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.

Comments

[Stephane Lee]

Hi Ludovic,

We spoke yesterday night about blogs disruptive nature and other things.

This is our version of Long Tail advertising : http://influenceurs.net

[johnan.s.]

hi ludovic
Thanks great for the tantalising updates about the new techno that has caught me personally an awares.
Please do me one fevour and mail me an appreciation of the distinctions that exist btn the new media and the old media.

I WILL BE VERY GRATEFULL
JOHNAN

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