Digital Information

Rhapsody

Rhapsody is a website that provides streaming audio on all sorts of genres of music. They make their money on monthly subscriptions on their service as well as advertisements on their website. Users basically pay a monthly fee for infinite usage and discounted downloading.

Consumers can only play the music using Rhapsody's software. That limits the amount of freedom that consumers have with the media content. Users can, however, burn CDs using Rhapsody's software.

iTunes

iTunes is a media player that also has downloading capabilities for music from Apple's content server. The catch is that users will have to pay a standard fee for each song. This can accumulate in cost quickly depending on amount of desired songs.

Consumers have a little more freedom with the media they download from iTunes. They can copy it over to their ipods and burn CDs. iTunes makes an attempt at restricting users to put their downloaded content into other mp3 players by making their content in another format. However, there are hacks to convert the files into mp3.

Hulu

Hulu is a streaming video website for modern TV shows, movies, and sports clips. I'm not sure if they really make any money, but they can provide their content as long as they show ads from the owner of the content.

Consumers don't have much freedom other than the ability to view Hulu's content only on Hulu. Hulu makes sure to only let users view content using Hulu's software. Users cannot download content from the website.