Convergence Culture:Movies, TV and even newspapers are all affected by broadband, writes Haydn Shaughnessyin the first of a new weekly series

Unless you use digital electronic tools (hand-held computers, the PC, 3G mobile phones) in your job, you might be forgiven for asking: broadband internet, what's the fuss about? Forgiveness, though, is in short supply. Outside Ireland but soon here too, broadband is changing the way people interact with content such as TV programming, video, film and music. And it's creating whole new categories of content for people to while away their spare time.

Last month the music industry launched 8,000 legal actions against people it claims are downloading music to their computers and iPods illegally. Nobody pretends that the flow of free music can be stemmed for long, though. In Luxembourg, the original home of pirate radio, the download site Jamendo offers 20,000 album-length recordings for free. The idea of "free content" is gaining traction in the broadband internet. You can access 4,000,000 free videos via dabble.com. Thousands of albums, music snippets and jingles can be downloaded free from sites such as commoncontent.org and ourmedia.org. And check out LastFM.com.

The broadband effect is hitting the movies, too. Star Wars director George Lucas recently announced he was quitting film-making. His reason: the future of content is about volume production, making many films, not making occasional big-budget blockbusters.

Movie makers such as Lucas are troubled by the arrival in Hollywood of dot.com computer wealth. Mark Cuban became a billionaire after selling his company broadcast.com, which ran a primitive radio/TV service in the early days of the world wide web. He now funds low-budget movies (Steven Soderbergh's Bubble), and owns movie theatres, cable channels and web companies.

Entrepreneurs such as Cuban live to disrupt the businesses they are in. He plans a future where movies are launched in a few theatres, on cable TV and the internet all at the same time, signalling an end to the Hollywood chokehold on film distribution through cinemas - and the price of viewing movies.

Television companies have listened idly to a long wake-up call from younger viewers migrating to YouTube and MySpace. But now new web-based TV channels are up and running. Soup-of-the-day, Latnitemash, Floaters, Mixcast, MediaStorm . . . They are too numerous to list and alongside them you can find TV from every country in the world.

And newspapers. Among the most popular sites on the web is Digg.com which aggregates stories from newspapers and magazines and allows readers to vote their favourites to the front page. Digg was reportedly up for sale recently for $150 million. Its current incarnation is just over a year old.

There is also a subliminal change taking place in what we, the viewers, regard as entertainment. Craig's List is an American classified ads site. Craig Newmark, who founded the list, regards it as a community that enjoys being around classified content such as personal ads.

If classifieds are a weird concept of entertainment, what about Startpages? You can drag content from any website onto your startpage and when you start your computer and go to Internet Explorer or Firefox, there it is waiting for you, a window on your web world. More than five million people have chosen to create startpages, and the main products, netvibes, pageflake and webwag, are still in development.

Blogs, the simple online diary, are in a transition phase already. The blog is becoming a personal gateway to information and entertainment. The podcast is the new radio, the vidcast the new TV, but the TV, too, is changing. TVs will soon be fully-fledged computers, hooked up to the broadband internet, providing viewers with the ability to interact with each other around programming.

There are wikis, or sites to which anybody can write or edit a page, virtual worlds such as Second Life, mash-ups, multi-player online games, and there is our changing view of how we want to be entertained or entertain.

In the past the talk has been about the web, the Net, the PC. It has all been about technology. In future, the web is all about us, and Convergence Culture is your weekly web-content guide to what's happening and where to look.

Haydn Shaughnessy edits the online magazine wripe.net. Next week: How to find good content

Words in Your Ear

Blogs:weblogs or online diaries

Podcast:an audio show that listeners can download from a website and play on their computer or MP 3 player (like an iPod)

Vidcast:the same as a podcast though using images as well as sound

Wiki:a website where everybody can edit or add a page

Startpages:websites built by users by dragging modules, like news headlines, pictures or text, from other websites

Mash-ups:sites which automatically combine content from two or more sources