DIGITAL SUBSTITUTES (a continuation from Monday Night’s post.)

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 10:24 am

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Forced to consider budgeting their once free-spending media habits, consumers may find getting better connected online to be the best way to cut their entertainment and communication costs.

Market researchers have seen a pick up over the course of the past year in switching behaviors as consumers cut back on premium movie or music packages or video rental subscription services.

For active consumers looking to watch more for less, there are abundant alternatives, albeit ones that may require several hours of battling “customer service” operators to extricate yourself from subscription traps, or in Europe, TV licensing fees.

Savvy consumers are finding “good enough” digital substitutes online that allow them to forego subscribing to pay TV or online video rental services.

That’s true already among the young, but is likely to spread among other age groups as they see the value for money.

To be sure, only as these older generations with far greater discretionary spending power switch will the trend spell the end of older media models.

Gartner analyst Mike McGuire says young people with newer PCs are increasingly taking over the functions of programing their own media, given the amount of TV, movie and music content they can stream or download.

TV over the Internet is sneaking up on us, slowly, unlike the music revolution set in motion by online file sharing service Napster a decade ago and laid low the music industry. Internet bandwidth limitations probably limit how many can be channel surfing online at any one time.

But Broadcasters are getting into the act. In Britain, the BBC iPlayer lets Web users replay the last week of broadcast TV and radio programs and ranks as the second most popular multimedia site behind YouTube. For now, overseas users can only hear BBC radio on the iPlayer.

True, watching TV on the web will be held back until consumers can pick and choose on what device and when they see any particular program. Regulators could do more to help break down media bundling in favor of a la carte pricing that allows consumers to pick and choose what they watch while freeing up programing for the Web.

While “live TV” is still a work-in-progress on the web, a growing amount of legitimate news and entertainment is free to view, via laptops or on smaller digital TV displays hooked up to computers.

For all but the most premium film or sports content, there is a growing variety of quality online substitutes.

It’s not high-definition on a fat screen but it’s playing when you want, at a price that’s hard to beat.

– At the time of publication Eric Auchard did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.

(Editing by Chris Wickham)

This article and many more like it, can be found at: http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersComService4/idUSTRE50C0K220090113?sp=true

To your success,

Joannes Hotagua

Get all of your entertainment needs from one source: http://www.myentmall.com