The Short Tail

Way back in 2004, Chris Anderson, who was then editor in chief of WIRED magazine, wrote an article, and later a book, about "The Long Tail". The idea is that technology and economics have made it possible for companies to provide some kinds of products for which each individual item might have low demand, but the number of items would be so large, that it would be profitable. The classic example of this was Netflix, from which you could rent a DVD of an obscure movie from decades ago; that DVD might not even exist until it rose to the top of your Netflix wish list, at which point it could be manufactured onto a physical DVD from a digital archive, and then shipped to you. Another example is Amazon.com, which provides an enormous variety of physical items, leveraging warehousing and logistics to keep costs low on low volume items. (The title comes from the shape of the graph where you plotted the demand for each item against the number of items; the head of the graph was high, representing the big hits, but the tail, although low, trailed off almost to infinity, containing all the niche products.)

Great idea. But those days are over.

Netflix, as everyone now knows, is dropping its DVD rental service in favor of internet streaming. Wow. Great. Except the number of movies it provides via streaming is a tiny fraction of what was available before on DVD. This orphans our long Netflix wish list, which was full of old classic movies that I hadn't seen, but wanted to.

Just a couple of days ago, the Spousal Unit had other plans, and I sat down with the TiVo remote control and laboriously searched for The Ipcress File, a 1965 spy thriller with a young Michael Caine, and Paint Your Wagon, a 1969 musical western with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. No luck on either movie, on either Netflix or with Amazon Prime, the latter of which I thought might work even if I had to pay a few bucks for either movie.

So much for the idea that internet bandwidth, and digital storage, being so cheap that virtually any digital media would be easily and almost instantly available. This is not the future I was promised in lieu of flying cars.

Today I read that Disney is dropping a pile of shows and movies from its streaming service. Why? Money, of course. This will - somehow - allow it to write-off US$1.5B dollars. This is existing content, which costs almost nothing to store and deliver technically, but may of course incur licensing fees to its creators. Including some of the very same writers that are currently on strike to protest in part terrible labor practices by production companies and giant media conglomerates.

I'm a capitalist at heart - I have to be, my income depends on it - but this is some kind of late-stage capitalism market failure.