Digital Information

Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/) is a popular website that offers free media, such as music videos, movie and television clips, along with amateur video sharing. Youtube makes their revenue through advertisements that are placed throughout their pages, which is how many other high traffic websites seem to generate revenue such as myspace and facebook so that users may still use the websites free of charge.
The consumer has the freedom to share the video with others whether by posting the clip on other websites or emailing it. Users are also able to comment on the videos, posting their personal input as to what they thought of it and rate it, which sometimes turns out to be more interesting than the actual media itself.

Radio websites such as Yahoo! Music (http://new.music.yahoo.com/), offer free access to individual music videos that they can put together into a personalized playlist or listen to the radio online. They also make profit through advertisement but with additional placement besides just webpage ads, where an advertisement is played before a video, or played in between songs on the radio. In order to avoid the ads, have a larger range of radio stations and be able to skip through an unlimited number of songs while listening to the radio, users may pay a monthly subscription fee.
Consumers are able to pick playlists (songs they are interested in listening to) either by music genre or selecting individual songs. Similar to Youtube, users may embed the video on other websites, email the video and rate it. While listening to the radio, users may skip past 3 songs of their choice, but in order to skip through more, they have to join the monthly subscription.

Certain television websites such as NBC (http://www.nbc.com/) offer full version reruns to consumers via online. They too generate revenue through advertisements, similarly to the radio websites, they have ads plastered on their pages and a 30 second commercial plays while the video loads.
Consumers are able to view the reruns as if it were on dvd, going back or skipping forward certain parts (when skipping forward, a commercial comes on while the video loads). Unfortunately, we cannot skip forward, past the commercials. *joke*