Entertainment Technology: What to Consider Before Buying HDTV. Entertainment is undergoing a paradigm shift. How, where and when we watch movies or television programs is changing. In the next decade the integration of traditional entertainment platforms with the web will transform our lives just as TV itself did more than a half century ago. For the television industry, especially, panic and worry have already set in despite the fact that they currently hold the same monopoly on our entertainment choices that they’ve enjoyed for decades. Perhaps they suspect the coming transformation in entertainment won’t be of their own making?
Because of this, some people fear the television networks are facing extinction, or at the very least are facing a challenge from the web much like TV posed the motion picture industry in the 1950s. However, any eulogies over the death of TV are most likely premature. What’s happening to television, and to a lesser extent to motion pictures, is similar to what happened to the music industry several years ago.
Viewing habits are changing, made possible by rapid advances in digital technology, and an increasing degree of interaction with the internet. Predictably, some of the power and control that the networks have traditionally had is shifting away from them and to the consumer, just as it has with music. How the networks confront this shift will determine the shape of entertainment in the coming years. They can embrace and nurture these changes, transforming themselves and securing their place in the entertainment markets of the future, or they can resist them as the record labels did, and reap equally disastrous consequences.
For the music industry, the future is already here, and its arrival several years ago was swift and chaotic. The ease with which consumers are able to digitize music, put it online, and share files – bypassing both the record labels and the record stores – literally changed the industry overnight. The labels and retail chains reacted poorly to the challenge of a digital world and to a new consumer they failed to understand. At first in denial of what was happening, the record labels became aggressively resistant, suing consumers for file sharing, and then reaping the consequences – a great deal of animosity from the public. Most of the retail chains failed to develop their on-line businesses quickly enough, and suffered ever-declining CD sales. Some venerable institutions, like Tower Records, have simply ceased to exist.
Apple, once strictly a computer company, was largely responsible for pulling the rug out from under them. As of July, 2007, Apple claims it’s iTunes store has sold over three billion songs – that’s billion – making it the third-largest music retailer in the U.S. in just over six and a half years. Music downloads overall were up eighty-five percent in 2006 compared to 2005, comprising eleven percent of worldwide sales. Meanwhile, CD sales for the same period dropped another five percent, the seventh straight year for decline. Warner Music Group, one of the world’s largest recording companies, posted a seventeen million dollar loss for the third quarter of 2007. Letting go of old business models, especially for companies as entrenched as the entertainment giants, has proven a challenge.
In hindsight, though, how difficult could it have been to foresee where the music business was heading? Sure, details are always elusive when predicting the future, but the explosion of P2P file sharing, the ease of burning your own CDs, and the introduction of the massively popular iPod in 2001 had to have given them a clue. The trouble wasn’t that the record labels couldn’t see the future coming, it was that they were determined not to give into it. Today’s consumer, however, will not be dictated to. Digital technology and the web have given them an unprecedented degree of control and it will be difficult to wrest this away. The consumer wants choice and flexibility – “my music when I want it, where I want it, and how I want it” – and in today’s marketplace, they can have it. Find more information about Plasma TV A Big Screen For a Little Room here.
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