Losses, changes, branching out

A round up of some of this month's media news – from the devaluation of Skype to a new college for Independnent Newspapers

World Cup losses

Despite Ireland's dismal performance at the rugby world cup, rugby fever was bigger than ever this year with hopes of qualification to the semi-final or final and it will be interesting to see what viewing figures TV3 and Setanta Sports produce.

It was a major coup for TV3 to get the viewing rights and RTÉ lost out. Last year sports programmes accounted for 13 of Network 2's top 20 most viewed programme amongst adults. Five of these were rugby matches.

Top of the list came the soccer world cup final which brought in 560,000 viewers. On average, each  of Ireland's Six Nation's rugby brought in 414,000 viewers. Considering RTÉ's top rated show last year was a Killinascully Christmas special – which brought in 699,000 viewers rugby has been a big draw for RTÉ. The Ireland France game brought in 555,000 viewers for TV3. Their television rugby abyss was compounded by the fact that they had no coverage on the radio as well. On this score they lost out to their news rivals Newstalk. 

Storage solutions

Microsoft has just announced that it will offer internet storage for documents in bid to compete with Google web based services. It will offer a free service called Office Live Workplace that will allow users to store and access documents online.

Users will be able to store up to 1,000 documents. Inevitably there are limitations; Word or Excel documents may not be edited online unless a user has purchased Microsoft Excel or Word software. Google's bundle of online applications includes a word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail, calendar and instant messaging.

Educating the masses

The Independent News and Media empire has now branched out into education with the opening of the Independent College in November. It is a privately funded college which will offer courses in law, professional accountancy, journalism and arts.

The school is going to run courses specifically for people doing the Law Society entrance exams and chartered Accountancy exams. This latest venture inevitably will bring more dollars into the already cash rich Independent company. Independent News and Media's interim results for 2007 show that they have an operating profit of €154m. In Ireland alone they have an operating profit of €50m so far this year.
Skype devalued

In an unusual step in the Internet world, where websites are bought and sold for extreme amounts of money, Ebay has mad a surprise move and lowered the value of one of its recent purchases Skype.

Ebay bought Skype in September 2005 for $2.6 billion. Ebay has now dramatically written down Skype's value by $900 million. One of the reasons for the devaluation is Skype's poor revenue performances. In three months to the end of June Skype generated just $90 million in revenue.

Emma Browne