![]() Long story short, within about 5 minutes we were all watching YouTube videos on my parent’s big screen via my iPad.Ī couple hours later, my parents were still asking me to bring up videos on places they’d visited in the past and wanted to visit again: Tofino, BC the high Uintas Navy Pier in Chicago. In an effort to find a YouTube channel for ROKU (turns out, there isn’t one), I instead found an article about a company called Twonky, which had created a mobile app (free on the App Store) that would allow me to “beam” a feed from my iPad directly to a ROKU. ![]() When other family members began to gather around, I decided it was time to look for a better option. It was awkward, to say the least-three of us huddled around a 10” screen. On this occasion, I happened to have my iPad with me and wanted to show my parents a particular video on YouTube. Just the same, I was over at my parent’s house a couple nights ago and witnessed another stage of long tail evolution play out in real time. I read Anderson’s book when it came out and have been chronicling its validity all along. can deliver more specific content on demand, night or day. Talk about kids in a candy store! Note that although the big four networks (which my parents had nearly abandoned anyway) just got dealt another blow, the real losers in this case are the cable networks that they used to watch-TBS, TNT, etc. In practical terms, the big four networks are losing viewers to specialty cable channels-cooking channels, travel channels, sports channels, etc.īack to my parents: I recently installed a ROKU for them and converted their Netflix account to a streaming subscription, which means they can watch British sitcoms and Gunsmoke twelve hours a day if they want, without commercial interruption. One of Anderson’s key points is that the emergence of a long tail in any given content market may trigger a reduction in distribution of the more general content products. This evolution, of course, is entirely in line with Anderson’s thesis-given the option, pretty much all of us will gravitate toward content that more directly fits our tastes and, in the process, winnow out more general content.Īnderson’s long-tail model places the more general content (products with broader appeal and, therefore, higher distribution) in the head and shoulders of the curve, with more specific products further to the right in descending order based on distribution volume. Like most Americans, they’ve had a couple hundred cable channels for years, which means they rarely watch the big four networks anymore. I’ve got them both using a PC, and my mom has an Android tablet, which she uses primarily as a book reader and a mobile email device. My parents, like many people in their age group, are late adopters of digital technologies. ![]() The thing is I recently had an experience that objectified Chris Anderson’s theory for me. Given all the new options, which could be located and consumed on demand, large segments in the music market quickly fragmented into an infinite amount of tiny markets, very few of which had enough consumers to support the old, relatively expensive model that the recording industry had relied on from its inception.Īnderson’s book has been out for several years, which raises the question of why I’m bringing it up now. One of Anderson’s key examples is the old music publishing industry, which collapsed as vast libraries of music were recorded in garages and basements around the world and published on the Internet at very low prices. The net result is that traditional content publishers, which rely on outdated distribution methods, can’t begin to satisfy the tastes of consumers, which become more refined as specific content becomes available. Key to Anderson’s thesis is the notion that content publishing technologies, coupled with Internet-based distribution and powerful search engines, are causing large segments of the population to develop highly specialized taste in music, books, and almost any other kind of digital content. If you happened to miss it, there’s a chance you haven’t fully grasped the effect the Internet and supporting technologies are having on our lives. The term long tail was coined by Chris Anderson in his book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. ![]()
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