mediajunk

Google has entered into a deal with media giant BSkyB, best known for its Sky Sports and Sky News channels, and associated satellite delivery system. From the Guardian:

In the first such deal for Google, the Californian firm will provide BSkyB with technology so it can offer email and internet telephony to customers of its fledgling broadband product.

I wouldn't have predicted such an alliance. Google's brand is associated with liberalist values such as freedom of information. Google is especially popular among the highly educated, and likes to flaunt its braininess, boasting about its PhD count, using maths puzzles in billboard ads, holding contests for computer developers, etc.

Sky, on the other hand, is an organisation that is innovative in a different and arguably more limited sense. The jewel in the Murdoch crown, the company has a cheap, tacky brand. Sky News is regularly sensationalist and/or dumbed down. The programming on Sky 1 is usually of the cheap and nasty "reality" fare. Sky Sports has a greedy, milk-them-for-all-they-are-worth veneer, regarded by football fans as having ruined the beautiful game by infesting it with money.

But Sky is successful and popular among the "ordinary people" of the UK, Ireland and abroad. And, in order to grow, Google's products and services must appeal to everyone, not just to geeks.

The Sky deal is another (inevitable?) deviation from Google's puritanical philosophy, a wobble that began a couple of years ago, when the company agreed to Chinese censorship of its search results. (Search for "Tiananmen Square" on Google China. You'll find little mention of any bloodshed.)

For the Murdochs, Google's innovative, easy-to-use products and services will boost uptake of Sky's recently announced broadband offering. But that's not the only reason Rupert Murdoch will have pushed for this deal.

Celebrating his 75th birthday earlier this year, the media mogul waxed lyrical about the internet revolution and the associated shift in power from the "old elite" to consumers. In July, Murdoch's News Corp acquired MySpace.com, the online community famous for breaking new music artists, for $580m.

It should therefore come as no surprise that, as part of their deal, Sky and Google say they will be exploring "future forms of web, TV and mobile advertising".