Online entertainment: at a tipping point?
February 24, 2008
Gregory Jackson,
Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the
University of Chicago, observed in
The Digital Carrot, The Digital
Stick (Chronicle of Higher
Education, November 2007) that illegal file
sharing would rapidly become moot if we could
resolve these problems with respect to legal
online acquisition of music and movies: I can’t
always get what I want; I can’t always use what I
get; and I don’t think the price is fair.
Maybe we're close. Consider:
Amazon.com offers music in MP3 format—free of digital rights management and thus untethered from the iPod—often for less than what iTunes charges. Nokia is bundling music access with cell phones, and Universal Music Group is looking to extend this model to other devices. iTunes is suddenly a dominant force in digital movie rentals, having partnered with all major studios, adding alternatives to services already offered by Amazon.com, Netflix (now with unlimited streaming videos) and hulu.com. NBC, CBS, and ABC make available streaming video of popular TV shows from their websites.
Then there's iTunes' new ranking as #2 music retailer in the world, behind only Wal*Mart. And as the ars technica posting indicates, that's #2 relative to all music sales, including CDs; not just digitally purchased music.
Still a lot of experimentation and practical problems, but the glimmer of a tunnel end seems apparent.
Maybe we're close. Consider:
Amazon.com offers music in MP3 format—free of digital rights management and thus untethered from the iPod—often for less than what iTunes charges. Nokia is bundling music access with cell phones, and Universal Music Group is looking to extend this model to other devices. iTunes is suddenly a dominant force in digital movie rentals, having partnered with all major studios, adding alternatives to services already offered by Amazon.com, Netflix (now with unlimited streaming videos) and hulu.com. NBC, CBS, and ABC make available streaming video of popular TV shows from their websites.
Then there's iTunes' new ranking as #2 music retailer in the world, behind only Wal*Mart. And as the ars technica posting indicates, that's #2 relative to all music sales, including CDs; not just digitally purchased music.
Still a lot of experimentation and practical problems, but the glimmer of a tunnel end seems apparent.