Imagine the Internet being just a scientific tool. No bells and whistles, no movies and music. No games and no interesting software to download. Just scientific network. Well, that’s what it started off as, and if it hadn’t been for all the music and movies and gamesavailable on it, the Net would have lived out its entire life in relative obscurity.We all know that sharing music illegally has been clamped down on hard; we’ve all seen Napster being hauled into court and then destroyed. We’ve also caught on to the lure of applications such as BitTorrent that lets us share our files with peers. Most of the shared files are music, movies or videos.
It’s a forgone conclusion that entertainment is a must for any medium to survive. A television that aired only documentaries and news would not catch on to the general population. The Internet today has become this vast database of most things under the sun. Movies, video clips, sound bytes, music. You name it, and the Net will have scores of sites offering these, some of them legally for a price, some illegally.
Entertainment: The Cornerstone Of The Internet Online radio stations by portals such as Yahoo! with their Launchcast service, too, are attracting customers. These services are free if you subscribe for a basic version—you can always pay for the more advanced, customisable ones. New technologies such as Apple’s iTunes music download service, and Podcasting, too, give you your daily dose of entertainment off the Net. However, entertainment on the Internet, a la television,is yet to kick off due to bandwidth and revenue model issues.
Who would want to catch their daily soap on the Net where it would get chopped halfway due to a bad connection? The gaming industry, too, is waiting for ISPs to resolve the issues concerning supplying the user with static broadband. Once that is taken care of, you can be assured of a shoot fest, a movie, and the news all streaming into your home PC.
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