BigShinyThing

What the article fails to note, is that these almost un-watched channels are another instance of the ‘long tail’. Back in 2002, Wired magazine wrote:

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

The seemingly bottomless pit of distribution enabled by the internet and other new media means that the obscure stuff - like Wine TV - has a justifiable market. Media commentators are now predicting that these little pools of enthusiasts will eventually become the market - the mass market will be no more.

One example that Wired uses is that of Touching the Void. Written in 1988, British mountaineer Joe Simpson’s account of near death in the Andes got good reviews, but was only a modest success and soon forgotten. A decade later, Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again, and was turned into a film in 2003.

How did this happen? Simply, ‘Amazon Recommends’. The online bookseller’s software noted patterns in buying behaviour and suggested to readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People followed up on the suggestions, read the book and wrote rave reviews. More sales were generated, more algorithm fueled recommendations occured and the book suddenly became a bestseller.

As Wired notes:

This is not just a virtue of online booksellers: it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what’s available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they fnd, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

The most successful online businesses are already making most of their money out of this so-called ‘long tail’. Google makes most of its income off small advertisers and eBay is mostly niche products (kewpie dolls anyone?).

The power of the long tail for a mass entertainment company like Sky could be this: suppose I think that Sky is all just Sky Sports and reject it wholeheartedly? Suppose that I, as a cat owner, discover that Sky has a whole channel dedicated to cats? Suddenly I’m interested, Sky has an offer that is relevant to me, and I’m driven to subscribe (remember, Sky is the only provider of the Cat Channel). Lots of advertisers who are keen to advertise to me as a cat owner, drop their big channel budgets and pour them into the finely targeted Cat Channel where they know they can reach the 11,000-24,000 odd enthusiasts that would justify their spend. They can even produce their own content as no one else gives a rat’s arse… and so on.

As media becomes increasingly on demand, mass market entertainment companies are going to find themselves increasing at the whim of the long tail. The Cat Channel (no pun intended) might not be that far away.