"The Long Tail" Has Some Really Interesting Pieces on the Future of Television
Chris Anderson writes The Long Tail, a blog that I added to my Bloglines feeds recently. A week ago, he started a posting a really interesting series of articles called Long Tail TV. These are reflections on television that's available in the United States and some of the technologies we can use to view and manage it.
Here's a bit of the first article that Operation Gadget readers may find interesting:
As your thumb crawls through your several hundred digital cable channels, TV may appear anything but shackled. Yet it is. What seems like everything imaginable is instead a very thin slice on the video world. The existing channel structure mostly rewards focused programming with enough depth to fill a 24/7 window every day of the year. So the DIY channel and History en Espanol now pass muster, but the Halo 2 Physics Hacks channel does not. An acceptable loss, you say? How about last year's great season on Bravo, long ago overwritten by your DVR to save space?
Both the channel-centric reality of TV and its ephemeral nature are artifacts of the distribution bottleneck of cable broadcast. TV is still in the era of limited shelf space, while the lesson of the Long Tail is that more is always better. The growth of cable capacity over the past decade pales next to the growth in video creation over the same period and the size of the potential microaudiences for anything and everything. TiVo may have helped by at least taking the tyranny of time out of the equation, but we are nowhere near the iTunes model of being able to download everything ever made, anytime.
If that got your attention, then make sure you check out:
- Long Tail TV,
- Long Tail TV: Part II,
- Long Tail TV: Part III,
- Long Tail TV: Wishlist, and
- Long Tail TV: Conclusion.
BTW, I just made my Bloglines feeds public for the first time in order to point to it in this article. If you've ever wondered which 150-plus sites one gadget blogger tries to keep up with on a daily basis, check it out. As I've said before Bloglines is changing my life. It may be able to help you too.
