Dawn of the digital age

by Michael Landon

The rise of digital distribution has made the past decade one of the most significant in the history of the media industry.

The noughties saw a technological revolution and the broadband breakthrough had us surfing the internet for music, videos and other commodities with a click of the mouse.

We were perplexed by the I Love You email bug, which infected computers around the globe.

With a sigh of grief we saw the death of the music-sharing phenomenon Napster in 2001. We compared our iPod and iTunes libraries with glee.

The world was our oyster via the improved Google search engine.

Wikipedia gave all students a worthy prepping tool for essay writing, as well as Amazon, which offered bargain-priced books for the penniless.

While Skype kept us all connected, YouTube provided us with a tool with which we could critically analyse the gaffes of leaders and politicans, and view the horrors of the world uncensored – as well as a lot of clearly mindless content.

With recordable digital TV boxes and more recently BBC iPlayer, we never miss a programme, just as social networking made sure we ensured that no one else missed a thing about our lives.

The growth of digitally distributed content in the music, movie and video game industries seems unstoppable, but will this decade be defined as the start of the beginning of the end for the traditional retailer and the physical format?

Beginning of the end?

A revolution of sorts has long been in the works and we are all aware of the seismic shift in the music industry away from the humble CD (you know the round, shiny disc with the hole in it) as downloadable digital MP3s are fast becoming the primary consumer means to music content.

The sacred procedure of unwrapping a CD-cover and flicking through its crisp booklet, with the familiar ‘new’ smell, is fading into a mere memory of past years.

As the world becomes better connected through high speed internet, the movie and video game industries are also becoming the next arenas to embrace the digital distribution monster.

A far cry from the hassle of a trip down to your local video shop to pick up a DVD, it has now become more normal to sit at home and download or stream whatever you want through theiInternet.

It seems inevitable that digital media will continue to squeeze the physical media market out of the way, but the tangibility of a DVD or Blu-ray disc will mean the physical formats will retain a presence, and until society can learn to accept a digital file as an item of monetary value, with equal value to something it can physically touch, this will always be the case.