VUDU and Apple TV: Long Tail Personified

As someone whose taste in media (literature, films, music, photography, painting, sculpture, etc) tends to lean towards the obscure and bizarre (i.e. last night’s movie selection), I’ve long been intrigued by the ‘long tail‘ characteristics of online distribution. Wired’s Chris Anderson coined the term, thereby putting a name to a phenomenon that statisticians had long studied. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, here’s a brief summary from the Wikipedia entry:

Given a large enough availability of choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution, instead of the expected normal distribution curve. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail").

Translation: when access to content becomes sufficiently easy, when the price of that content becomes sufficiently low (thereby attractive to consumers) and when the cost of warehousing and distributing that content also become sufficiently low (thereby attractive to suppliers), the amount of content available for consumption and the demand for that content will both explode.

Take Teeth, for example, which I watched last night on VUDU. It was a low-budget independent film, with subject matter that a substantial percentage of the U.S. population would frankly find disturbing if not offensive. Combined, these factors would preclude its being shown in secondary-market movie theaters…I was actually surprised to discover via Google’s cache that the film even made it to Sacramento venues. For similar reasons, brick-and-mortar DVD rental-and-sales merchants might decline to stock it.

But VUDU inventoried it, so I was able to enjoy and learn from it. And in this same light, I’ve been equally intrigued by the iTunes Store’s ‘99 Cent Movie Of The Week’ promotion, and of my response to it. I’ve rented several of the films Apple’s offered since the service launched at the end of February. In some cases, they were films I hadn’t yet seen (I’m embarrassed to admit…they were all excellent):

• Ronin
• Saved!
• The Usual Suspects
• A Fistful of Dollars

But what of Ghost World, which is currently sitting on my Apple TV’s hard drive awaiting a screening? I’d seen it before, but a long time ago, and I remembered enjoying it very much. It was less than a buck. And, because it was a standard-def title, I could begin watching it almost immediately if I wanted to. An impulse rent? Yes. But one I doubt I’ll regret.

If restricted to traditional brick-and-mortar distribution, would I have ever gotten around to seeing the first four movies listed above, or would I have bothered watching Ghost World again? Probably not. In the brave new Long Tail world, however, the rules have changed, therefore too has the outcome.

Apple wins. The studio wins. AT&T, my broadband supplier, wins. My LAN equipment providers win. And I win. Who can argue with that? Aside from Blockbuster, that is?