Online Entertainment

Online Entertainment

One of the main reasons why the online world has taken off is due to the fact of entertainment. There are many different types of entertainment such as music, video or games; some people consider communication online with friends and families as a part of entertainment as well. Some popular websites like Omegle let you chat with random people from around the world that are on the website at the same time, there are an average of about 10,000 people on there at all times.

Downloading videos form a central part of entertainment.

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One thing that you can do online is play games and interact with others in the virtual world. Some examples of this are games like ‘Second Life’ or ‘Minecraft’ which are very popular with people form around the world and are constantly expanding with the amount of users they have. In ‘Second Life’ you are able to design your own character, set their hobbies and generally everything about them, then they are able to join things called ‘Realms’ which are really different servers for people that speak different languages or to just get a better connection to the server hosting the game. Within realms you are able to join different lobbies for different topics of pop-culture like certain movies/TV Shows or fan-bases.

Another very popular interactive multiplayer game is ‘Minecraft’. This game is based on building and construction, similar to Lego. You either have the option to play on
your own is single player mode or search multiplayer servers online. There are many different servers that include special interactive games within Miecraft as well as other modes like ‘Free Build’ where players are able to join and build where ever with friends. This is a very popular interactive game as a lot of people tend to play online with their friends.

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Another part of entertainment is music online. The music industry has changed dramatically over the past years because of the online service, which has caused big record labels and stores like HMV to close down due to the increase of people buying music digitally. People prefer to buy music online as it is much easier as you are able to instantly buy music and download it on places like ITunes, as well as buy separate songs instead of buying the whole album like you would hav
e to do with a physical CD copy.

To play MP3 files, people need MP3 players meaning that MP3 players like the IPod sales have dramatically risen over the years as people like to listen to music ‘on the go’ with them and not just at home where they might have a computer or a CD player to play the music instead.

Because of the online industry of music, it has changed the format in which music comes in which are formats like MP3 and MP4. Originally music came on vinyl disks which produce an analogue sound, which is real sound unlike digital format which is compressed.


Analogue is the sounds that we hear everyday, analogue wave forms are infinite meaning that they do not have a fixed point in the travel of the sound wave; vinyl is analogue as the disk has the real sound scratched into the disk that the vinyl player later picks up, where as digital sound has got a fixed point as the sound wave keeps on going on and off really fast to the point that our ears pick it up as one long sound. For example some lights do this as well where they keep flashing on and off really fast to the point that we think the light is constantly on, in reality the room is going black for a split second and then back alight again, our eyes manage to pick this up but our brain converts this into a long stream of light, that’s why long exposure to artificial light can cause eye strains.

The analogue entertainment that we enjoy today, has become much more accessible due to the internet, as we can easily and quickly download music, as we can easily share music online unlike in real-life with vinyl or any analogue music you would have to actually record the music in its original form.

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E-Books are another very popular type of entertainment as you can download entire books in an amazingly quick time and be able to read them on any tablet which proves to be much more convenient as books tend to be quite tricky to carry around with you everyday.

Amazon which is a product distribution service now as well, used to specialize in books retail. With its recent expansion, Amazon has created the Kindle where you are able to download E-Books from Amazons E-Book store and read up to a 1,000 any time you want.

With the creation of E-Books and E-Book retailers like Amazon, the business in physical books has been greatly effected by loosing sales and have stripped physical paper books, because of this, many book retail stores have had to shut down due to the low business.

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The advantages of Music online entertainment is that you are able to download single songs instead of havening to buy an entire album, as well as no having to physically go in store to buy it and the fact that you can download music within seconds which is much more convenient.

An advantage of the E-Books is that you are able to carry around over 1,000 books with you at any time and read them on any tablet device, which removes the need of carrying physical paper books around, as well as removing the fact that you have to go to the store to buy it and the book that you might want, might not always be in stock!

One Limitation of music online is that the quality tends to be slightly worse than analogue sound as the MP3 format compresses the audio to make the file size smaller. A limitation of the E-Book is similar to the same concept of MP3 with the quality as when your read the E-Books on your tablet, you are able to see individual pixels on the screen.

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I personally always listen to music online through platforms like YouTube or Spotify as it seems much more convenient for me instead of going in store to buy an album, but also the fact that you can easily get access to new songs that have been released very recently. I have however never bought an E-Book mainly because I prefer the touch of a physical book, I’m also not too much of a reader so I don’t really need to invest into a tablet like the Kindle for reading books, but it might be something that I might look into, in the future if I have more time and read more.