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Electronics, the Internet, and Entertainment Media Author: Stephen Meyer Date: 2011 From: Electronic America(2011 ed.) Publisher: Gale, a Cengage Company Series: Information Plus Reference Series Document Type: Topic overview Length: 10,868 words Content Level: (Level 4) Lexile Measure: 1230L

Full Text: For many Americans, new technologies simply mean new toys. Almost every advancement in consumer technology since the 1980s has in some way been tied to entertainment. In Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010 (2010, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s1094.pdf), the U.S. Census Bureau examines the amount of money Americans spent between 2004 and 2007 for media content, which included pay-television subscriptions, video games, home video, and music. On average, most Americans spent $851.57 on all media in 2007, which was $80.62 more than they spent in 2004, a 10% increase. In general, media usage also increased during this span. In 2007 the average American aged 12 and older watched 1,613 hours of television, compared with 1,550 in 2004. During this time, however, broadcast television saw a 6% decline in viewership, from 679 hours per person in 2004 to 639 in 2007; at the same time, viewing time for cable and satellite television services grew from 871 hours per person in 2004 to 973 in 2007, a 12% increase. According to Census Bureau projections, both broadcast and cable television viewing was expected to decline by 2012, as other forms of entertainment grew more popular. For example, whereas Americans on average spent 85 hours playing video games in 2007, this figure was expected to increase to 142 hours a year by 2012.

Even though television was still the media outlet of choice in 2010, Americans have been rapidly turning to new forms of entertainment made available by the Internet and other technologies. According to "Trend Data" compiled by the Pew Internet & American Life Project (Pew/Internet; 2010, http://www.pewinternet.org/Static-Pages/Trend-Data/Online-Activites-Total.aspx), as of April 2009, 72% of American adults who used the Internet had surfed Web sites for fun. By May 2010, 75% had gone online for information about the news, 66% had watched a video clip on an Internet video-sharing Web site, and 61% had visited a social networking site.

Electronic Gaming

Once considered the pastime of children and socially challenged adults, video and computer games now represent a major form of entertainment in the United States. Video games, also known as console and arcade games, are played using a computer that is specifically designed to play games. By contrast, computer games are just one type of program that can be run on standard personal computers. The difference between the two types of games is in how they are accessed, not necessarily in their content. Many games can be played using either a video game system or a computer. Thus, the terms video game and computer game are sometimes used interchangeably. According to Amanda Lenhart of Pew/Internet (May 2009, http://www.slideshare.net/PewInternet/teens-mobile-games-lenhart-presentation-to-federal-trade-commission-may-2009), 97% of teens aged 12 to 17 played video games in 2009. Seventy-seven percent of teens owned a video game console, and more than half (55%) owned portable gaming devices. As Lenhart reveals, portable gaming devices were more popular among younger teens; two- thirds (67%) of teens aged 12 to 14 owned portable gaming devices, compared with 44% of teens aged 15 to 17. In a data memo released on December 7, 2008 (http://www.pewinternet.org/ /media//Files/Reports/2008/PIP_Adult_gaming_memo.pdf.pdf), Lenhart et al. report that a majority of adults (53%) also play video games. According to the memo, 81% of adults aged 18 to 29 play video games, compared with 60% of adults aged 30 to 49, 40% of adults aged 50 to 64, and 23% of adults over the age of 65. Roughly one-fifth (21%) of adults play video games every day.

The largest retail launch in the history of the entertainment industry as of 2010 did not center on a movie, album release, or television series. It took place on November 10, 2009, and belonged to the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (COD MW2), developed by Activision Blizzard for the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 consoles. Before COD MW2, the biggest retail launch in history had been the April 29, 2008, launch of another video game, Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA4), developed by Rockstar North for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. As Don Reisinger reports in "Modern Warfare 2 Biggest Entertainment Launch Ever" (April 21, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20003080-17.html), COD MW2 reached $401.6 million in sales on its first day of release, shattering the record of $310 million set by GTA4 the previous year. By comparison, in "Sideshow: Plenty of Box Office Bite" (Philadelphia Inquirer, November 23, 2009), Tirdad Derakhshani reports that the leading one-day box-office sales record, set by the movie New Moon on November 20, 2009, is $72.7 million.

Rise of Video and Computer Games

Computer and video games are almost as old as computers. Many credit Alexander Shafto Douglas (1921-) with creating the first graphics-based computer game at Cambridge University in England in 1952. Part of his doctoral research on human-computer interaction, the game was played on an enormous Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) computer, which was one of the first computers in existence and was made primarily from rows and rows of vacuum tubes. The EDSAC display screen was a 35-by-16 array of monochromatic dots. The name of Douglas's game was OXO or Noughts and Crosses, a human-versus-machine version of tic-tac-toe in which the human player chose the first square. Ten years later, computer games were developed on mainframe computers and eventually on ARPANET, the nationwide network of military defense computers that preceded the Internet.

One of the more popular games that spread to computer mainframes across the United States during the 1960s was Spacewar! Spacewar!, created in 1961 by Steve Russell (1937-), Martin Graetz (1935-), and Wayne Wiitanen (1935-) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to test the capabilities of the $120,000 Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 computer. The game consisted of two low-resolution ships, one shaped like a needle and the other like a wedge, flying around a dot that represented a sun in the

middle of the screen. The object was to destroy the other player's ship while maneuvering through the sun's gravitational pull.

In 1971 Nutting Associates released Computer Space, the first video game for the general public. Computer Space, a direct imitator of Spacewar!, was set in a futuristic arcade-style cabinet. Most people considered the game too complicated at the time, so Nutting only made 1,500 units and then stopped production. The next year, however, Atari released Pong. In this monochromatic game, a small cube was bounced back and forth between two slightly larger rods controlled by the player(s). The video game was a smash hit, and Atari sold more than 800,000 arcade cabinets. A month earlier, Magnavox released the Odyssey, which was the first home console video game system that ran on a television set. The Odyssey, which sold for $100 (about $526 in 2011 dollars), had several different games installed on it, all of which involved hitting a pixilated square (or squares) on the screen with rectangles. According to the Atari Museum (2010, http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/dedicated/homepong.html), the Atari home version of Pong was released in 1975 and sold over 150,000 units during the holiday season alone.

