Look At College Kids To Understand What's Happening With Digital Entertainment
from the new-habits-die-hard dept
An interesting, if not very focused, article in the Red Herring about how college students are responding to digital entertainment initiatives. For one thing, they've got very used to not paying for any content, and that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon. They've also found that while the computer with broadband access has become a central part of their lives, they don't use it the way most people expected them to (or, rather, the way major entertainment companies expected them to). The article makes a really interesting point, which probably should be the focus of the article, but isn't: many of the failed entertainment companies and projects say the problem was that broadband acceptance was too slow and there wasn't a critical mass of people who could really enjoy their services. However, college students have shown that they end up using their broadband connections differently - and a lot of that is due to bandwidth "caps" that universities are giving their students. They're being careful what they "spend" their limited bandwidth on - and they certainly don't want to pay any money on top of that.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
