Battle for online content hots up

Couple of interesting developments in the battle for online content:

Rupert Murdoch has acquired Skiff from Hearst and a stake in Journalism Online. These two deals are significant because Skiff is an online store for content and an e-reader and Journalism Online is a platform that alllows content producers to charge for content. This is clearly Mr Murdoch buying up the pieces or building blocks required to let people buy and enjoy content online from a wide range of producers over a wide range of access devices. Sound strategy

Google looks likely to launch its own content payment platform newspass. This was rumoured last year but now it appears that its happening and will be live by end of the years according to PaidContent.org.

As the battle hots up the race is on to get the access platform and the payment technology out there and adopted by consumers. Who would you back to win that race?

Home Printing - exciting new frontier

Taken by the news that HP are rolling out next generation of printers.

Central feature is printers with email addresses. This is brilliant. First no more cables and secondly ease of printing from where ever you are and whatever device - simply email whatever you want printed and its waiting for you when you get home. Brilliant

Perfect for our increasingly mobile lifestyles.

What's also significant about this generation of HP printers is the partners they've lined up for their version of the App store. With lots and lots of partners on board printing just got much more interesting.

Now this is something I've long toted. Home printing is going to become really, really important.

We started with word processing docs, moved swiftly to pics and now I believe we will print everything from colouring books for our kids to our favourite daily newspaper.

I forecast that home printing will become an important component in the transformation of the publishing sector in same way smart phones and iPads are.

Web-only TV

We've long taken a keen interest in web-only TV and its been a surprisingly quiet market. But now it seems to have burst into life with the imminent launch of 2 high profile web-only launches in UK.

First off comedy star David Baddiel is debuting in FA Dave, a web-only series on (yes you've guessed it) UKTV's Dave channel.

Fashionistas Trinny and Susannah are back on screen with a web-only series entitled Trinny and Susannah - What They Did Next.

Their 16 episode mockumentry goes out exclusively on ivillage.co.uk and is then available across the web via a group of super distributors.

You can view the trailer of the show right now on their website.

The T&S model might give us a clue about how future commercial models might work. Producers TM5 have sensibly underpinned the show with sponsor money from ivillage and Westfield and are augmenting with ad sales.

Let's see how these two perform but I suggest that if these shows go well they might provide some much needed impetus for the web-only format.