Golden Age of Video Games

Within a year after these initial offerings, video games quickly gained a foothold in the United States. A steady stream of unremarkable cabinet games was released throughout the 1970s. For most of the decade, video games were novelties that sat next to pinball machines in bowling alleys, bars, and roller-skating rinks. With the arrival of Asteroids and Space Invaders in 1978, arcade video games came into their own. Space Invaders, a game in which the player shot row after row of advancing aliens, triggered a nationwide coin shortage in Japan so severe the Japanese government had to more than double yen production. Namco introduced the first color game in 1979 with the arrival of Galaxian, and then in 1980 the company released Pac-Man. The original name of the game was Puckman, derived from the Japanese pakupaku, which means "flapping open and closed" (e.g., the character's mouth). Despite the game's simple concept of guiding a yellow, dot-eating ball around a maze, over 100,000 arcade units were sold in the United States. The game inspired an entire line of merchandise from lunch boxes to stuffed toys. Between 1980 and 1983 many colorful, engaging video games were released, including Defender, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Frogger, and Ms. Pac-Man, which still holds the record for the most arcade games sold at 115,000, according to William Hunter, in "Player 2 Stage 4: Two Superstars" (2010, http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/play2sta4.htm). Video arcades sprang up in every mall and town in the United States. On January 18, 1982, the cover of Time magazine read: Gronk! Flash! Zap! Video Games Are Blitzing the World. The cover story, "Games That Play People" by John Skow, revealed that in 1981 nearly $5 billion in quarters (about $12 billion in 2011 dollars) was spent playing arcade games. By comparison, the U.S. film industry took in $2.8 billion that year (about $6.8 billion in 2011 dollars).

At the same time, game consoles were gaining popularity in living rooms across the United States. In 1977 Atari launched the Atari VCS (later named the Atari 2600) for $250 (about $906 in 2011 dollars). By Christmas 1979 sales were brisk as people realized that the system could support more than just Pong. With the release of Space Invaders on the system the following year, units flew off the shelves at $150 apiece (roughly $400 in 2011 dollars). Tekla E. Perry and Paul Wallich explain in "Design Case History: The Atari Video Computer System" (IEEE Spectrum, March 1983) that Atari sold over 12 million consoles between 1977 and 1983. More than 200 games were made for the system. Other video systems such as Intellivision and Colecovision gained huge followings as well. Skow noted that 600,000 Intellivision units were sold in 1981. Overall, 1981 sales for home video games exceeded $1 billion (approximately $2.4 billion in 2011 dollars).

Video Game Industry Stumbles

By 1984 the Commodore 64 home computer had debuted at $1,000 ($2,115 in 2011 dollars), and the Apple IIc was introduced at the comparatively affordable price of $1,300 ($2,750 in 2011 dollars). Such computers not only offered better graphics than the contemporary video game consoles but also they were useful for practical applications such as spreadsheets and word processors. Consequently, people began to lose interest in video games and buy home computers instead. In 1983, faced with a collapsing video game market, losses of hundreds of millions of dollars, and far too much inventory, Atari loaded 14 tractor-trailer trucks with thousands of unsold cartridges and pieces of hardware. It drove the surplus out to a landfill site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and buried the inventory in a concrete bunker under the desert. The following year Warner Communications, the owner of Atari, sold the game and computer divisions of Atari to Jack Tramiel (1928-), the founder of Commodore. Mattel, the maker of Intellivision, also shed its electronics division, and hundreds of arcades closed as well.

For several years gaming was relegated to the computer. Before 1983 computer games were low on graphics and heavy on text, but by 1984 a number of colorful and entertaining games became available for home computers, including the Ultima and King's Quest series. However, toy and electronics manufacturers in the United States were wary of investing in video game consoles after the Atari disaster.

Japanese companies were not nearly as pessimistic and continued to invest money into video console development. Nintendo, a company that originally manufactured Japanese playing cards, surprised the entire gaming market in 1986 when it released the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The games looked better than most arcade games from the early 1980s and took as long to play through as computer games. After two years on the market, the NES found its way into almost as many homes as the Atari 2600. As Pat Davies reported in "The Hottest Game in Town" (Globe and Mail, May 19, 1989), the sales of NES video games in 1988 reached $1.7 billion ($3.2 billion in 2011) in the United States alone. Arcades at the time also enjoyed a brief revival with the advent of complex fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II. Mortal Kombat, which eventually made it onto the NES, inspired a congressional investigation into violence in video games and led to the establishment in 1994 of the Entertainment Software Rating Board, an industry self-regulatory organization that monitors the content of video games for depictions of violence, nudity, profanity, and other material that parents might find objectionable for young children.

Present and Future of Gaming

Since the late 1980s the U.S. electronic gaming market has continued its rise, with the majority of the gaming industry's revenues coming from console systems and games. After the NES ran its course with estimated sales of 60 million units worldwide, the Sega Genesis video game system enjoyed a period of popularity. The electronics giant Sony entered the fray in 1995 when it released PlayStation in the United States. Nintendo answered Sony's challenge with Nintendo 64 in 1996, which sold 1.7 million units in the United States in the first three months, according to Michael Miller, in "A History of Home Video Game Consoles" (April 1, 2005, http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=378141). In 2000 Sony PlayStation launched the PlayStation 2. Taking note of the profits brought in by successful gaming systems, Microsoft, the largest software firm in the United States, launched the Xbox in 2001. Both Sony and Microsoft funded enormous advertising campaigns to promote their systems, and Microsoft sold its system for a loss to introduce it into more homes. Peter Lewis stated in "Should You Wait for the PS3?" (Fortune, November 22, 2005, http://money.cnn.com/2005/11/21/technology/playstation_fortune_112805) that over 96 million PlayStation 2 consoles and 25 million Xbox systems had sold worldwide by the end of 2005. With the release of the Xbox 360 in 2005 and the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii in 2006, the video game market enjoyed double-digit year-over-year growth. By decade's end, however, overall sales began to slip. The marketing research firm NPD Group reports in the press release "2009 U.S. Video Game Industry and PC Game Software Retail Sales Reach $20.2 Billion" (January 14, 2010, http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_100114.html) that retail video games produced roughly $19.66 billion in sales in 2009, an 8% drop from 2008 revenues of $21.4 billion. Sales of console hardware saw the biggest decline (13%), while console and portable software also saw sales decrease by approximately 10%. By comparison, sales of portable hardware increased by 6% between 2008 and 2009.

Overall, the computer game market has grown at a slower pace than the video game market. In the 1990s with the advent of

Microsoft's Windows operating system, the computer game market split in two. Solitaire and countless other card and puzzle games found their way onto the desktops of every personal computer and provided a brief escape from work or schoolwork. At the same time, computers also became the platform for cutting-edge strategy and shooting games, which are generally played by a relatively small, devoted computer gaming audience. Graphics-intensive games such as Quake and Half Life 2 led to increased sales in computer components as gamers bought extra memory and bigger hard drives to boost computer performance to handle advanced graphic engines.

