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Revenues: $8.59 Billion, up 9.5% y/y. Up 21% from last quarter. Beat conensus by 4%
Operating Income: $1.42 billion, up 24% y/y, driven by movies, cable. Up 35% from last quarter.
Earnings: $832 million, up 1.2% from last year. Up 13.6% from last quarter.
EPS of 27 cents misses consensus by a penny.
Guidance: Up. Raising operating income growth projection for FY 2008 to from "low teens" to "mid teens".

No major aquisitiions planned - Yahoo, Time-Warner, etc.

Rupert Murdoch is now threatening to sue the BBC for stealing from him.

In his big, free-wheeling, interview with Sky News Australia, Murdoch trashed the BBC calling it "scandalous."   Specifically, he said, "If you look at them, most of their stuff is stolen from the newspapers now, and we'll be suing them for copyright."

Of course, he's just trying to rile them up, as he followed that statement, saying he doesn't think it'll come to lawsuits, "They know the law, they'll adapt."

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News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch said the company will eventually remove stories from Google’s (GOOG) search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online, according to a story in the Guardian, which apparently was based on an interview Murdoch did with Sky News Australia.

News Corp. publishes The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, the New York Post, the Sun, among other newspapers. (As well as this blog.)

Filed under: Bad news, Internet, Google (GOOG), News Corp'B' (NWS), Media World, Technology

For News Corp. (NWS), MySpace is the mistake that keeps on costing. It's bad enough that Murdoch's empire paid $500 million for the social networking platform shortly before Facebook knocked it from the premier spot in the social media beauty pageant, but now we also know that News Corp. has committed $350 million to office space for MySpace that will never be used.

Rupert Murdoch says once he starts charging for all his sites, he's going to take them out of Google's search index.

In an interview with Sky News Australia, he says he doesn't want people coming to his sites through search engines. "What's the point of having someone coming occasionally?" Murdoch wants them coming to his site directly. He has pretty low opinion of searchers.

"If they're just search people... They don't suddenly become loyal readers." They get 15-20 headlines and just click on the most interesting. There's no loyalty built from Ask, Google or Microsoft.

Matthew Garrahan, FT: News Corporation is paying more than $1m a month to rent an empty office complex in Los Angeles that it has been unable to sub-lease since scrapping an ambitious plan to move MySpace and its other digital businesses there.

The company is locked into a 12-year lease worth about $350m that it signed in August 2008, when the number of people using MySpace was increasing and the social network was running out of space in its Beverly Hills offices.