The New Age of Entertainment. Part I
While I await for my OPT to arrive before I start my full-time job, I have some time to kill apart from the projects and the regular stuff I've been doing.
Lately its been lot of movie and show watching. And its amazing to know today how satisfied an entertainment consumers can be. You just need a computer with an Internet connection and you are all set. There are plenty and plenty (and plenty) of sites offering free movies, tv shows and almost everything you'd want to watch. The major benefits of viewing media online are not only it allows flexibility in the time you spend watching, but it also offers you huge variety of entertainment options. That too with a viewable quality and most importantly without any commercials. Its like a dream come true for an entertainment consumer. And can certainly be said as a golden era for entertainment consumer. Today you can watch almost anything you demand, from the current tv-shows, to very (very) latest movies (shrek 3 released yesterday, now available on couple sites for free viewing), to any old movie or any old tv show that you watched in your childhood. Its just amazing. Whats more amusing is that many stuff online comes in a very good quality audio and video, even in divx quality on many sites.
The sites are plenty:
www.tv-links.co.uk
www.bollydhoom.com
www.moviewalah.com
www.alluc.org
www.movie6.net
www.peekvid.com
www.quicksilverscreen.com
Whats booming all this? Wheres are the copyright laws? Is DRM dead already? (I wouldn't disagree that DRM won't work at all..but I have a post due on that.)
The main reason for proliferation of movies and tv shows are the gateways or "leecher" sites that do not actually host anything but just act as link-aggregators providing links to the content available on different servers. Its illegal in US, for example, to host any copyrighted content for unsolicited public downloads, so many leechers link content from servers outside US, like ouou.com in China. But leechers promote copyright violations and are thus illegal anyway. But more they are suppressed, more they sprung up..more in number and more powerfully. Leechers are small sites, (just may be a desktop machine hosting the site, and thats it) and many in number. If one gateway is shutdown couple more sprung up. And its a never ending benefit for the consumers. For the media companies, its more compelling to sue high profiting big-company-backed movie sites like youtube, that such leechers. But these aggregators are certainly creating a shift in the way the consumer consumes his dose of entertainment.
Consumer who have experienced this new age of online media, is becoming habitual about how he wants his entertainment dish to be served. Now he wants it when he demands it, good quality, ads-free, and possibly free (as in free beer). And he will likely to get it from now on. Music, media companies will have to work around to sort out things related to the digital media, and are already in process by legalizing downloads for a small fee.
Lately its been lot of movie and show watching. And its amazing to know today how satisfied an entertainment consumers can be. You just need a computer with an Internet connection and you are all set. There are plenty and plenty (and plenty) of sites offering free movies, tv shows and almost everything you'd want to watch. The major benefits of viewing media online are not only it allows flexibility in the time you spend watching, but it also offers you huge variety of entertainment options. That too with a viewable quality and most importantly without any commercials. Its like a dream come true for an entertainment consumer. And can certainly be said as a golden era for entertainment consumer. Today you can watch almost anything you demand, from the current tv-shows, to very (very) latest movies (shrek 3 released yesterday, now available on couple sites for free viewing), to any old movie or any old tv show that you watched in your childhood. Its just amazing. Whats more amusing is that many stuff online comes in a very good quality audio and video, even in divx quality on many sites.
The sites are plenty:
www.tv-links.co.uk
www.bollydhoom.com
www.moviewalah.com
www.alluc.org
www.movie6.net
www.peekvid.com
www.quicksilverscreen.com
Whats booming all this? Wheres are the copyright laws? Is DRM dead already? (I wouldn't disagree that DRM won't work at all..but I have a post due on that.)
The main reason for proliferation of movies and tv shows are the gateways or "leecher" sites that do not actually host anything but just act as link-aggregators providing links to the content available on different servers. Its illegal in US, for example, to host any copyrighted content for unsolicited public downloads, so many leechers link content from servers outside US, like ouou.com in China. But leechers promote copyright violations and are thus illegal anyway. But more they are suppressed, more they sprung up..more in number and more powerfully. Leechers are small sites, (just may be a desktop machine hosting the site, and thats it) and many in number. If one gateway is shutdown couple more sprung up. And its a never ending benefit for the consumers. For the media companies, its more compelling to sue high profiting big-company-backed movie sites like youtube, that such leechers. But these aggregators are certainly creating a shift in the way the consumer consumes his dose of entertainment.
Consumer who have experienced this new age of online media, is becoming habitual about how he wants his entertainment dish to be served. Now he wants it when he demands it, good quality, ads-free, and possibly free (as in free beer). And he will likely to get it from now on. Music, media companies will have to work around to sort out things related to the digital media, and are already in process by legalizing downloads for a small fee.