In the mid-1990s computer games began to go online. Hardcore fans of card games and battle and quest adventures found competitors on the Internet. The next generation of console systems also enabled gamers to go online and play against one another. In "The Future of Online Gaming" (PC Magazine, March 27, 2003), Cade Metz noted that by 2002 online gaming traffic made up nearly 9% of the overall traffic along the Internet backbone in the United States. The fastest growing segment of online gaming appeared to be in the console game market. Xbox Live, an online service for the Xbox, gained 350,000 subscriptions at the beginning of 2003. In 2005 Microsoft launched a more advanced version of the console, the Xbox 360. As Tor Thorsen reports in "Xbox 360 Sales Top 40 Million" (April 22, 2010, http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/driving/forzamotorsport3/news.html?sid=6259832), by the first quarter of 2010 Microsoft had sold more than 40 million Xbox 360 consoles worldwide.

By this time new technological innovations had created a rapidly expanding market for handheld gaming devices. In Social Media and Young Adults (February 2010, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults/Part-2/4-Gaming- devices.aspx?r=1), Lenhart et al. find that 51% of teens owned portable gaming devices in 2009, compared with 80% who owned game consoles. The study reveals that mobile gaming was more popular among younger teens in 2009; 66% of teens aged 12 to 13 owned portable gaming devices, compared with only 44% of teens aged 14 to 17. (See Figure 5.1:

.) As Figure 5.2: shows, teens represented the biggest market for both game consoles and portable gaming devices by decade's end.

Gaming Violence and Addiction

Over the years games have grown exceedingly more complex and engaging. The Sims series by Electronic Arts Inc. has provided gamers with a "real-life" fantasy world where they can simulate alternate lives. Game series such as Doom and Grand Theft Auto allow people to take out their aggressions on virtual demons or rival gang members. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs; in which a large number of players interact with each other in a virtual world that continues even when a player is offline), such as World of Warcraft, open up entire fantasy worlds where players are free to roam and embark on quests with other gamers.

As the complexity of games has grown, so, too, has the temptation for many to play video games in excess to escape their problems. Although still largely an unstudied phenomenon, gaming addiction appears to be more and more commonplace. In "Video Game Addiction: Is It Real?" (April 2, 2007, http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID=1196), Harris Interactive finds that about 23% of gamers aged eight to 18 reported in a January 2007 poll that they had felt addicted to video games at some time, and 8.5% suffered enough negative consequences from excessive play to be classified as addicted gamers. Those classified as addicted in the Harris poll played an average 24.5 hours per week, compared with 13 to 14 hours per week on average for all youth aged eight to 18. About two-thirds (65%) of addicted gamers had video game systems in their bedrooms. Harris Interactive notes that as a group they were more likely to have been diagnosed as having an attention deficit problem and were more likely to be receiving lower grades in school than those who played games less.

Many psychologists believe games provide a means of escape for people with stressful lives or mental problems in much the same way as drugs and alcohol. A number of symptoms that accompany gaming addiction are similar to those of other impulse control disorders, including alcoholism and drug abuse. These include preoccupation with gaming life over real-life events, failed attempts to stem gaming behavior, having a sense of well-being while playing games, craving more game time as well as feeling irritable when not playing, neglecting family and friends, lying about the amount of time spent gaming, and denying the adverse effects of too much gaming. In June 2007 the Council on Science and Public Health urged the American Medical Association to classify excessive gaming an addiction. Lindsey Tanner reports in "Is Video-Game Addiction a Mental Disorder?" (Associated Press, June 22, 2007, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19354827) that advocates of this classification hope the move will bring attention to the plight of those whose lives are affected by excessive gaming and will enable affected families to gain insurance coverage for treatment. As Nicholas K. Geranios reports in "Internet Addiction Center Opens in U.S." (Associated Press, September 4, 2009, http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/internet-addiction-center-opens-in-us/1351052), the first residential Internet addiction treatment facility in the United States was founded in Fall City, Washington, in July 2009. Dubbed ReSTART, the center offers a 45- day treatment program, at a cost of $14,000. In spite of increased awareness of the problem of video game and Internet addiction, as of 2010 the American Psychiatric Association still did not recognize either as official medical disorders.

Another problem people have with video games is violence. Parents and teachers have always been concerned that violent games may lead to violent aggressive behavior. Fears were fueled in 1999 by the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where two teenage students killed 15 people. In their suicide note, the teenage murderers said they drew inspiration from the video game Doom. In Grand Theft of Innocence? Teens and Video Games (September 16, 2003, http://www.gallup.com/poll/9253/Grand- Theft-Innocence-Teens-Video-Games.aspx), Steve Crabtree of the Gallup Organization indicates that many parents and educators are concerned about the violence in video games such as Grand Theft Auto. Crabtree states that the concern is perhaps justified. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of teens played video games at least one hour per week in 2003, and 60% of teens had at some point played a game in the Grand Theft Auto series. Not only do such violent games give teens a false impression of adult life but also

studies show that the games may hinder social development in some teens. According to Crabtree, a 2001 study at Tokyo University revealed that violent games stunt the development of the brain's frontal lobe, which is the part of the brain that controls antisocial behavior.

The ease with which young teens were able to obtain violent video games was also a cause for concern. As the Nielsen Company reports in Grand Theft Auto: The Brand That Hits (and Injures and Steals and ... Sells) (August 2008, http://en- us.nielsen.com/content/dam/nielsen/en_us/documents/pdf/White%20Papers%20and%20Reports%20II/Grand%20Theft%20Auto%20The%20Brand%20That%20Hits%20- %20August%202008.pdf), 17% of all video gamers who purchased Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008 were between the ages of seven and 16. Sixty-one percent of these reported having purchased the games themselves. Of those who had someone else purchase the game for them, 80% acquired it through a parent or guardian. To confront this trend, some state governments began to craft legislation aimed at keeping violent video games out of the hands of children. In 2005 the state of California passed a law making it illegal to sell violent video games to minors. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) challenged the legislation in federal court, and in 2009 the U.S. Ninth Court of Appeals declared the law unconstitutional. As Matt Miller reports in "California Submits Violent Video Game Argument to Supreme Court; ESA Responds" (July 13, 2010, http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/07/13/california-submits-violent-video-game-argument-to-supreme-court-esa- responds.aspx), California submitted an appeal to the Supreme Court in early 2010. Oral arguments in the case, known as Schwarzenegger v. EMA/Entertainment Software Association, were scheduled before the Supreme Court in November 2010.

