Consumer digital. News Corp subsidiary Move Inc., operator of realtor. com, has completed its acquisition of Opcity, the US real estate technology platform that matches home buyers and sellers. Opcity has grown its US client base to over 5,000 brokerages and more than 40,000 agents since 2015. Move Inc – with News Corp’s matching REA business in Australia – has consistently been among the best-performing subsidiaries of News Corp, accounting for some 35% of profit but only 10% of revenue.
The Murdoch-family controlled parent company has long been best-known for its daily newspapers in the US, UK and Australia, and Harper Collins book publishing. But it has been quietly transforming its operations in Australia where it also controls Foxtel pay TV and, in the UK, where The Sun online has overtaken DMGT’s Mail Online to become the country’s largest newspaper site. Foxtel, whose subscriptions revenue has been falling in the face of competition not least from Netflix, is launching a much-vaunted sports streaming service in March. In the UK and Ireland, News Corp’s Wireless Group operates 30 leading radio brands including talkSport (claimed to be the world’s biggest sports radio station), talkRadio and Virgin Radio. It is easy to believe that the digitally-refocused $8bn News Corp (now divorced from 21st Century Fox which was sold to Disney and Sky TV, acquired by Comcast) could launch further (free or subscription) streaming services, for example in business, travel and politics in various markets.
