Consumers have moved rapidly to adopting digital formats for entertainment content related to consumption. The most obvious example is the music and video downloads, with Apple's iTunes and You Tube as leading examples. Apple has sold over one billion songs through its iTunes music store and it continues to show a spectacular growth rates. Over 30 million people bought an iPod portable music player, and tens of millions of other consumers use one of dozens of other portable devices to play music. Other platforms for listening to music are equally successful, and in the case of Windows Media Player from Microsoft even more dominant with over 90,000,000 systems running the software in the world. Real Networks' Rhapsody and Yahoo Music to represent other major players in this space. In addition to these companies selling downloads of licensed music for a fee, peer-to-peer services like Limewire and Morpheus claim to have tens of millions of users sharing music and other files on an ongoing basis. As consumers have become comfortable buying (and stealing) music online, they are now starting to download other forms of digital entertainment, including music videos, short films, subject, television, and same throughout the length of Hollywood pictures. The traditional media companies have recognized the opportunity to establish new revenue and assets of former lever allowing consumers to download television shows for a fee, and the rate of adoption seems to match the early days of downloading music . The growing penetration of broadband connections (more than 50 million households in the U.S.), advances in software that enables high quality downloads, and content companies to recognize a huge opportunity to distribute directly and at lower cost for consumers has created a tidal change in the number of digital multimedia resources available for download on computers, handheld devices and even cell phones.
Companies like YouTube is at the forefront of the intersection of video entertainment and media fragmentation due to the empowerment of the consumer. Hundreds of millions of videos are uploaded every week starting from YouTube (as well as dozens of competitors), and a significant portion of these videos are not professionally produced. More importantly, new talent in various entertainment fields are discovered through these distribution platforms and forever change the way entertainment is created, produced, distributed and evaluated.