkyB - Essay Example It will be pertinent to take a note of Rupert Murdoch's British operations, which started a way back in 1969 when the Mirror group wanted to relinquish from its mid-market daily newspaper The Sun. It is precisely at this time when Murdoch acquired it and made it thumping success with the passage of time by selling three million copies per day. Murdoch's control on the print media of UK became more prominent when he acquired The Times and The Sunday Times from Canadian publisher. During the time Murdoch's UK based satellite network Sky television was making huge losses which compelled him to agree for a merger with British Satellite Broadcasting in 1990. The merged company came to be known as BSkyB which is now considered to be the most dominating company in the British pay-TV market. When seen in the above perspective, the news of proposed buyout of BSkyB by Murdoch’s News Corp has far-reaching implications as it may facilitate a near monopolistic control to Murdoch on print a nd electronic media of UK. The point to be noted here is that BBC and other competing media groups have raised their opposition to the deal. It is not surprising that Business Secretary Vince Cable had to bow down on public uproar and ask Ofcom to investigate the matter on the media plurality issues that may arise after this proposed takeover by News Corp. European Union’s antitrust competition regulator also plunged into action to investigate the matter on the grounds of competition. It will be worthwhile to go through some of the important developments that have taken place in the last few months regarding this complete control and take over issue of News Corp. (Prodhan, Georgina et al 2010) The European Commission The European Commission gave its report in the third week of December, 2010 approving the proposed acquisition of BSkyB by News Corporation. The commission in its report concluded that the said transaction of complete control of BSkyB by News Corp is not going to hinder the competition in the European Economic Area (EEA). Its findings were only restricted to the competition aspects and has nothing to do with the proposed investigation carried out by UK regulatory body on media plurality aspect to protect legitimate interest of British nationals. It is pertinent to note here that media plurality assessment and competition assessment are two different areas of investigation. The Competition assessment mainly focuses on whether consumer would be facing any hike in the pricing structures or any forced featureless offerings. On the other hand, the issues related to the media plurality are concerned with the role played by media in relation to the democratic fabric of the various institutions and further their capacity to influence them in their own interests, which may be in the long run detrimental to the health of country. The European Union’s antitrust commission’s main findings are listed as per the following. 1. BSkyB and News Corp are in competition with each other to a limited extent as they are active in different markets in the UK and the Ireland. 2. The commission is of the view that the proposed transaction is not likely to improve substantially BSkyB's existing share of the market in the supply of basic pay-TV channels. 3. Both the parties have a small combined market share in TV advertising hence not going to affect the balancing act in competition concerns. 4. The Commission also investigated the possibility of offering mixed bundles of subscriptions for its print and online versions along with satellite pay channels. The commission is of the view that it will not be possible for the vast majority of newspapers' on line editions are currently free of charge and this equation is not likely

Netflix Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Netflix - Research Paper Example It also offers flat rate DVD rental-by-mail in the U.S. Recently, the company has announced its plans for rebranding and restructuring of its DVD home media rental service into an independent subsidiary company called Qwikster, there by completely separating DVD rentals and streaming media (Murph, 2011). Hastings background and education Reed Hastings, the founder and the CEO of Netflix has been the company’s chairperson from the time it was established. Hasting was born October 8, 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a prominent entrepreneur and education philanthropist. He is married with two children and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area (Hamilton, 2011). He graduated from high school in 1978 from the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and for one year, he was a sales person for Rainbow Vacuum Cleaners (BB&N, 2011). Hastings studied mathematics at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine where he was awarded the Smyth Prize in 1981and Hammond Prize in 1983, before graduating with BA in 1983 (Hamilton, 2011). After a short stint with US Marine Corps in 1981, he joined the Peace Corps and taught high school maths in Swaziland from 1983 to 1985, and from his tour of duty, he joined Stanford graduate school, earning a masters degree in computer science in 1988 (Zipkin, 2006). Career, personality and skills After graduation, his first job was at Adaptive Technology, where through his creativity, invented a tool for debugging software. He left Adaptive Technology in 1991 to form his first company, Pure Software that specialized on products for troubleshooting software, and grew rapidly to the extent that he found it challenging to run the company (Zipkin, 2006). The experience from teaching in Swaziland, working at Adaptive Technology, and managing Pure Software made Hastings more determined, focused, and this transformed him from an engineering background to a CEO material. Following its success, Pure Software merged with Atria So ftware in 1996 forming Pure Atria that was acquired by Rationale Software in 1997 prompting Hastings to leave company shortly after the acquisition (Clark, 1997). To sum his personality and skills, Hastings is considered as being intelligent, creative, determined, understanding, analytical and a very charismatic leader, which is a scarce combination (Hitt, Ireland & Hoskisson, p.276). Idea for that led to establishment of Netflix and it improvement For two years after acquisition of his company, he became more engrossed in philanthropic education reform efforts and other sociopolitical reforms. It was during this time that the idea of forming Netflix Inc cropped. One day in 1997, he got late to return a Blockbuster video tape and was fined $40 for the Apollo 13, something that embarrassed him, triggering him to think about the huge market that was available if only a company did not impose huge fine on customers on lateness fees (Abkowitz, 2009). It was then when he began investigat ing on how to establish a movie rental business by mail. In his study, he realized that customers did not like long queues that were found in rental stores, poor selections, process of returning the movie, and the lateness