Keeping up with demands for online entertainment

Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Jakarta
vmahmud@yahoo.com

In the late 1990s, the Internet was heralded as the ultimate medium for content distribution. People could download movies, music, news and other forms of information or entertainment at the click of a mouse.

Web users would be able to save money and content authors could get a bigger slice of the profits as prices fell as middlemen (like record companies or movie distributors) could be taken out of the equation.

Unfortunately, things have taken a different turn.

Despite the powerful communications infrastructure during the dot-com era, security solutions to safeguard content had yet to mature.

Piracy was and still is ripe the world over as people began to download bootleg movies, music, books and other items that could be scanned or digitized over the Web.

The record industry recently launched a worldwide legal campaign to stop computer users from downloading the latest songs without paying, citing lost sales and falling revenue. They began suing people left and right in the U.S., including a grandfather who barely used his computer (his grandchildren were the alleged culprits) and a 12-year-old girl living in subsidized housing.

Yet, despite all this, the Internet as a distribution medium is here to stay. People are voting with their PCs that they want to obtain some of their entertainment via the World Wide Web. They want to have the ability to play the content of their choice on whatever hardware they possess.

Users frown upon attempts by entertainment companies to "lock- in" content to a particular player or storage medium. After buying a DVD or a CD, just who owns what anyway? Do users have the right to play their purchases wherever, whenever they want or do the studios dictate till when and with what they are used?

Apple's iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes) is perhaps one solution. Its music store offers 200,000 songs from every artist under the sun for 99 U.S. cents (Rp 8,400) a song.

The music can be played on the computer, the highly popular iPod MP3 player, or even burned onto a CD to be played elsewhere. The library includes songs from famous artists like Seal, U2, Sheryl Crow and others.

There is, of course, some security limitations built-in to the digital downloads courtesy of the Advance Audio Codec (AAC) format used to encode the music, yet iTunes has so far sold over 10 million songs since its launch four months ago.

A Windows-based iTunes is due at the end of the year and non- U.S. users will be able to join in the fun soon.

Content creators and copyright holders have always been wary of posting their wares over the Internet because of security issues. Apple can do what others have failed to do as it can craft both hardware and software solutions that secures the sanctity of the files without alienating its users.

Apple CEO Steve Job's vision of making the company a content distributor may be new for a technology company, but it is yielding profitable results. This is in contrast to the different approach of the "traditional" entertainment cartels.

After killing off Napster, some record studios joined forces to create their own music distribution website. But they locked- in many conditions to the purchase of content. It can only be played on one registered computer, it cannot be burned onto a CD or it will erase itself after a set number of days.

It seems they tried to change the art of "music selling" into "music renting" in a bid to prop up their falling revenue.

And what about those struggling songwriters, singers, filmmakers and photographers?

At the moment, they are still under the control of middlemen: record executives, movie studios and book editors. This "axis of evil" still wields the decision-making power of what gets published, marketed and viewed by the general public.

But as technology gets better, people will soon be able to publish, market and sell their own content directly to the masses, with the assistance of transparent tools and services.

Apple is said to be considering taking in unknown bands and record labels under its wing. Considering Apple's QuickTime technology and the emergence of broadband worldwide, could movies be next?

Entertainment companies should take note of the new technologies and market realities of their industry. People no longer want to purchase entire albums for just a few good songs, nor will they dish out dozens of dollars for what costs pennies to distribute.

They don't mind buying straight from the musicians or authors themselves, but some are leery of lining the pockets of middlemen.

The old ways of music and movie distribution is coming to an end. People don't want to wait while other countries enjoy the latest releases. Courtesy of online reviews, they can also immediately tell which movies or songs will be hits or complete bombs, helping them to efficiently choose their next purchase.

In fact, some studio executives fault the Internet for the box office disaster of The Hulk. It seems they were hoping that the news of its poor reviews would take longer to spread in order to garner more weekend profits.

The Internet changes all that. Record and studio executives better get with the program or they will find themselves irrelevant.