One of my neighbours asked me on Friday if I knew anything about BitTorrent. He was trying to download a film and it was taking forever.
I told him that I had once made a foray into the world of free downloading using Emule but gave it up when the first film I tried to download took all night and then wouldn't play. To make matters worse, I wasn't enamoured by the idea that my Internet bandwidth was being eaten up by scores of people uploading material from my computer in return.
I'm aware that there is a whole class of people that are no longer paying for their entertainment. They watch the latest films weeks before it opens in the cinema, they receive TV broadcasts illegally, they listen to free music and don’t watch television by episode but by series.
It was sad when Coldplay put their latest album online and said people could pay as much as they wanted for it – 5p or £5 or whatever they felt like, it turned out that most people still downloaded it illegally out of convenience
I’m not enormously bothered by the legality or otherwise of any of this and I don't want to sound moralistic but the truth is that free downloading has already killed the music business. It is only a matter of time before it kills every other aspect of entertainment.
1 comment:
The future of the media industry does bother me, but I find it difficult to feel too much sympathy because it seems they are a victim of a situation they created.
People found a way to rip music off at little or no cost at the point of usage, and I think it really flew because the record companies said 'this is illegal' and the people really didn't care because the recording industry had been bending consumers over royally since the introduction of the CD.
Similarly for TV - channels are dying because advertising revenue is now worth next to nothing. But that's only because the industry decided to start splitting advertising across three hundred channels. That's done more harm than the internet.
The problem of course is when the whole thing goes pop nobody is generating any new content any more apart from news programmes and talk shows - and we're not far from that already.
More Love Boat anyone?
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