Online Entertainment

In today’s modern society, there are many services in which entertainment is offered to the users of the World Wide Web. There are services such as online gaming, music download services, live streaming and many more.

TV Catch Up

There are many television channels that have recently discovered the world of the internet and decided to produce website that are associated to there television channels. They has designed these websites to be able to broadcast programmes that have already aired on television, many people use it to ‘catch up’ with programmes they have missed or forgotten about the programme and have not watched it. There are two methods in which people are able to watch television on there computers, they can either watch it by streaming it straight to a media player or by downloading it straight to their computer. With online TV catch up services becoming ever more prominent, it is essentials for all of the major television broadcasters to have a feature like this, BBC have the BBC iPlayer which is able to be downloaded as an application on both Windows and Mac operating systems; they were also the first major broadcasters to allow users to download an application on their mobile devices. Following BBC doing this many of the other major broadcasters followed in the footsteps of the BBC by creating TV catch up services and producing mobile device applications.

Spotify

Spotify is a new music streaming service that allows users to stream selected music straight to there computer. It was launched in October 2008 and in November 2010 it was said to have gathered approximately 10 million users; 1 million of these users were paying ones. Spotify has a clever system where, in which, everybody is able to use the service free of charge as long as they have created an account with Spotify, with this membership, users are able to listen to 20 hours of music, on their computer, throughout a month without having to pay a penny, the only disadvantage to this would be that you can listen to one song only 5 times before you are not able to listen to it anymore. They then have another 2 different types of membership, one that costs £4.99 per month and enables users to listen to unlimited music, on their computer, throughout the month paid month. The final membership, that costs £9.99 per month, allows users to listen to unlimited music on their computer or on their mobile devices as long as they are compatible to Spotify. This is how Spotify make money through the services they offer, and it is all completely legal. Spotify is now available on many different platforms including, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and mobile devices that run iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and many more.

I personally use Spotify quite a lot for listening to music that I may not own on my other music players, I am one of the 9 million non paying members as I do not listen to enough music to benefit from the unlimited side of the memberships.

iTunes

iTunes is a music playing entertainment service which offers many useful things. It allows users to manage their music files all in one place and have them all listed in any order they like, it also allows users to do this with things such as music videos, movies and applications all on a desktop computer or a laptop.

iTunes was launched in January 2001 and since then it is said that over 10 million users have downloaded iTunes.

iTunes is able to connect to the iTunes Store; the iTunes Store enables users to download music, music videos, movies, movie rentals, television programmes, iPhone and iPad programmes, audiobooks, Podcasts. Users are now able to download iPhone, iPod and iPad application software from the App Store.

I personally use iTunes everyday to listen to music and watch movies. I also download music from the store quite frequently and it is very convenient and quick as when I have downloaded from other sites such as Amazon, it takes quite a long time to download a song and then I have to import it into my iTunes library which results in making the process of downloading a music file much longer than it needs to be.

Media Piracy

Media piracy is the copying and distributing of media files over the internet, peer to peer programmes such as Limewire, Frostwire, Napster and iMesh are available to download onto any platform for users to download music, movies and television programmes for no price. The consequence of downloading illegal media is massive, an example of how it is affecting the media industry is that in 1997, 78 million singles were sold in the UK, in 2011, only 8.6 million  were sold, that’s 69.8 million less over the course of 14 years

The consequences if people are caught sharing files through peer to peer applications are massive; you can be given a high priced fine depending on the amount of downloading you may have done, if you are not able to pay the fines you may have your possessions taking away.

Online Gaming

An online game is a game that is played over an Internet network. The way in which online gaming has expanded over the last few years is incredible, its gone from small local networks to the internet and then the obvious growth of the internet making the experience of playing a game online much quicker and more enjoyable for the user.

The idea of online gaming can range from simple text based gaming to complex graphical games to virtual worlds; a great example of a virtual world would be Second Life.

Second Life is a virtual gaming world in which gamers can have a ‘second life’. Users are able to interact with other users over the Internet through their virtual bodies and can explore their second life world. Users, known as residents in the game, are also able to create and trade virtual properties and services with one another. This game, as of 2011, has around 1 million active users, and is available on the majority of platforms including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

There are also lots of online games that are just browser games; sites like miniclip.com offer these types of flash games. It is widely reported that the online gaming market is worth more than 15 billion dollars and the average time spent playing online by gamers is just over 6 hours and 30 minutes weekly.

The benefits of online gaming is that is a fun and safe way for young and old people to interact with each other and play a friendly game, in most cases. The disadvantage to online gaming is that gamers could become to engross in a game, like Second Life that they forget about more important things in real life, there are stories of gamers of Second Life, who do not consider the game to be their second life but actually their first and most important life.

Online Gambling

There are many ways in which people can gamble, through poker, casinos, betting on sports, bingo, lotteries and horse racing to name a few, whether it be small bets or big money bets, it can now be done all through the internet.

During the 1990’s was when online gambling was first introduced to users of the Internet but it was nowhere near the standard of quality that it is now a days.

Online gambling is still in the early stages of its development now and surprisingly is still not yet legal all over the world and may never be legal all over the world as there are laws against it in some countries.

It is estimated that there are around 20,000 online gambling sites for users to visit. Online poker is the most popular way of gambling online and recently it has seen a massive increase in popularity, with Texas Hold’em Poker being the most popular type of poker, as it can be very cheap to be involved in or, people are able to play for real but with pretend money. Social networking sites are the latest sites to be involved with online poker; it has become very popular due to the nature of the games that are free to play in.