Slashdot Mirror
Finding the Long Tail of Television
prostoalex writes "The New York Times runs the story on the long tail of television, where the channels that would not be hits on the mainstream media are migrating to the Internet and finding interested audiences there. The article mentions Sail.tv - TV programming for those into sailing and yachting, TrioTV - the cornucopia of pop culture and music, BrilliantButCancelled will rerun the reruns of old TV shows, and OutZone will feature programming pertaining to gays and lesbians."
I'd like to have them show Vengence Unlimited, and Brimstone. It's not often that Fox creates something worth watching, but Brimstone certainly deserved more than the 1 season it was granted in 1998.
Oh You POS
Mma Mma Mmaxxxx Hed Hed Headroom!
Headroom.
outzone already slahdotted.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
pr0n. Say what you want about it, but it drives the Internet and probably pulls in a LOT more jingle than all "legit" music/movie sites on the Internet combined.
It's called a plug. Given the lousy selection of shows on the air nowadays, it's better off unplugged most of the time.
This is something that should be a suprise to no one especially with the increasing popularity of BT and other p2p software to share shows from netwrok TV. Finding new shows on the internet and providing them with dedicated viewers should also inprove the quality of regular television, while it lasts, as some of these shows get picked up by the networks. They would likely be popular because they're good and hopefully original instead of being popular because they're better than the rest of the trash on TV.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Maybe I missed something in my skimming, but what's the difference between sail.tv and, say, a video podcast of the same content? Surely they're not betting the whole farm on streaming video content. You'd think that with the rise of the video ipods and the whole timeshifting concept that new companies would immediately embrace the watch-whenever concept. After all, that's crucial to acting on the long tail. You don't just say "here's what I've got, showing at 9pm" you say "here's everything I've ever had, and if you happen to stumble across it and like it, then welcome."
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
One must jump the shark to find the length of its tail.
Eric
My AdSense blog
I really liked watching Trio TV when it was on DirecTV. Unfortunately, they got into some sort of dispute, and were dropped.
We had a radio station in our small city that was listened to by a large population over a hundred mile radius. They specialized in country music. They had great listenership over a large geographic area but not a very great percentage of the local listeners. The local businesses wouldn't advertise. There weren't enough ads from national advertisers to make a go of it. So, in spite of the fact that they had lots of listeners, they had to change their format and focus on the local market.
With the internet, you can have local advertisers on these national or even international web sites. The local ads are seen only locally, the advertisers pay per click and apparently the advertising is effective. Given that model, these 'specialty channels' could be profitable.
With a TiVo TV runs on your schedule. A show that wouldn't survive prime time or day time under normal circumstances could be run at 2:00 AM. TiVo users would record it and to them it wouldn't seem any different than if it ran at 8:00 PM. TiVo killed time slots, for TiVo users.
Digital distribution takes it one step further. That will kill channels. We are seeing this with the popularity of TV on DVD. I couldn't care less if Battlestar Galactica ran on ABC, UPN, Bravo, or The Home Shopping Network. If the show is the same, then where it came from doesn't matter. This is where iTunes and such will bring us.
You won't watch ABC. You won't say you like the stuff NBC shows. You'll say you like things made by Dick Wolf or David E. Kelly. Just like people don't say they like Paramount stuff (as they might back before the big studio breakups), they say they like Spielberg stuff, or Tarintino stuff.
I think this is great. There are so many great shows that never made it for various reasons (including but not limited to not finding their audience, terrible time slot, chronic time slot changes, etc). Dead Like Me, Keen Eddie, The Critic, John Doe, Threshold, Firefly, Futurama, and many others have been canceled. Half the shows on TechTV/ZDtv too.
We've already seen it happen. DVD sales brought back Family Guy (which Fox killed, like so many shows, with the deadly 7:00 PM Eastern time slot on Sunday). There are always rumors of that happening to Futurama too. Firefly fans have been trying.
