Entertainment has been big business pretty much since the dawn of man, and its two dominant forms today are film and music. If you can furnish people with easy access to their favorite songs, movies, and TV programs, you're halfway home to having a respectable ecosystem.

Music





Apple stole a march on the competition early last decade with its introduction of the iTunes music store. Digital music distribution up to that point had been conducted almost entirely via illegal file sharing and people hadn't yet become accustomed to paying for downloads. iTunes, buoyed by the phenomenally popular iPod, was the one big-name platform to succeed in cracking that market, and everyone has been catching up ever since.

Amazon's MP3 store emulates iTunes with a web-based interface — eschewing the need for dedicated software — and throws in its own Cloud Player app that will store and stream 5GB of your music to Windows and Android devices. Google Music does pretty much the same thing, swapping the 5GB cloud storage limit for a cap of 20,000 tracks, though its big shortcoming at the moment is that it's limited to just the United States. Apple has no cost-free countermeasure to these budding cloud music services, with its iTunes Match requiring a $25 annual fee to synchronize your music collection across devices. It may be worth it for people with a huge library of music, but then Amazon undercuts that price with a $20 per year service that provides unlimited cloud storage for AAC and MP3 files plus 20GB of general-purpose online backup. Among these three similar services, Amazon has the lead in value and accessibility, but Apple clearly has a lot of user inertia built up from its earlier dominance of the market.

Microsoft and Sony tread a different path. The Zune Marketplace charges a flat $9.99 monthly fee and then gives you unlimited access to all the licensed music and music videos at Microsoft's disposal. You can consume that content on your PC, Xbox 360 console, or Windows Phone handset. Sony matches the monthly cost of the Zune Music Pass with its own Music Unlimited subscription service, which offers a significantly better compatibility list: PlayStation 3, Bravia TVs and Blu-ray players, Walkman PMPs, Android devices, and, soon, iOS devices too. That and there's a cut-price $3.99 Basic monthly subscription option, though it performs a function more similar to iTunes Match — allowing you to only play music you already have in your Music Unlimited collection. Zune has greater flexibility, by virtue of allowing you to buy music as well as "rent" it via the monthly subscription, but Sony's cross-platform strategy gives Music Unlimited the edge in terms of accessibility.

Facebook doesn't have a music service of its own, but its recent efforts to plug into as many popular services as possible have meant that it doesn't really need one. You can stream Spotify, Last.fm, MOG, and Rdio content using only your Facebook credentials, although the latter are US-only services for now. In any case, the crown jewel for Facebook is Spotify, which has one of the richest choices of tracks around and will play up to 10 hours of ad-supported music for free each month (this limit's been removed in the US as an enticement to attract new customers). Its $4.99 subscription option nixes the ads and the playback limits, while a $9.99 Premium tier adds offline and mobile playback and thus squares off against Microsoft and Sony's similar offerings. Spotify arguably outdoes the pair thanks to its richer community participation and universal availability (there are apps for the iPhone and iPod touch, Android phones, BlackBerry, Palm phones, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, and yes, even Symbian).

Film and TV





Facebook's strategy of partnering with category leaders is repeated on the movie front, where it has arranged a deal with Netflix to allow Facebook Connect access to the film streaming service. Unfortunately, that only works outside the US due to the Video Privacy Protect Act of 1988, which prohibits video rental companies from disclosing personally identifiable information about their users. Netflix has pushed for an amendment of that law, but for the moment it remains without proper Facebook Connect functionality in its biggest market. This hitch exposes the rather flimsy underpinnings of Facebook's still nascent ecosystem: relying on other companies for the provision of content inevitably places the social network's services at the mercy of extrinsic forces. What happens if Spotify or Netflix cease to be independent and get gobbled up by the likes of Google? And the corollary of that, what will Facebook do in instances where the market leader in a certain field is actually owned by a direct competitor? Those questions will have to be answered by the company in the (relatively near) future, but at least for now, if you're living in the UK, opting for Facebook saves you from having to create separate accounts and credentials for the two best streaming services.

The choice of suppliers is about as wide as the choice of content

You'll also find Netflix available on the Apple TV, Google TV, Xbox 360, PS3, and yes, even the Kindle Fire, all devices that are less ambitious about sharing your every waking activity and therefore not troubled by the same hurdles as Facebook. The two consoles on that list are your best bet for getting the latest streaming content to your nearest HDTV, with the Xbox 360 recently augmenting the Zune Video Marketplace with Comcast Xfinity On Demand, HBO Go and MLB.tv, which join a constantly growing array of third-party content providers. Sony's PS3 matches the 360 with Hulu Plus, Vudu and other third-party options, while also beating Microsoft to the punch in offering native Amazon Instant Video streaming. Add in Sony's own Video Unlimited store for movie rentals and purchases and you get a vast choice of suppliers that's hard to keep straight.

If there's one consistent theme to movie and TV streaming, it's that the market remains highly fragmented and no single service is able to serve everyone's needs. That's understandable, in light of how many rights owners each company has to appease in order to bring a streaming or download service into existence. Google's plight with Google TV has been an instructive example of that, with content providers actively keeping their content off Google's connected set-top box. Apple isn't doing too much better with Apple TV, adding the dedicated MLB, NBA, and NHL channels, but mostly relying on the iTunes store to satisfy people's multimedia needs.

It'll take time for video on demand to coalesce into the same sort of maturity as music, and until then we'll have to deal with a smattering of different service providers (a lot of them overlapping in the content they offer), multiplicities of pricing tiers and subscription options, and a bunch of international inconsistencies. No single company is really approaching a coherent and comprehensive VOD offering yet.