Tuesday, May 16, 2006

MySpace missing a trick with move into TV downloads

So MySpace is going to be selling episodes of 24. And this has what, exactly, to do with the raison d’être of MySpace? That’s the question some observers are asking. Does News Corp know the answer? From the excellent technology and innovation resource Techdirt:

The whole point of MySpace is communication—after all, it’s a social-networking site—not sitting there to passively watch some TV show. At the very least, you’d expect there to be some facility to let MySpace users engage the content somehow, like the ability to stream the show from their page, or add clips in to their blog—just something, anything, to make the show add some value to users’ experience on the site. Blindly adding music or TV downloads in an attempt to get some Web cred really doesn’t make sense for these sites, particularly when they don’t do anything to make the offering relevant to what they do. Without adding any benefit to make buying downloads from them better for their users than buying downloads from established sources like iTunes, their efforts are little more than futile.

But it sure does make for good press, doesn’t it? Grim. Find out how to improve upon MySpace’s methods on June 21st.