The Long Tail (25 page)

Meanwhile, the blogosphere is the greatest vector for new voices ever created. The convention of linking to ideas and information of merit, wherever they come from, be it professional or amateur, is a powerful force of diversity. The main risk with blogs is the distraction of too many leads to pursue, not too few. Anyone who is reading online and not enlarging their cultural perspective has either found some remarkably barren corner of the blog world or needs a refresher course in the meaning of hyperlinks.

Since nothing on the Web is authoritative, it’s up to you to consult enough sources so that you can make up your own mind. This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require—and reward—investigation. The sixties told us to question authority, but they didn’t provide us with the
tools to do so. Now we have those tools. The question today is how best to use them without becoming overwhelmed by uncertainty.

Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions. If professional affiliation is no longer a proxy for authority, we need to develop our own gauges of quality. This encourages us to think for ourselves. Wikipedia is a starting point for exploring a topic, not the last word.

It’s the end of the couch potato era. When you think about it, in the peak of the network TV age, we may all have been watching the same things, but we were all too often watching them by ourselves—“bowling alone” in prime time. Online today we’re doing different things, but we are more likely to encounter other individuals, either by reading their writings, chatting live, or just following their example. What we’ve lost in common culture we’ve made up in our increased exposure to other people.

Today we’re not so much fragmenting as we are re-forming along different dimensions. These days our watercoolers are increasingly virtual; there are many different ones; and the people who gather around them are self-selected. Rather than being loosely connected with people thanks to superficial mass-cultural overlaps, we have the ability to be more strongly tied to just as many if not more people with a shared affinity for niche culture.

Although the decline of mainstream cultural institutions may result in some people turning to echo chambers of like-minded views, I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near-infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less.

As much as the blockbuster era seems like the natural state of things, it is, as we’ve seen, mostly an artifact of late-twentieth-century broadcast technologies. Before then most culture was local; in the future it will be affinity-based and massively parallel. Mass culture may fade, but common culture will not. We will still share our culture with others, but not with everyone.

“TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

—David Foster Wallace

Nobody thought the
future of television would look like this. On October 15, 2005, an eight-month-old startup called YouTube unveiled the ultimate Long Tail marketplace of the moving image. Apple’s iTunes’ polished video store may have had far more network TV content, but YouTube let anyone upload their videos for free and let anyone instantaneously view them by simply clicking on a big play button.

The result was predictably messy, a near-random collection of everything from banned commercials to baby videos. But it was a glimpse into a world of infinite variety, where commercial and amateur video content compete head to head…and the amateurs often win.

On any given day the first YouTube page, with its most popular videos of the moment, said it all. In the rows of thumbnails you could find clips of commercial content (from
The Colbert Report
to Britney Spears’s missteps) intermixed with short clips of dumb dogs, funny commercials, and an octopus eating a shark (which was amazing, by the way). And on the next page and the next and beyond, there was more of the same: snowboarding wipeouts, funny songs, and people playing video games very, very well.

By Spring 2006, users were uploading 100,000 videos a day to YouTube
and viewers were watching around 100 million clips daily, either on the site itself or in “embedded” YouTube players on third-party sites such as blogs. That’s five million hours of video watching a day, which put YouTube at about the viewership of a medium-sized TV network. No wonder that Google bought the company in late 2006 for $1.65 billion.

Today Google Video and YouTube have become the distribution channel of choice for not just the Long Tail of content producers but also studios and networks trying to reach a new audience.

Broadcast networks can make Google Video a storefront for their archives, or just a place to host teasers of upcoming shows. It’s already becoming a resource for the Indian diaspora, which can now find Hindi shows that are only broadcast on the subcontinent (legality: suspect). And indie filmmakers can now find out if anyone wants to pay $12 (or $3 for a day pass) to watch their masterpieces. Not having distribution is no longer an excuse for obscurity.

Meanwhile Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, and a host of others have started their own video marketplaces. The biggest of these sites now rival mainstream TV. Yahoo!’s music video viewership would put it between MTV and VH1 in audience share. More people watch the most popular Jon Stewart segments online than see them live. Popular online video shows, such as Tiki Bar TV, are routinely watched by several hundred thousand people a day, which puts their viewership on a par with good-sized cable TV shows.

