Consuming content online: loss of control of users

2011/03/01 Leturia Azkarate, Igor - Informatikaria eta ikertzaileaElhuyar Hizkuntza eta Teknologia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Internet

(Photo: © iStockphoto.com/Thesuperph)

P2P networks (peer-to-peer or similar) have been a major change in audiovisual consumption habits. The editing and distribution of music, videos, literature, etc. It was in the hands of producers and publishers, and consumers had to adapt to what they offered. This offer was limited according to the marketing strategies or economic accounts of these companies. Thus, they had the latest novelties and classics that are always sold well, but many things were inaccessible because they were "disclosed".

Although the fact of being in the era of digitization and the Internet facilitates and greatly encompasses distribution and sale, the producers and publishers did not know how to adapt to the times, nor devise a wider, economic and comfortable offer. Then users rose up and at the beginning of the century P2P networks were created.

In P2P networks, users share with other users the digital audiovisual content they have on their computer through a software, while they can access the content that others have. Examples of these networks are eDonkey and BitTorrent. Although the latter is mainly used to share the most successful films, series and songs or music groups of the time, in the eDonkey network, which uses the eMule program, you can find almost everything: songs from countries and curious languages, old comics, movies and old series... Thanks to the P2P networks, the control of the contents and the offer passed to the users. It was a time of prosperity, and so it has been since.

Trend towards online consumption

In recent times, however, the tendency to audiovisual consumption is changing. On the one hand, music and videos are often consumed by streaming, that is, it is heard or seen live, without each one coming down to his computer and saving them. Examples of this are Spotify (a service that offers a lot of music - with free or paid advertising- without advertising), Netflix (service of rent of videos and online access) and Megavideo (service that allows to see in streaming movies and commercial series uploaded to Megaupload). And although it is not streaming in the strict sense, a similar phenomenon is that when we buy a book you can only read on the web of the online service, as in the e-bookstore of Google.

On the other hand, direct download services, such as Megaupload or Rapidshare, are currently more successful than P2P networks for sharing music and videos together. People upload the contents to these servers and others download them.

Third, it tends to buy online the content contained in the DRM (behind this speaker name Digital Rights Management there is a system to prevent copies). In them we lowered the content to our hard disk, but having a system to prevent copies serves no one. Well, neither to us in the gadgets we will have in the future! (In the number of March last year we spoke to you about the DRM of electronic books). This is what happens in various online stores and in most e-book stores.

Loss of content control

Thanks to this trend, users are used to not having content on our computers. In fact, many devices intended for audiovisual consumption, such as smartphons or tablets, come with little storage capacity. What if everything is online and from there I can consume directly?

But that has its weak point: again we are losing control and leaving it in the hands of companies. And while it is true that in most cases they are other companies - which have adapted to the network and have more and more offer -, we will always depend on what they want: they will put the prices, they will decide what is the offer and they impose the conditions (like the drm).

On the other hand, if Internet users, instead of making content using P2P networks, do so through services like Megaupload and Rapidshare, they just have to close them to interrupt any kind of change. Before the P2P networks, music was exchanged for a time through services like the Napster, they depended on a single central node and, when they closed, it was over. It seems that we have not learned...

Someone will say that when they do so we always have to go back to the first and use the P2P networks again. But, meanwhile, on many webs and forums dedicated to music, series and movies are hanging only links to direct download webs that will be useless if they close these services... In Basque, for example, there are websites with links to download series and films (cartoons in Basque, Euskal Encodings..) or music (Ekaitzaldi), but many of the links are for direct download websites. If we close these websites of direct download, all this effort to make available to the public content in Basque will go to the gate.

If the trend towards direct consumption of audiovisual content in online services predominates and we are used to using it without saving it on our computers, companies will again decide and limit the offer that users have become almost unlimited.