Why “The Long Tail” for video is different.

Since Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” article hit the pages of Wired back in November, there’s been a lot of discussion about it, and the impact of the idea that content never goes out of print in a new on-demand environment.

The article is breathtaking in it’s simplicity, clarity, and inevitability. Looking at the numbers from either the Rhapsody back-cataloged usage in The Long Tail or the more recent stats that Chris is blogging from Tivo it’s pretty clear that the era of media as disposable is over.

But it’s important to make a distinction between retail video-media, as it exists today (TV, Films) and motion media content that’s likely to populate the Long Tail model in the years to come.

FLASHBACK. Books have been around a long time. The idea of committing ideas to paper, and then moving that paper around is one that human beings understand in a way that is intuitive rather than intellectual. Written words have knowledge. If we want to know something, knowledge is on paper.

Moving images are on the other hand primarily place in society as entertainment. Yes of course there is news on television, and documentaries, but as a percentage of the amount of content either created or consumed, those non-fiction moving images are a very small portion of what currently is in the marketplace.

So we have both a tradition, and an intuitive understanding that when we’re sitting in front of a video screen it is to ‘relax’.

So in order for video to be part of the Long Tail revolution – two important things need to happen. First, lots of high value content needs to be created and be made available. This is inevitable (tools like Final Cut HDV are central to this). But even once content is created and made available – and validated through some sort of filter/folkomnomics /metadata solution – there’s another piece missing.

Users. Motion media is a very different value proposition. If I go looking for a book on how to tile my bathroom floor on Amazon, and I’m offered a video of the same subject – how will I use it? On DVD? On my laptop, on my portable media player? On my cell phone? New experiences are scary – and as much as I’d rather have someone show me how to lay tile… the combination of a missing device, and more importantly a missing sense that I can trust video to be knowledge rather than entertainment, means that there’s a slow build as the demand for long-tail motion media builds.

None of this is bad. In fact, the opposite I think.

The fact is that a new culture of motion media creators is coming on line at the same time that a delivery system for the material is being born. That means that as young creators build their ‘archive’ of published media, audiences will grow both in size and sophistication.

PAUSE. More on the difference between music and Television – and why viewers are likely to make more video content than music…. IN A BIT.