When you take having to be on at a decent time out of the equation, it becomes much easier to program to the long tail. The problem is that enough people don't have DVRs yet. If you give them digital distribution that works too (just let my TiVo download the shows straight from the network off the 'net), I think we'll see programing move more towards the tail as networks are no longer "forced" to program towards the middle of the bell curve.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I am not usually on the leading edge of things, but even with multiple cable channels I could never get decent coverage of one of my favorite sports - bicycling (Beyond Lance Armstrong who was almost a sport to himslf). I looked around and the only place I could find actual race coverage was on the internet. All sports channels seem to want to show are high volume shows, poker, and hunting and fishing, with hour a week of coverage max. This internet TV thing is great - even if they do seem to be super Microsoft focused in technology and still not very much resolution. Cable was supposed to lead to differentiation, but I think the overhead of the cable distribution network is stifling this, and I don't want to pay $100/mo for tons of channels I will never watch. The article says that the 500+ cable channels are full, but I don't see them available anywhere without very big cash outlays by me. That same infrastructure (cable modems) can also deliver programming not under the control of the cable provider through internet TV. I wonder as this develops when it will hurt them so they notice?
I had to laugh at the ESPN spokesman - yeah they will put $ in quality production of Poker or dumb commentary shows but don't want poor quality shows, like actual coverage of sporting events. Typical big corp talk - it doesn't match the walk.
Now that G4 has killed ALL tech (and most game programs) in favor of old reruns can we please have a tech channel back?
The Internet makes a market out of the smallest segments, and enables producers to enter those markets.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Well, I make up one of those two people.
I wonder who the other is. I hope it's a girl.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
It was the only thing Trio was ever successful with. They managed to buy the pilots of a few shows that were cancelled. They started with series that had short runs, like "Gun" or "Action". They later picked up a few shows that were only pilots (like "LA Confidential", "Lookwell!"). There were various reasons these shows didn't make it. Some were very good (like "Action").
They certainly got the idea from Moomba, a club in West Hollywood that used to run cancelled TV pilots and received a lot of notice for it. Specifically it contributed to the legends of "Lookwell!" (which starred Adam West and was written by Conan O' Brien and Robert Smigel) and "Heat Vision and Jack" (which was written by Ben Stiller and starred Jack Black and Owen Wilson).
These shows were easy to get rights to (except apparently Heat Vision and Jack), and cheap too, the shows were considered almost valueless. There was no market in syndication for shows with short runs, and DVD sales of TV shows were not a factor yet. But Trio was jumping in only just ahead of the curve, and suddenly there was a market for these shows and Trio simply couldn't afford to pick them up anymore on a shoestring budget. Then, DVD sales of TV shows became big, and it was all over.
Trio picked up a few other shows that were very cheap, like "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" and "The Ernie Kovacs Show" (which was brilliant), but really, they were done for by that point. The channel couldn't sustain any ratings, was dumped by DirecTV and it was over. NBC (who owns the channel) pulled the plug.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
No discussion on the topic would be complete without a thorough examination of Naked News.
(For once, a post so easy that I figure I don't need preview, and what do I do? I screw it up!)
"Simpsons actors .... Factor in top-shelf writers, producers and directors and you're talking a lot of money."
Well, given the recent 5-6 seasons of The Simpsons, I think we can rule out top-shelf writers as being the reason the show costs so much to produce.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Everyone point and laugh:
"When Things Were Rotten"
"UFO"
"Quark"
"Futurama"
Not funny, son. I know the woman who filed the complaint about WoW's refusal to permit a GLBT guild. It is really too bad that you think that your "right" to make fun of gays and lesbians is worth more than their dignity.
I did a WHOIS search on the links in the article and came up with some not-so surprising results.
TrioTV, brillantbutcancelled are owned by, take a guess? Universal Studios.
Looks like they are trying to push some of their old crap to wring a few dollars more out of the viewing public.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
I was watching the naked News with 5-6 other guys.
We watched for 10 minutes and someone said This is Great.
Then I asked if anyone could remember a SINGLE peice of information from the show.
Silence.