Why would I ever need that?

I was glad to hear that most of you enjoyed the Wired article titled “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. It’s not a new article, but it has had real staying power. One of the things that I like best about the paper is its implication that taste is not as mainstream as once thought. It’s great to have things that most of the population finds interesting and exciting, but as the paper powerfully points out, this same population of individuals also have their own unique tastes. We are multidimensional in our tastes. Some of our dimensions tie into large communities and some into small communities. Some of us might be members of only small communities, and we shouldn’t assume that the small communities are necessarily subsets of any large community. Tolerance of unique interests turns out to be good business!

Speaking of taste, not everyone in my family understands my excitement with the new Star Trek series that CBS recently launched. Star Trek: Discovery tries both to hook a new generation of Trekkies into the media franchise of space-age morality tales created from the mind of Gene Roddenberry and to appeal to the older generations that grew up on the Original Series and many subsequent series. I won’t try to convince you to watch the new series, but simply encourage you to think about the churn that continues in television and video markets. Unlike a lot of TV shows today, you can watch Discovery on Sundays at 8:30pm ET, but if you miss the broadcast, you can’t catch up on the streaming site for CBS without subscribing directly to CBS. Stated another way, your cable subscription does not give you streaming access to Star Trek: Discovery like it does for CBS’s primetime show Salvation. Further complicating things, you can get the show on Netflix, but only international viewers outside the U.S. can access it there.

The streaming world is a lucrative business, as the Long Tail paper points out, and it is not surprising that CBS wants to get into it and not just provide content for it. However, we’re going from a world where we pay for cable access and a few streaming services, which collect all the back content, into a world where every studio, network, and cell-phone manufacturer wants to launch its own streaming service. I can’t imagine that this will make Joe and Jane Consumer happy; I certainly don’t want to pay for multiple streaming services. It’s bad enough that I have multiple apps on my iPad, but then at least, I pay only one bill. (Ok, two. One to my cable provider and one to Netflix.) It seems like this space is ripe for disruption again. It will be interesting to watch.