The internet has had a tremendous effect on every type of media outlet, including newspapers, magazines, TV, film and music industries, and radio broadcast.
On the positive side, the interactive nature of the Internet has provided consumers with easy and fast access to the news, and it has also enabled anyone to voice his/her own opinion on a particular issue through blogs and comment fields. We no longer need to rely on buying the daily paper or the weekly magazine to get the latest news, or wait for the latest CD to come out. Most people now turn the computer on in the morning and go to their favorite news web site for the latest news, instead of getting the paper from their door step or from a newsstand. We can now purchase individual songs and download them to our smart phones and mp3 players and carry our entire music library with us. We no longer need to go to a video store (remember those?) to rent our movies. Movies can now be streamed directly to our computer, smartphone, or TV through an Internet vendor. We can even get live television in our computers through IPTV, which is a system that provides television services through Internet protocol. In addition, anyone with a video camera can now broadcast daily on the Internet through web sites such as ustream.tv. We are no longer restricted by short wave signals, as radio stations from around the world now stream their live broadcast over the Internet. Those of us old enough to have lived through the early days of MTV remember how much fun it was to watch their latest music videos, which are now available on YouTube. And that brings me to the issue of copyright infringement. The unscrupulous copying of videos and music files has had a negative effect on both the film and the music industries. In the end, we all pay the price of copyright infringement. We see the rise in the prices of DVDs, CDs, and concert tickets to make up for the loss in revenue resulting from illegal copying and downloading of music and video files.
Agreed. I think there was always a bit of "piracy" going on, even before the Internet became so widely available, but it certainly is even worse now.
ReplyDelete