MSNBC’s
The Abrams Report
, with a multimillion-dollar budget and a crew of dozens, was at the time of this writing watched by an average of 215,000 homes per day. Rocketboom, a Jon Stewart–like comedy news program created online by exactly two people for the cost of some videotapes, two lights, and a cardboard map, was watched by 200,000 homes per day over the same period. Now it’s selling advertising and got $40,000 for the five thirty-second spots in its first week. Not quite as high as broadcast TV revenues, perhaps, but the networks would kill for those margins. (And, of course, Rocketboom host and co-owner Amanda Congdon was lured to ABC in the summer of 2006.)

This day has been predicted for a decade, but it took the mainstreaming of broadband for it to finally arrive. A generation that grew up online and developed its media consumption habits in the band
width paradise of American university dorm rooms is now totally comfortable watching video on a computer screen. Increasingly, though, they don’t have to. The home networking boom is connecting broadband to the living room, and network TiVos, other digital video recorders, and broadband-connect video-game consoles such as the Xbox 360 are bringing online content to ordinary TVs.

It’s easy to dismiss the random junk on YouTube as little threat to
The Sopranos
. After all, distribution is not the only barrier to entering TV: production costs are a hurdle, too. It takes more than a digital video camera to produce
CSI,
and only the economics of mainstream media can support elaborate dramas such as
Lost
. But there is an audience for less-produced fare that can be made at a fraction of the cost of traditional TV programming. Don’t just think
America’s Funniest Home Videos
, writ large. Think local sports and narrow interests; cool commercials you choose to watch and presentations from conferences you wish you could have attended.

Blogger Thomas Hawk explains:

If today I watch
CSI Miami
, but on my weekends go out hang gliding and am a huge hang gliding fan, when the California hang gliding championships end up being broadcast through a microcontent platform I will end up watching that instead of
CSI.

If today I watch some network television but even more than my network television I love reading author Hunter S. Thompson, and my microcontent platform brings me a talk by Hunter S. Thompson from the University of Wyoming I will end up watching that instead of
CSI
.

If I am 16 and my favorite band is not what hits the charts but rather the latest skate punk music thing, then the custom skate punk music shows that can easily be created and delivered to my microcontent platform will be much more interesting to me than
American Idol
.

Today, TV viewership of eighteen-to thirty-four-year-old males, the most coveted demographic for advertisers, has peaked and is beginning to decline, as the more interactive charms of Internet and video games win the competition for eyeballs. Overall TV viewership is at all-time highs, so it’s not panic time in broadcast land yet. But the day when the Internet becomes a real rival to TV appears near. The question is what to do about it.

A TAIL FOR THE TAKING

As your thumb clicks 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 of 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 Channel en Español now pass muster, but the Halo 2 Physics Hacks channel or the Cool Robots channel does not. An acceptable loss, you say? How about last year’s great season of
Project Runway
on Bravo, long ago overwritten by your DVR to save space, or never recorded in the first place?

Today both the channel-centric reality and the ephemeral nature of TV 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 almost always better. The growth of cable capacity over the past decade pales next to the growth in video creation over the same period and in 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.

Of all the traditional media industries, television is now the industry with the greatest potential to be transformed by Long Tail forces. Here’s why:

• TV produces more content than any other media and entertainment industry. There are an estimated 31 million hours of original television content produced each year. Although that isn’t as much as radio, most radio is either chat or recorded music that is available elsewhere, so it’s not in the same league. In addition, 115 million digital videotapes are sold each year for personal camcorders. The amount of video produced each year is staggering, but…
  
• Only a tiny fraction of it is available to you. First, the average American household now gets one hundred channels of TV. While that sounds like a lot—it’s 876,000 hours of video broadcast to the average home each year—that’s still less than 10 percent of the
  video that’s broadcast in the United States (when you include the 400-plus national channels available on high-capacity satellite and digital networks, and all the local programming across the country). Making matters much worse, unless that home has a DVR (and only about 15 percent of U.S. households do) and someone is spending a good chunk of their free time scouring listings to program it, they’re going to miss virtually all of that TV. Once TV is missed, it’s usually gone. Only a tiny fraction of shows are syndicated, and an even smaller fraction make it to DVD.
  
