Fox’s CEO, James Murdoch, who is speaking at Recode’s Code Conference this week in California, offered up some advice for tech companies that are looking to create their own programming like Apple, Twitter, Snap and others. Of course, who better than the chief executive officer of a media company to give out that advice. Murdoch said it’s going to be “very challenging” for these tech companies, continuing by saying “going piece by piece, one by one, show by show, it’s going to take a long time to really move the dial and have something.” And that’s why licensing is so important for companies like this, but to really stand out, companies need their own original content. But as Netflix can attest too, it’s going to take a lot of cash and time to really build out a library of original content.
21st Century Fox itself has had a tough time competing with some new digital competitors in Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, and is actually in the middle of a sale to either Disney or Comcast. Disney initially put in a bid for 21st Century Fox’s movie division, which would really bolster Disney’s already impressive movie collection, but Comcast came along and put in a higher bid. The company is said to be voting on which deal it should go with, pretty shortly. Between 21st Century Fox and CBS trying to combine with Viacom, it shows that traditional media companies are needing to combine with each other to compete with the new media companies like Netflix, who is able to spend a ton on content, and bring in even more customers.
Murdoch also offered up some advice, or rather critiques of Facebook and Snap’s business model, which is ads. Murdoch said that these social media companies need to determine how much they value customer privacy. This comes after the big Cambridge Analytica scandal that Facebook was embroiled in over the past few months. While Snap’s CEO did say that they value customer privacy more than Facebook does, it does still sell ads, based on the users’ behavior.