Fox, CBS Acquisitions Fuel Online Strategies

News Corp. and CBS Corp. added to their online arsenals Wednesday with separate Web site acquisitions.

News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media will purchase Photobucket Inc., which links photos, graphics and videos to Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Fox Interactive Media also owns MySpace. CBS is buying online music site Last.fm for $280 million.

The deals, along with several in the past months, demonstrate a strong recognition by traditional broadcast video distributors that these popular online destinations are a growing source of content to expand their viewing audiences.

While many of these sites are referred to as social networking locations, such as MySpace, Revver and others, their top values to older media giants are their huge audiences and the user-generated video created by their legions of visitors.

Service providers worldwide are already embracing user-generated video from online social networking sites as part of their wireline and wireless video services with Verizon Communications Inc. having cut a deal a few months back with Revver, which shares revenues from content sales with those that create the video.

Comcast Corp. and United Kingdom-based operator Vodafone cut deals with sites where part of their content is aired over wireline and wireless network services, respectively.

In a letter on its Web site Photobucket CEO and Co-Founder Alex Welch stressed he expects “nothing to change in our day-to-day operations. After the transaction is closed and finalized, the plan is to operate Photobucket as an independent, standalone company within FIM.”

He added that the company plans to continue developing innovative tools that enhance self-expression and give you the best media sharing, linking and searching experience on the Web. “Partnering with FIM will give us added resources and support to deliver on this vision, as well as the ability to offer new features for you – our most important audience.”

In addition to linking photos and videos, Photobucket users can share their digital media by e-mail, instant messaging and mobile devices.

Last.fm describes itself as a service that keeps track of what music you listen to and then produces features personalized for you. It can be used to listen to music, find out about artists you may like and other people with similar music taste.

CBS Corp. www.cbs.com
Last.fm www.last.fm
MySpace www.myspace.com
News Corp. www.newscorp.com
Photobucket Inc. www.photobucket.com

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