In spite of the negative consequences sometimes associated with video games, several studies examining the positive effects of gaming have emerged over the years. In Video Games and Your Family (2010, http://www.media- awareness.ca/english/parents/video_games/upload/video_games_tip_sheet.pdf), the Media Awareness Network outlined numerous benefits that video games offered children. According to the report, video games had the potential to teach reading and other learning skills, promote socialization with other game players, and help young people feel more comfortable with technology. At the same time, the report cautions that the violent images found in some video games can have a negative impact on a young child's development, and that parents should play a role in steering their children away from potentially traumatizing games. Other researchers have questioned the link between violent video games and aggressive behavior altogether. In "The Hitman Study: Violent Video Game Exposure Effects on Aggressive Behavior, Hostile Feelings, and Depression" (European Psychologist, 2010, http://www.tamiu.edu/ CFERGUSON/hitman.pdf), Christopher J. Ferguson and Stephanie M. Rueda of Texas A&M International University find that there is no proven connection between violent games and aggression, while suggesting that in some cases violent games can actually help individuals suffering from depression or other mood disorders. In "ESA to Highlight Positive Effects of Video Games in Supreme Court Case" (August 3, 2010, http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/03/esa-to-highlight-positive- effects-of-video-games-in-supreme-court-case.aspx), Jeff Marchiafava states that Ferguson and Rueda's study was expected to serve as a key element of the ESA's argument in Schwarzenegger v. EMA/Entertainment Software Association.

Online Gambling

There is no doubt inside or outside the scientific community that gambling can be addictive. One troubling development on the Internet in the early 2000s was the continued rise in online gambling. According to a congressional statement by the U.S. deputy assistant attorney general John G. Malcolm (April 29, 2003, http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/Malcolmtestimony42903.htm), 700 Internet gambling sites existed in 1999. By 2003 the U.S. Department of Justice estimated that 1,800 gambling sites were in place, bringing in roughly $4.2 billion. The Economist reports in "You Bet; Online Gambling" (July 10, 2010) that online gambling generated more than $25 billion in revenues worldwide in 2009.

Many of these sites allow gamblers to wire money from their checking accounts into a gambling account run by the casino. When the player wishes to gamble, he or she simply goes online and begins a session. Because most of these big online gambling operations are based in foreign nations in the Caribbean or South America, the U.S. government cannot regulate them. Malcolm pointed to instances in which the online houses manipulated the software so that the odds of games such as blackjack are skewed heavily in the house's favor. Other fly-by-night gambling operations had simply run off with people's money. Even when these gambling houses are honest, they are still perceived as a threat to society by many lawmakers. People addicted to gambling, for example, might log in and gamble unfettered for hours at a time from work or home. They might lose hundreds or thousands of dollars with a few clicks of the mouse.

Malcolm also addressed the issue of money laundering through online casinos. Criminals who make their money from illegal activities such as drugs are known to use online casino accounts to stash their profits. Once the money is in the casino, the crooks use the games themselves to transfer money to their associates. Some criminals set up private tables at online casino sites and then intentionally lose their money to business associates at the table. In other instances, the casino is part of the crime organization. All the criminal has to do in these cases is to lose money to the casino.

In October 2006 Congress approved the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (Title VIII of the Security and Accountability for Every Port Act of 2006), which made it illegal for banks and credit card companies in the United States to make payments to Internet gambling sites, effectively ending online gambling nationwide. According to McCarthy and Swartz, PartyGaming, the world's largest online gambling company, generated 80% of its $1 billion revenue in 2005 from 920,000 active customers in the United States. At the time of the ban, the U.S. market accounted for an estimated 50% to 60% of online gambling worldwide. After the passage of the act, several bills came under consideration to review and revise the regulation of online gaming. Among the items introduced were the Skill Game Protection Act, a bill sponsored by Robert Wexler (1961-; D-FL) in 2007, which set out to exempt such games as poker, backgammon, and other games requiring skill from regulation under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act; the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act, sponsored by Barney Frank (1940-; D-MA) in 2009, which proposed legalizing online gambling under a new system of federal oversight and regulation; and the Internet Gambling Regulation and Tax Enforcement Act, a bill sponsored by Jim McDermott (1936-; D-WA) in 2010, which proposed licensing operators of Internet gambling sites and imposing taxes and fees on both gamers and site operators. As of fall 2010, however, no further legislative action had been signed into law.

Recorded Music

The conversion from analog recordings to digital music during the 1980s changed the way Americans listened to music. Humans talk and listen in analog. When people speak, they create vibrations in their throats that then travel through the air around them like ripples in a pond. A membrane in the ear, known as an eardrum, picks up these vibrations, allowing people to hear. Patterns in these vibrations enable people to differentiate sounds from one another. Before compact discs (CDs) and MP3 files, all music was recorded in analog form. On a record player, the vibrations that create music are impressed into grooves on a vinyl disc. A needle passing over this impression vibrates in the same way, turning those vibrations into electrical waveforms that travel along a wire to an amplifier and into a speaker. With tape players, the analog waveforms are recorded in electronic form nearly verbatim on a magnetic tape.

The biggest problem with analog recordings is that each time the music is recorded or copied, the waveform degrades in quality much like a photocopy of an image. Digitizing the music resolves this problem of fidelity. To record and play music digitally, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) are needed. In the recording process, the analog music is fed through the ADC, which samples the analog waveforms and then breaks them down into a series of binary numbers represented by zeros and ones. The numbers are then stored on a disc or a memory chip like any other type of digital information. To play the music back, these numbers are fed through a DAC. The DAC reads the numbers and reproduces the original analog waveform that

then travels to the headphones or speakers. Because the numbers always reproduce a high-quality version of the original recording, no quality (fidelity) is lost, regardless of how many times the song is transferred or recorded.

Compact Discs

Digital music was first introduced into the U.S. mainstream in 1983 in the form of CDs. Klaas Compaan, a Dutch physicist, originally came up with the idea for the CD in 1969 and developed a glass prototype a year later at Philips Corporation. Over the next nine years both Philips and Sony worked on various prototypes of a CD player. In 1979 the two companies came together to create a final version and set the standards for the CD. The first CD players were sold in Japan and Europe in 1982 and then in the United States in 1983.

With a standard CD, music is recorded digitally on the surface of a polycarbonate plastic disc in a long spiral track 0.00002 inches (0.00005 cm) wide that winds from the center of the disk to the outer edges. A space 0.00006 inches (0.00015 cm) wide separates each ring of the spiral track from the one next to it. Tiny divots, or pits, a minimum of 0.00003 inches (0.00008 cm) long, are engraved into the surface of the track. The polycarbonate disc is then covered by a layer of aluminum, followed by a layer of clear acrylic. (See

Figure 5.3: .) As the disc spins in the disc drive, a laser follows this tiny track counterclockwise, and a light sensor, sitting next to the laser, tracks the changes in the laser light as it reflects off the CD. The laser strikes a nondivoted section of track, which causes the laser light to bounce off the aluminum and then back to the light sensor uninterrupted. However, each time the laser hits one of the divots along the CD track, the light is scattered. These flashes of light represent the binary code that makes up the music. Electronics in the disc player read this code. The ones and zeros are then fed into a digital signal processor, which acts as a DAC, and the analog waveform for the music moves to the headphones or speakers.

