| |
Digitalization of
Entertainment
Digitalization of Entertainment
Consumers have moved rapidly to adopting digital formats for consuming
entertainment-related content. The most obvious example of this is music and
video downloads, with Apple’s iTunes and You Tube as leading examples. Apple has
sold more than one billion songs via its iTunes music store and it continues to
demonstrate a spectacular rate of growth. Over 30,000,000 individuals have
purchased an ipod portable music device, and tens of millions of other consumers
use one of dozens of other portable devices to listen to music. Other platforms
for listening to music are equally successful, and in the case of Microsoft’s
Windows Media Player even more dominant with over 90,000,000 systems running the
software globally. Real Networks Rhapsody, and Yahoo! Music represent other
major entrants in this space. In addition to those companies selling licensed
music downloads for a fee, peer-to-peer networks such as Limewire and Morpheus
claim to have tens of millions of users sharing music and other files on a
continual basis.
As consumers have become comfortable purchasing (and stealing) music online,
they are now beginning to download other digital forms of entertainment,
including music videos, short-subject films, television shows, and even
full-length Hollywood pictures. Traditional media companies have recognized the
opportunity to establish new revenue streams and leverage old assets by enabling
consumers to download television programming for a fee, and the adoption rate
appears to match the early days of music downloading. The increasing penetration
of broadband connections (over 50 million homes in the US), advances in software
that enables high-quality downloads, and content companies recognizing an
enormous opportunity to distribute directly and inexpensively to consumers has
created a tidal shift in the number of digital media assets available for
download to computers, handheld devices, and even cell phones.
Companies such as YouTube are at the forefront of the intersection of video
entertainment and the fragmentation of media due to the empowerment of the
consumer. Hundreds of millions of videos are downloaded weekly from YouTube (as
well as dozens of competitors), and a significant portion of those videos are
not “professionally” produced. More importantly, new talent in various
entertainment fields are being discovered through these distribution platforms
and forever changing how entertainment is conceived, produced, distributed, and
valued.
Source: Free Articles
About the Author
Justin Burge is CEO of uPlayMe.
|
