Ludovic Copéré

The Long Tail and active media consumption

I am a strong believer in the Long Tail theory and observations, as first written in the best Wired article in 2004 and followed up in an eponymous blog, where Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson brillantly shows how the Long Tail - this inverted exponential curve, is driving the digital media industry.

In a nutshell (but I do encourage you to (re-)read Anderson's article and posts), the red part of the curve is the "mass target" content: the few TV channels broadcast by the big national networks, the Top 50 music and book hits available pretty much anywhere. Now with the low-cost entry barriers of distributing, streaming, selling or plainly putting content online, much more focused and targeted content adds to the total media available. Think of this yellow part as the power of the niches.  Services like Amazon for books, independent online labels for music, local or special-interest TV channels through ADSL TV all bring us a longer tail, a richer choice, a potentially more fulfilling media package.

Such choice and possibilities is fatally followed by an increased complexity that still today resides on the user side. Of course, PVR (Personal Video Recorders) like TiVo in the USA have attracted hundreds of thousands, but now show their limitation in thin-slicing the offer and smart-filtering content (not to mention the regulatory and legal "gray area" services like that are being pushed to).
Once again, the solution could well come from the Web side: Google recently unveiled its Video Search engine, along with Yahoo's own version, which are not hard to image being soon extended to handle mode media types (think streamed radios and podcastings), should help to make aggregation eventually easier.

It is especially important for TV as it is by essence a passive activity, despite all the attempts to make it glitter with interactivity and active use: feeding a household with the whole chunk of 1000s of channels will not make it spontaneously feel better served, except for isolated groups of very early adopters and technophiles. The key once again is to use those "glue" tools and services to  immediately provide a thinly-sliced and carefully filtered choice of channels and content. In short, generalize the iPod Shuffle paradigm, with stripped-down interfaces and smart randomness.

New Media vs. Old Media?

Thanks Pascal for pointing out this interesting video from the Museum of Media History: a polished and graphically impressive retrospective of the major milestones in information construction and diffusion as well as the prediction of its future twists and evolution until a prophetical culmination point in 2014 marking the irrevocable victory of the "New Media" - a decentralized mesh of individual micro-contributions, ratings and content - against the "Old Media" - the Press, Fleet Street and the likes, as depicted in the video by the might of "Googlezon" (Google + Amazon) launching their "Evolving Personalized Information Construct" and the online withdrawal of The New-York Times.

This is good food for thoughts, as I see a strong potential in integrating the multitude of separate and niche nano-publishing and community-based islets that exist today on the Web: think of the synergies that can be created by crossing social relationships (LinkedIn, Friendster, Orkut...), information icosystems (Technorati, Google News, personal RSS subscriptions, e-mails), entertainment (Flickr, Last.FM, Filmtipset in Sweden...), shopping intelligence (Amazon recommendations, ) and many others which I don't know of or not out yet. What stands out is the vast amount of tools and "glue" that have been made available in the last few years to connect content, people, time and location. Far from the Orwellian tone of the video, I thus see such combinations as an opportunity to deepen the meaning and use of the Net, and bring it closer to a collaborative effort.

However, it is important to have the necessary legal (Creative Commons) and privacy frameworks to make such new engine run smoothly. And I seriously doubt that what is seen as the "Old Media" will just let itself wither without reacting, as the video suggests: as already underlined by Loïc, newspapers like Le Monde in France are adopting blogs as a new type of online space, where reader-contributed content has a key role. Soon, I am sure it will expand to other content (photo, video where bandwidth allows) and roles (information, socialization, entertainment...).

Instead of going after the "New vs. Old", we'd rather look at the "Aggregated vs. Isolated" in the media world.

On to 2005!

Quite calm blogging activity those past weeks, which have actually been quite an hectic period for me of moving from Stockholm and settling down back in France in Paris, where I have just started working at Sony (more on that soon). Now almost set-up, so keep a close eye around here :-)

In the meantime, I wish heartily to you all Happy New Year / Heureuse Année / Feliz año nuevo / gott nytt  år /  あけまして　おめでとう　ございます ! May this year bring dreams to reality and hope to success.