When CD players were first released in the United States by both Sony and Philips in 1983, they were priced close to $900 apiece ($1,985 in 2011 dollars). The CDs themselves, which occupied a small section of the music store at the time, went for close to $20 apiece ($44 in 2011 dollars). Despite the high costs, the Census Bureau indicated in Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2003 (2004, http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/03statab/inforcomm.pdf) that 22.6 million CDs were sold in 1985. By 1990, 286.5 million CDs were sold. In Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010 (2010, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s1103.pdf), the Census Bureau reports that by 2000 this number peaked at 942.5 million, then dropped to 384.7 million by 2008 due to competition from MP3 players. Over the years CD players have become much more compact and have been equipped with many more features, often designed to increase sound quality. By 2011 personal CD players and portable CD stereo units were widely available for less than $50.

Rise of the MP3 Format

In 1985 the first CD read-only memory (CD-ROM) players were released for computers, again by Sony and Philips. CD-ROM players can read computer data from CD-ROMs as well as music from CDs. Even though people with early CD-ROMs were able to listen to CD music, downloading it onto a computer was difficult. A three-minute song on a CD consisted roughly of 32 megabytes. (Each byte consists of a string of eight ones and zeros that can be used to represent binary numbers from 0 to 255. In binary, which is a base- two number system, 1 is 00000001, 2 is 00000010, 3 is 00000011, and so on up to 255, which is represented as 11111111.) During the late 1980s and early 1990s most computer hard drives were only big enough to hold a few songs straight from an audio CD. In 1987 researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Germany began to look into ways to compress digital video and sound data into smaller sizes for broadcasting purposes. Out of this work, the MP2 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer II) and then the MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer III) audio file formats emerged. Other compression formats, such as Windows Media Audio and Advanced Audio Coding, have come onto the market since then but are not nearly as well known.

Using such compression formats and encoding software, digital songs can be compressed from 32 megabytes per song to as little as 3 megabytes per song. CD recordings pick up any and every sound in a studio or concert. Compression systems, such as MP3, work by cutting out sounds in CD recordings that people do not pay attention to or do not hear. This may include sounds drowned out by louder instruments. In classical music, an MP3 encoder might cut out a nearly indiscernible note from a flautist or the sound of a faint cough in the audience. It then condenses the recording to one-tenth its previous size. When played back, the encoder reconstructs the song. The compressed files sound nearly as good as CD tracks and much better than audiotapes.

At first, these compression formats and encoding software existed only on home computers. In February 1999 Diamond Multimedia released the first hard drive-based music player. Because early players mainly played MP3 formats, all hard drive-based music players, such as the Apple iPod, became known as MP3 players. All MP3 players consist of a hard drive (many were available in 60 to 500 gigabyte range in 2010) and all the electronic circuitry necessary to transform MP3 and other compressed music files into analog music. Using a cable, these players can be hooked up directly to a home computer. Once connected, the user can download thousands of songs onto the hard drive of the MP3 device. When the user selects a song, a microprocessor in the player pulls the song from the hard drive. A built-in signal processor decompresses the MP3 file (or other type of compressed music file) into a digital CD format, converts the digital signal to an analog signal, and then sends the analog waveform to the headphones. Though compressed music files do not sound quite as good as CD tracks, people can place their entire music collection on a player smaller than the palm of their hand. Since 1999 significant advances in technology have led to major improvements in iPods and other MP3 players. In 2010 most new players had color screens and the ability to play video files, which were typically compressed using a MPEG-4 video compression format.

MP3 and Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

The widespread use of MP3 files and the increased size of hard drives in the late 1990s caused a sea change in the music industry almost as big as the advent of digital music. People suddenly had the ability to store entire music libraries on their computers and swap music for free over peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. According to Michael Gowan, in "Requiem for Napster" (PC World, May 17, 2002, http://www.pcworld.com/article/100004/requiem_for_napster.html), the Napster file-sharing service had approximately 80 million subscribers at its peak. However, the availability of free music cut deeply into the recording industry's sales. The Census Bureau states in Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010 (2010,

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s1103.pdf) that the recording industry had revenues of $14.3 billion in 2000. Sales then fell steadily over the next eight years, eventually dropping to $8.5 billion by 2008.

Seeing diminishing profits at the turn of the 21st century, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster and the users of other peer-to-peer networks who shared music files. Some high-profile bands at the time, such as Metallica and Creed, joined the RIAA in its attempt to close down Napster. Other musicians, however, did not seem fazed by Internet file sharing. Radiohead released its 2000 album Kid A on the Internet three weeks before it was released in stores. The buzz generated by the Internet prerelease catapulted the album to number one in the United States after it hit record stores. Before Kid A, Radiohead had never had a number-one album in the United States.

The lawsuits brought on by the RIAA succeeded in putting an end to much of the free file-swapping on the Internet. The free Napster Web site shut down in July 2001 and reopened later as a pay music service where users could buy songs. After the RIAA began going after private citizens, traffic on many of the remaining peer-to-peer sites diminished greatly. The number of people using noncentralized peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa dropped precipitously after the RIAA became litigious with file swappers in 2003. Lee Rainie et al. of Pew/Internet reported in the data memo The Impact of Music Industry Suits against Music File Swappers (January 2004, http://www.pewinternet.org/ /media//Files/Reports/2004/PIP_File_Swapping_Memo_0104.pdf.pdf) that only 14% of American adults downloaded music from the Internet in the last two months of 2003, compared with 29% only six months earlier. Meanwhile, sales of digital music downloads increased rapidly over the remainder of the decade. According to Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010 (2010, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s1103.pdf), Americans purchased 139.4 million digital singles in 2004, along with 4.6 million digital albums. By 2008 Americans purchased over a billion singles online, and nearly 57 million albums. According to Apple (2010, http://www.apple.com/pr/products/ipodhistory), by June 2008 the company had sold five billion songs through its iTunes service. By February 2010 the total number of songs sold on iTunes had climbed to ten billion.

