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The Long Tail of TV and coming IP TV Revolution

I'm a big fan of WIRED editor Chris Anderson's Long Tail thesis and his blog about the subject. The gist of it is that while a handful of popular shows/songs/movies make up the bulk of revenue for entertainment companies, often 50% or more of their total revenue can come from many people finding the less popular stuff, or the long tail. Thanks to various technologies enabled by the internet, like Amazon, Netflix, iTunes Music Store, it's now easier than ever to find that one old movie, song, or show you really loved and buy it (Amazon, NetFlix and iTMS all contain inventories no physical store could ever match).

In a recent posting on his long tail blog, Anderson talked about how television is an industry headed towards a disaster/wake-up-call, and how TV serves the long tail the least of all entertainment industries. In a related interview, Thomas Hawk talked with Jeremy Allaire about his new venture Brightcove, which is also mentioned at the end of Anderson's piece.

Both pieces are illuminating. The TV industry as a whole produces over 31 million hours of programming each year, but most people only have access to 3-4% of the total, and finding what you like even among that smaller number is difficult. There's also the weird way most TV shows are shown once and then never seen again. Ad rates and audiences are dropping, threatening the entire business model that TV is built on, so it's only a matter of time before big change comes to the TV space.

If you could digitize and make available all 31 million hours of video produced each year, and had a sophisticated search mechanism, people could find all the niche programming they want and love. Some shows (like say, I don't know... "Hawaiian Snowmobile Video Magazine") might only have 1000 fans in the entire world, but if you could capture that audience and give them the shows they want to see, you might be able to make quite a bit of money selling the show at a premium while also selling advertising to a very specific audience. Some folks call this "narrowcasting" and those in the ad world are always looking for ways to reach their intended customers.

It's an exciting time for people that watch TV and those that are on the cusp of new trends in delivering television to viewers, but it's likely a bad time to be a network TV executive, straining to keep old business models alive. I can't wait to see where the world of TV is in five years. I suspect I'll be picking shows I want to see off a website, buying copies for a small charge, and downloading them for to my home theater by then.

by Matt Haughey April 12, 2005 in Op-Ed

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