Introduction
In this article I will be writing about how interactive media has changed the society we live in today. From the introduction of the World wide web which is one of greatest inventions of the 20th century it acts as one the best platforms of communication in the world. There a loads of ways in which the media industry uses the world wide web for example commercial advertising is greatly used on the world wide web as 30% of the world population is online so for that reason alone it acts as a perfect platform to advertise products.
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Some of the most used sites on the web have some form of advertising for example a video on youtube which has large quantity of views would likely include a commercial ad before your chosen video plays. This technique of advertising had only been implemented recently as people in the media industry are looking for different ways in which to target younger people as more and more young people are not watching tv or newspapers which in previous generations were the main medium for advertising.
One of main factors which have caused younger people not to watch TV as much as previous generations is the introduction of user created content on the web. As nearly every new gadget such as phones and portable devices on the market now include cameras and mobile connection to social networking sites it is very easy to produce video content and put it on the web in seconds. A popular user generated site called “Youtube” enables anyone to upload any video they want free of charge and today Youtube contains millions of user generated videos. With the shear choice of videos on Youtube the current generation are going on sites like youtube and watching videos they want instead of watching network TV on their televisions.
Online Shopping
In the current generation more and more people are doing their every day shopping online from buying your weekly groceries to doing your Xmas shopping. The reasons why people shop online is because in many ways it's more convenient for example if your do your online shopping you can choose what time you want it to be delivered which would be convenient for people who may work throughout the day and want their shopping delivered in the evening this service has been introduced to pretty much all the major supermarkets. Popular online shopping sites such as Ebay and Amazon offer the customer a far larger range of products that if a customer went to a shop. Ebay is the world‟s largest online marketplace, accounting for $60bn sales worldwide in 2008, while Amazon also offers small businesses an opportunity to use its platform to generate sales.
This has a serious affect on small businesses on the high-street because people are holding onto their cash more than ever which is a result of the global recession so people are comparing prices and searching for the best deal. In many cases these online small businesses have the best prices resulting in the high-street businesses losing significant sales. A good example of businesses which have become bankrupt as a result of online shopping is “Travel Agents” it is common practice these days to book a holiday online as it's a lot easier and offers a great deal more customization to your holiday and also in most cases is a lot cheaper. Many businesses which offer a service similar to travel agents are likely to become obsolete in the the recent future.
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Something which falls into a similar category is downloading and streaming content.
Movie rental companies such a “”LoveFilm” have introduced a service which enables customers to download or stream movies straight to their PCs which for the company saves significant postal costs and in some ways can be considered more “Green” because you are not mass producing the DVDs or physically transporting them. The only disadvantage I can think of from streaming media content would be if the customer has a slow broadband speed then video quality will suffer significantly. A downside to media content such music and movies on the web is that it can be easily copied and illegally distributed around the web and is almost impossible to avoid. The illegal distribution of music and films has had affect on the industries which for the music industry has resulted in music artists needing to do tours to sell their music.
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Digital Video on the Web
The web is filled with video content as a result of sites like youtube which enable users so upload videos quickly and pretty much anonymously. With the almost constant introduction of new portable devices with the capacity to shoot video and still images. They also include very easy to use interfaces which pretty much enable you to upload content from your portable device to sites like Youtube in a couple of clicks. There is restrictions when it comes to file formats with youtube though for example it's able to play
- WebM files
- .MPEG4,3GPP MOV files
- .AVI
- .MPEGPS
- .WMV
- .FLV
but isn't able to play some common formats such as mp3. Many manufactures would very much consider these file formats when they design a something like a new phone so that phone's camera shoots media content in one of the file formats supported by Youtube which wouldn't require the user to convert the file manually. File formats shouldn't be much of problem when it comes to uploading to youtube because all of the main formats are compatible for example .AVI is very widely used when filming from a camera and MOV is used for the very popular portable device the iPhone.
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The web acts as a democratic platform in which almost every in the world can express their opinion but in some countries such as china the web is widely monitored and the Chinese people are filtered from content which way question their current government in a negative way. Here is a few of the popular sites which have been filtered Facebook, Twitter , Youtube and Wikileaks. The filtering of sites such as those is one of many techniques used by the Chinese government to prevent the exposure of content which they want to hide from their people.
There are ways in which you can bypass the filters which have been put in place by the government. The way in which this can be done is to connect to a external proxy server then browse the web once you have connected to that proxy.
There are ways in which you can bypass the filters which have been put in place by the government. The way in which this can be done is to connect to a external proxy server then browse the web once you have connected to that proxy.
Copying Prevention
One of the ways in which the music industries try and prevent the illegal copying of their content is to implement copy protection onto the CDs you buy in the shops. In the manufacturing process of making music CDs the distinctive feature they must include is that the Disk must be distinguishable from normal (unprotected CDs) and it's very important that the CD cannot be copied or relocated using typical hardware or software.
Some of the techniques they used to begin with was to on purpose build the CD so it had loads of bad sectors on the disk. Having bad sectors on the disk resulted in a typical Cd drive to skip the contents of that sector so that it cannot be copied. Other methods include encrypting the data using codes which cannot be bypassed using typical software. The same copy protection techniques can be found on DVDs and Blu-rays for video.
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