Television

Although inventors had been trying to create a television as early as 1877, many people consider Philo Farnsworth (1906-1971) to be the father of the first modern, electronic television. He demonstrated his device for the first time in San Francisco in 1927, when he transmitted an image of a dollar sign. Using Farnsworth's design, Radio Corporation of America (RCA; then the owner of the National Broadcasting Company [NBC] network) began work on the first commercial television system in the late 1930s. In 1939 the first commercial televisions were introduced. Early televisions had tiny screens and were as big as small dressers. The pictures were in black and white, and at first the major networks only broadcast in the largest cities. Full-scale broadcasting began nationwide in 1947. According to the Museum of the Moving Image (2008, http://www.movingimage.us/site/education/content/behind/page17.html), by 1956, 85% of U.S. households owned a television set. By 1980 television had saturated the U.S. market with 97.9% of U.S.

households owning a television. (See Table 5.1: .)

Since the early 1960s television has been the most popular medium of entertainment for Americans. In There's No Place Like Home to Spend an Evening, Say Most Americans (January 10, 2002, http://www.gallup.com/poll/5164/Theres-Place-Like-Home-Spend- Evening-Say-Most-Americans.aspx), Lydia Saad of the Gallup Organization reported that 27% of Americans in a December 1960 poll said their favorite way of spending their evening was in front of a television. Resting, reading, and entertaining and visiting friends were ranked second, third, and fourth, respectively. Television appeared to hit its peak between the mid-1960s and early 1970s. A full 46% of people polled in February 1974 rated watching television as their favorite evening activity, followed by reading (14%), dining out (12%), and the somewhat ambiguous response of "staying at home with the family" (10%).

A survey reported in the Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010 (2010, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s1096.pdf) finds that in 2008 just over 94% of adults had watched television within the week prior to participating in the survey. Of those, 81% had viewed cable television during that period. Among age groups, seniors watched more television than any other demographic, with 96.5% of those 65 and older watching TV during the previous week. By comparison, 90.2% of those aged 18 to 24 had watched television over that same span. As the Nielsen Company reveals in Television, Internet and Mobile Usage in the U.S.: Three Screen Report (2010, http://en- us.nielsen.com/content/dam/nielsen/en_us/documents/pdf/Three%20Screen%20 Reports/Nielsen_Three%20Screen%20Report_Q12010.PDF), the overall number of television viewers increased 0.6% between the first quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010, from 284.5 million to 286.2 million. Over that same span, the average amount of time viewers spent watching television in a month also grew, from 156 hours and 24 minutes to 158 hours and 25 minutes, an increase of just over two hours per month. By comparison, in 2010 respondents spent an average of roughly 25.5 hours a month on the Internet, just over three hours watching video on the Internet, and approximately three and a half hours watching video on their mobile phones. The report also shows that 57.8% of respondents watch television while simultaneously surfing the Web.

Cable Television

Since the 1970s steady advances in cable, satellite, and digital technology have changed the way Americans watch television. Cable television was installed in 19.9% of U.S. households with a television in 1980 (about 15.2 million homes). (See Table 5.1:

.) This percentage rose dramatically through the early 1990s, leveling out at about seven out of ten American television households after 2000.

Cable television began in 1948 in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania. John Walson (1915-1993), the owner of an electronics shop, began selling televisions in 1947. However, few customers in the local area wanted to buy a television because of the bad reception caused by the surrounding mountains. To increase sales potential, Walson erected an antenna on a nearby mountaintop, ran a cable from the antenna to his store, and connected it to his television. He then agreed to attach cables from his antenna to the houses of those who bought televisions from him. From then until the early 1970s, cable networks were generally only used in rural or mountainous areas. At most, early cable television programming included local broadcasts and a broadcast or two from a nearby region.

As early as 1965 the U.S. government and various contractors began putting up a communications satellite network. A satellite network remedied the biggest obstacle faced by broadcasters during the 1960s, which was the curvature of the earth. If the earth was flat, televisions could receive broadcast signals from thousands of miles away. However, because of the curvature of the earth, these broadcast signals escape into space after traveling about 100 miles (161 km). With a satellite system in place, a transmitter on the East Coast can beam a signal to a satellite above Kansas. The satellite then relays the signal to the West Coast without interruption.

Home Box Office (HBO) became the first pay cable station in 1972 and was the first television broadcaster to take advantage of a satellite communications network. HBO began in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and broadcast its movies and shows to a limited number of cable networks in and around the state. In 1975, to expand the subscription television market, HBO leased the right to use one of the uplinks on RCA's Satcom I communications satellite. Once HBO was on the satellite network, any cable network provider around the United States could buy a 9.8-foot (3-m) satellite dish and provide HBO for any house on the network. By 1978 HBO had one million customers. Ted Turner (1938-), who put his Atlanta-based station, WTBS, on the satellite network in 1976, created the Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980. This was followed by the Music Television Network (MTV) and a number of other stations in 1981, and an era of exponential growth for the cable industry followed. Table 5.2:

summarizes the growth in the cable and pay television industry between 1975 and 2009. Between 1975 and 2001, basic cable subscriptions skyrocketed 581%, from 9.8 million to 66.7 million. Cable subscriptions gradually decreased over the next decade, however, falling to 62.9 million in 2009.

The early 1980s also saw the emergence of videocassette recorders (VCRs). As the Nielsen Company reports in Television Audience 2008 (2009, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/tva_2008_071709.pdf), the percentage of television households with VCRs rose from 14% in 1985 to 66% in 1990, eventually climbing to 90% by 2005. As the market turned from videotape to digital video discs (DVDs), however, the percent of homes with a VCR began to fall steadily, dropping to 72% by 2009.

Closed Captioning and the V-Chip

By the mid-1970s television had become the predominant medium not only for entertainment but also for news and emergency information. Recognizing this, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set aside part of the television broadcast spectrum for closed captioning for the hearing impaired. Closed captioning consists of scrolling text at the bottom of a television screen that spells out what is being said on television. Four years after the FCC action, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and NBC ran their first closed-captioned programs, which included the Wonderful World of Disney and the ABC Sunday Night Movie. At first, closed captioning was scripted, but then the National Captioning Institute developed a keyboard interface that could be used to create captioning for live television shows, sporting events, and newscasts. A stenographer

listened to the audio portion of a broadcast and typed it into the broadcast in real time. In 1990 Congress required that all television receivers contain decoders that display closed captioning, and in the 1996 Telecommunications Act Congress insisted that closed captioning be included in all shows by the turn of the 21st century.