• Thus the ratio of produced content to available content is higher than in any other industry. Other industries may produce more content—print, for instance—but it’s far more available (see Google). Only television treats its premium content as disposable. True, a lot of it actually is. But not all, and not as much as is effectively thrown away after a brief moment in the sun.
  

There is no shortage of smart people thinking about how TV can find its way out of its corner. But it’s not easy. For starters, most of the networks are content
renters,
not content owners. This means that the archives are often not theirs to capitalize on.

Even for those who do own the content, releasing video in ways not anticipated at the original time of broadcast still can be remarkably difficult. Rights are a total hairball, made even more complicated by exclusive regional distribution deals (which conflict with the Internet’s global nature) and syndication options. And then there’s the music in the video, which is even worse. Want to know why you can’t watch old
WKRP in Cincinnati
episodes on DVD? Because the sitcom was based in a radio station, which had loads of classic rock playing in the background. It’s too expensive and difficult to license the music that was used in the show. (Indeed, that show is considered one of the hardest popular TV shows of all to clear; it’s the lead standard against which all other clearance challenges are considered.) Other classic shows, such as
Married…with Children,
are released to DVD with different music than in their broadcast incarnations, annoying fans.

TV OUTSIDE THE BOX

But there is another class of video, one designed from the start to be distributed on the Internet. This sort of video—the product of the spread of digital camcorders and desktop animation tools—has few such legal encumbrances. Created from scratch to be streamed for free online, it’s already proving to be the richest, most entrepreneurial source of programming for a post-broadcast age.

Consider Barrio305, a Web-only television service for “reggaeton” music videos, interviews, and urban Latin culture. “Think MTV…but in Spanglish,” says its cofounder, Noah Otalvaro. Each day it streams about 50,000 minutes of video to 5,000 unique users. That’s tiny by television standards (reggaeton isn’t for everyone), but what’s interesting is how it could grow.

The site is built on a video distribution “platform” created by Brightcove. What that means is that Otalvaro and his brothers don’t have to figure out a way to stream the video to their users; they just publish the video like a blog post and Brightcove takes care of the distribution. Even better, if other sites want to use Barrio305’s content, they can simply copy some HTML code onto their pages and they, too, will have streaming video. Notably, Barrio305 gets the ad revenues from the greater viewership.

Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove’s founder, describes the effect:

Just as consumers flocked to the Internet despite the hiccups of dialup modems and clunky Web pages, they will flock to this new medium that empowers them in ways that no single company or industry can replicate. They will come to forget that their relationship to video programming used to be mediated by a black box connected to their TV set, and instead will enjoy the same degree of freedom that they have in consuming and using the text Web from any personal computer.

Most importantly, the massive economies of scale and reach that the Internet already provides will extend to the realm of video production, where producing and self-distributing a video program is nearly as effortless as producing a Web site, and where millions of new producers and programmers are born.

Or as Gregg Spiradellis, the cofounder of the hugely popular Web animation site JibJab, puts it: “The Audience is the Network.”

SHORTER, FASTER, SMALLER

The first thing you notice about the content of Google Video or Barrio305, aside from the near-total absence of production polish, is that most of it is three minutes long or shorter. Which is not a length often found on broadcast TV, the land of the half-hour increment (or twenty-two minutes once you take out commercials). Instead, it’s something new—a medium that lies somewhere between passive television watching and interactive Web surfing.

When you think about it, there’s nothing magical about half hours; they’re simply an easy way to divide a broadcast programming schedule into segments that start and finish on the hour. Outside of the broadcast schedule, entertainment and news comes in all sorts of lengths, from thirty-second clips to three-hour concerts; there’s no inherent premium on thirty minutes.

Like so many other conventions that we today accept as cultural choice, the rigid programming convention of producing video in multiples of thirty minutes is actually an artifact of inefficient distribution. Someday, that convention may fade away, replaced by a range of more natural lengths of video content that reflect the diversity of human attention spans and content types, not network programming convenience and advertiser priorities.