Institutions

Apple is the obvious company, producing iTunes in 2001. Like Windows Player and Realplayer, iTunes is a 'digital media player application', but it also has its iTunes Store section, an online 'store' where you can buy and download music at a monetary cost.

The big record companies, e.g. Sony, EMI, Universal, stand to gain from the boom in online music. They get a share of the money paid for songs on iTunes, and a cut of the price of the albums they endorse. Various deals are in place here, but since the emergence of digital technology, the risk of piracy has soured. We can see how iTunes has reacted to audiences' demands with their plan to release DRM-free music downloads. This is hugely advantageous to their customers, as it means they can buy one song and read it through several different types of hardware (although, of course, this is an extra 20p). An earlier example is the progress from solely-audio iPods to video iPods, and the eagerly anticipated iPod phone.

Apart from in the music industry, plenty of other institutions are reaching out to their customers through convergence, for example the inclusion of a DVD player in the games console PS2.

However, these media institutions will need to try and reverse the huge threat of piracy which has catapulted since the 'dawn of digital'. Additionally, there are deeper arguments at play here with convergence: why do you need a DVD player in your PS2 when you already have a DVD player? And what if you can't afford all the latest advancements in NMTs? Why should you have to pay extra just to put a legally bought song on an MP3 player which isn't an iPod?