As part of this act, Congress also requested that broadcasters rate their shows. The industry heeded the request and developed the TV Parental Guidelines. At the start of every television show, a rating is shown in the corner of the screen for 15 seconds. TV-G designates general audiences, whereas TV-MA warns of content not suitable for anyone under 17. Even with the ratings system in place, parents across the country found they still could not monitor all the shows on cable as well as on broadcast television. Gloria Tristani (1953-), the FCC commissioner, said in a speech delivered at the 1999 Columbia/Barnard May luncheon (May 25, 1999, http://www.fcc.gov/Speeches/Tristani/spgt910.html) that the average child spent 25 hours per week in front of the television. In response, the FCC mandated in 2000 that all television sets 13 inches or larger contain a V-chip. The V-chip worked in conjunction with the ratings system. If a parent set the V-chip to allow only TV-G shows, the microchip would simply block every show not rated TV-G.

Advances in Television since the Mid-1990s

In 1994 a new way of broadcasting movie and television shows became available when RCA released its Direct Satellite System (DSS). The DSS was the first affordable satellite receiver available to the American public. By installing an 18-inch (46-cm) satellite dish on their houses, Americans could receive nearly 200 channels in their living rooms. To squeeze so many channels into a stream of data small enough to travel through space and back, the direct broadcasting satellite provider had to use a form of digital compression known as MPEG-1. The MPEG-1 compression format works much like an MP3 format. (The MP3 format in fact was developed from the audio portion of MPEG-1 format.) To employ the MPEG-1 format, all television shows recorded in analog must first be transformed by ADCs into a digital format. MPEG-1 encoders, owned by the direct broadcasting satellite provider, then compress the digital data largely by removing redundant scenery between frames. For example, if a character's face movement is the only discernable change between two frames in a movie, then the background from the first frame is applied to both frames, cutting out the redundant information in the second frame. The compressed signal is then beamed to the satellite network. On receiving the signal, the satellite network broadcasts the signal to homes all across the country. A DSS box in the home decompresses the signal and delivers it to the viewer.

Several years after the first direct broadcast satellites were released, cable companies introduced digital cable. Digital cable works in much the same way as direct broadcast satellites, but uses a slightly more advanced MPEG-2 format for compression. By digitally compressing their programming, cable providers found they could transmit ten times more television stations than before along their cables. Many cable providers added music stations, pay-per-view movies, and multiple movie channels to their services. The only drawback with both the digital cable and satellite systems is that the decoder can only work on one television at a time, and it is usually bulky.

In terms of television accessories, the big development during the late 1990s was the DVD. DVDs work almost exactly in the same way as CDs, but the standard DVD can hold up to seven times more information per disc, which allows the DVD to carry the data needed for much larger video files. Since its release in 1997, the DVD quickly rose to become the preferred format for watching recorded movies. In Television Audience 2008 the Nielsen Company reveals that 76% of TV households owned a DVD player in 2006, compared with 89% that owned a VCR. By 2009 the percentage of TV households with a DVD player climbed to 88%, whereas VCR ownership dropped to 72%.

The design and quality of TV sets also experienced a radical evolution during the 1990s and 2000s. Among the most significant innovations was the development of flat screen (or flat panel) televisions. Flat screen televisions offered numerous advantages over traditional television sets. For one, flat screens were more streamlined and energy efficient than traditional televisions, which used bulky cathode ray tubes to generate images. At the same time, flat screens offered the potential for a higher-resolution picture quality. The two principal technologies behind the emergence of flat screens were liquid crystal display (LCD) and plasma. Already widely used in calculators and laptop computers, LCD screens are composed of two polarized panels containing millions of liquid crystals, each of which controls a particular aspect of the light being projected through the screen. Plasma screens, on the other hand, contain tubes of gases that emit light when charged with electricity. By manipulating light in this way, LCD and plasma technologies are able to project images onto a television screen. The first flat screen plasma televisions became widely available to consumers in 1997, and cost more than $7,000 ($9,582 in 2011 dollars). While LCD technology developed more gradually, by the early part of the new century LCD TVs began to compete with plasma models. Many higher-quality LCD televisions also began to use Light Emitting Diode (LED) backlighting technology, which produced a sharper picture quality while requiring less energy.

The Development of 3D Television.

By 2010 a number of television manufacturers had introduced three-dimensional (3D) television sets. Most of the new models projected 3D images to viewers wearing special glasses, but in late 2010 Toshiba began offering the Regza, a flat-panel 3D television that required no glasses. Instead, as Dan Reisinger reports in "Digital Home" (October 4, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20018421-17.html), the Regza presented multiple images of each 2D frame that viewers' brains "superimposed ... to create a three-dimensional impression of the image." At the time of the product release, the sets were available only in 12- and 20-inch models, and the 3D effect was viewable only within a limited area 2 to 3 feet (0.61 to 0.91 meters) from the screen. In addition, Sarah Jacobsson Purewal reports in PC World (November 4, 2010, http://www.pcworld.com/article/209772/holographic_tv_coming_your_way_in_2017.html), that researchers at the University of Arizona had developed a holographic television system "that can render an image in near real-time and update the image every two seconds." With improvements in the capture, refresh rate, and projection speed of holographic images, Purewal notes, true 3D television projection could be commercially available by 2017 and is expected by 2022.

Television and the Internet

As higher connection speeds and faster computers became more widespread, the Internet became a popular source of video entertainment. By the early 21st century, several video-sharing Web sites had been established, enabling Internet users from around the world to post videos and other recorded content online. Of these sites, YouTube quickly emerged as one of the most popular. Created in February 2005, YouTube allowed visitors to view and upload videos free of charge, while also enabling users to create their own accounts and video libraries. In "Video Websites Pop Up, Invite Postings" (USA Today, November 22, 2005, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2005-11-21-video-websites_x.htm), Jefferson Graham reports that the site had more than 200,000 registered users by late 2005. Traditional media outlets quickly recognized the marketing potential of YouTube, and soon clips from television programs, movie trailers, news features, and other mainstream content became available on the video site. YouTube's rapidly increasing popularity soon attracted the attention of major media and technology corporations, who regarded the site as a means of reaching new audiences of younger consumers. Indeed, the site's growth was staggering; as Andrew Ross Sorkin reports in the New York Times (October 10, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/technology/10deal.html), by October 2006 YouTube visitors were watching more than 100 million videos a day, a 4,900% increase in less than a year. A month later, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion.

