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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.
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