Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Good enough for me, maybe not for you..

At Lost Remote, an article referencing Wired's article about "the Long Tail" reminded of something I've wanted to post for a while.

Media, and especially television, has for so long has been about mass-market consumption, that they've forgotten how to sell to anything less than millions of people. You and I know, however, that none of us all agree, all the time on what's good television. I, for example, would buy DVD copies of Max Headroom episodes and certain commercials (Miller Lite sports-combos like sumo high-dive and full-contact golf, for one example). You probably want the entire "Edge of Night" soap opera and early Milton Berle. Television executives, however, only market DVDs of shows which were popular in the ratings sense; they market to the masses, not to the small niches.

If they'd wake up and market to the hundreds, or thousands, instead of the millions, they'd realize that they could sell this stuff they have on the shelf. Just digitize all of it, and wait for the orders to come in, which can be filled on demand - no shelf space, no warehouses, nothing but a few disk drives to hold the content and a few DVD burners for filling orders. The income wouldn't be huge, but hey - any income from something they didn't think would sell ought to be "good enough", wouldn't you think?

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