The success of YouTube inspired a wide range of other online outlets for video content. Prominent among these was Hulu, a streaming video site that airs shows and movies produced by major studios and TV networks. A number of other sites, particularly

news and sports outlets, began to use video as a way of augmenting or supplementing their written content. As Kristen Purcell of Pew/Internet reveals in The State of Online Video (June 3, 2010, http://www.pewinternet.org/ /media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP-The- State-of-Online-Video.pdf), by 2009 more than two-thirds (69%) of Internet users had viewed or downloaded videos via the Internet. Younger Internet users were most likely to view or download videos online: 84% of Internet users aged 18 to 29 had viewed or downloaded videos, compared with 74% of Internet users between the ages of 30 and 49, and 53% of users over 50. According to the report, comedy was the most popular genre of online content in 2009, with 50% of online adults claiming to have watched comedy videos over the Internet. Other popular content included news shows (43%), educational programming (38%), movies or TV shows

(32%), music videos (32%), and political content (30%). (See Figure 5.4: .) As Table 5.3:

shows, comedy videos were most popular among respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 (93%). News shows were more popular among viewers between the ages of 30 and 49 (72%) than among older (59%) or younger viewers (52%).

Digital Television

Many confuse the concept of digital cable with digital television. Digital cable simply uses digital technology to compress the size of broadcasts so the customer has more channels. The digital signal also does not degrade as it travels across miles of coaxial cable. Most of the programming fed through the digital cable systems is not digitally recorded. Digital television, however, is digital from start to finish. Digital cameras are used to record the broadcast; cables, satellite systems, and broadcast towers send a digital signal; and digital televisions play the broadcast. The result is a television picture that more closely resembles an image on a computer monitor than an image on a television set. The FCC established a number of standards for digital television, which became mandatory for full- power stations on June 12, 2009. (See Table 5.4:

.) Standard-definition television (SDTV) has the resolution of an analog television, which is roughly 480 by 440 dots per inch (dpi) or 210,000 pixels in total. The next step up in visual quality is enhanced-definition television (EDTV), which generally has the same overall resolution as SDTV but features a wider screen. Finally, high-definition television (HDTV) is the highest quality television format with resolutions up to 1,920 dpi horizontally and 1,080 dpi vertically. Overall, HDTV has more than 2 million pixels to display each image, which provides the viewer with ten times the detail of SDTV. For a television to meet HDTV standard, it also has to have the ability to play the latest versions of Dolby stereo.

As HDTV became more widespread, electronics manufacturers began to develop a higher quality DVD format known as Blu-ray. Capable of storing between 25 and 50 gigabytes of data, Blu-ray discs produced a picture definition that was far sharper than that offered by conventional DVDs. The first Blu-ray player was released by Sony in 2006. By 2010 about 19.4 million Blu-ray players had been sold in the United States, according to industry tracking figures reported by Dave Itzkoff in the New York Times (August 15,

2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/movies/16lucas.html).

The digital television standards were adopted by the FCC after Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The act called for a full conversion to digital television across the United States within ten years. By 2006 every television station serving every market in the United States would be required to air digital programming. In addition, broadcasters would no longer have to air analog content. Americans with an analog television set would be required to buy either a digital television or a $50 to $100 ADC device to watch television. In 2005, however, only a small percentage of Americans had HDTV or even EDTV. Consequently, in 2005 Congress pushed the deadline for the digitization of television to February 17, 2009. This deadline, too, was later extended to June 2009.

On January 1, 2008, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce began issuing $40 coupons that defrayed the cost of converter boxes, allowing consumers to continue using older, analog television sets after the conversion to digital broadcasting. Households were eligible to receive two coupons and were required to redeem them toward the purchase of converter boxes within 90 days. In December 2009 the TV Converter Box Coupon Program released the final number of coupon requests that had been received, processed, and redeemed. As of December 9, 2009, the program had received 64.1 million requests, and had approved coupons for 34.8 million households. (See Table 5.5:

.)

Journalism and New Media

The many advances in new media have fundamentally changed the manner in which Americans get their news. Table 5.6:

reveals the ways in which people received their daily news from August 1995 through December 2008. In general, cable news networks, talk radio, and Internet news sources increased in popularity over these years, whereas nightly network news programs and local newspapers showed declines. Evening news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC took the biggest hit, with viewership dropping from 62% in August 1995 to 34% in December 2008. Daily readership of local newspapers increased slightly between March 1998 and July 1999 to a peak of 54% before declining to 44% in 2004, and eventually falling to 40% by 2008. The biggest increase occurred among Americans who got their daily news from cable television networks, which rose from 23% in August 1995 to 41% in December 2002, then dropped to 34% by 2006, before eventually increasing to 40% by 2008. The number of people who said they received their news from the Internet increased from 3% in August 1995 to 31% in December 2008. Local television newscasts held fairly steady over the survey period and were the most popular source of daily news as of 2008.

A likely explanation for the decrease in network news viewership and newspaper readership could be that more people are turning to the Internet to get their daily news. The Internet has made getting news much more convenient. With the Internet, hundreds of magazines and news sites can be accessed in seconds. At the same time, the advent of mobile technology and social networking sites made sharing news and information with others faster and easier. In Understanding the Participatory News Consumer (March 1, 2010, http://www.pewinternet.org/ /media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP_Understanding_the _Participatory_News_Consumer.pdf), Kristen Purcell et al. report that in late 2009 and early 2010 a majority (59%) of American adults received news each day through a combination of online and offline sources. At the same time, the report indicates that 33% of mobile users acquire news through the handheld devices. Among Internet users, 81% turned to the Internet for information about the weather; 73% read national news stories online, and 47% used the Web to find news about celebrities or entertainment.

Besides gaining popularity among Internet users, online news and information sources have also experienced increasing revenue. Online publishers generated approximately $15.5 billion in 2007, a 20% increase over 2006 ($12.9 billion). (See Table 5.7:

.) Of this sum, $8.5 billion was attributed to publishing and broadcasting content on the Internet.

High technology has not only changed how news and information are sold but also how reporters and writers do their jobs. Advanced communications and video technology have allowed reporters with established organizations to report from anywhere in the world in real time, something that most modern viewers take for granted. With the Internet, anyone can report on current events or start a publication or Web log (blog) and begin writing commentary. No longer do reporters and writers have to work for a large publishing house or magazine to build a reputation. Some blogs have grown so popular that they have a readership bigger than some major newspapers and magazines. For example, Matt Drudge (1967-) began the Drudge Report Web site/blog in 1997 to report on current events. He was largely responsible for breaking the story of President Bill Clinton's (1946-) relationship with the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky (1973-) in 1998. By October 2010 the Web site (October 16, 2010, http://www.drudgereport.com) reported more than 8.8 billion visits in the previous 12 months and a daily tally of 27.2 million.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Meyer, Stephen. "Electronics, the Internet, and Entertainment Media." Electronic America, 2011 ed., Gale, 2011. Information Plus

Reference Series. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ191900105/OVIC?u=txshracd2512&sid=OVIC&xid=00300edd. Accessed 4 May 2021.

Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ191900105