Hongyun and I are moving very soon and we've come to the conclusion that we no longer need TV. Here's one reason why:

[via Get A Look At This]

And the nice thing is that there is a TON of amazing content on TED, public radio, public TV, and privately produced. Sure we'll still watch shows like Heroes and LOST, but we'll do so online. The only thing I'm really sad about is the demise of my Tivo. But alas, Tivo's time shifting was just a way station to our time-shifting, place-shifting, and even content-shifting future.

So the conclusion came about that we no longer need a TV since everything we want to see is or will soon be online.

We plan on keeping our TV around though. We need something to play video games on once in a while, you see. But I'm thinking of hooking up our home server to the TV so that we use the TV to watch TED and all of the other content out there instead of on our laptop. We'll see how successful that is...

Looks like Cal and Google have teamed up for streaming video goodness. Imagine how the world will be after a 10 year old kid with an IQ of 160 gets their hands on these...

Check it out

Canada? Yes, that's right Canada. REVERIE SOUND REVUE out of Canada has all but fallen off the face of the map, but they were featured in the Toronto Star's Anti-Hit List Podcast (what can I say? I'm eclectic) a couple of weeks ago and they've been stuck in my brain ever since. So what do they do? They construct righteous alterna-pop with dreamy guitars and vocals that just seem to float around in the sky just above your head. They really should make the next Diet-Coke commercial song.

Try going to the New Music Canda site and listen to their songs that are posted there (especially "Walking Around Waiting Downtown") to fall in love with music again. I tried going to their now defunct website only to be disappointed. They have a CD for sale through the NMC site's link and it's only $10CN. For now though, I'm going to just keep the streaming window open and enjoy the poppy-goodness.

UPDATE: I just got an email from Maxx at Megatunes that my order has been processed and will be shipped out this week! Finally, after an Internet-eternity, my dreams of having my very own Reverie Sound Revue CD will finally come true. Pop On...

dodoskido says:

An interesting read on the Long Tail and how it's bringing an end to the the stranglehold content distributors and filters (think: RIAA) have on our ability to entertain ourselves (get your mind out of the gutter).

Originally from game girl advance...

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, wrote an article called "The Long Tail" for the October 2004 issue which argues the commercial viability of non-hits. He's currently maintaining a blog on the topic while he works on a book-length version.

Anderson has some great examples, like how Netflix has allowed documentary films to undergo a commercial renaissance, and how more than 50% of Amazon's top sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. He makes a pretty convincing argument that an internet-based distributer can make good money on non-hits by offering a couple thousand different titles, priced fairly.

Of course, videogames are quite famously not music, books or movies. Can this distribution model work for them? I say why not? Again, don't think about how to shoehorn Halo into this distribution model. Halo is a hit, and the industry already knows how to sell hits. The long tail model requires a flood of content with limited appeal. Think Katamari Damacy clones, PopCap, curling simulators, Indie Game Jam entries. Think all the videogames with reviews that caution "unless you're a die-hard fan, pass this one over," because the die-hard fans, the niche markets, are the territory of the long tail.

The long tail isn't "the end of hits." Anderson is happy to point out that the long tail isn't a lot of things. The long tail could be a way to bring back the commercial garage game, and it might very well be the best way to save the point 'n' click adventure game. As long as I keep working at Electronic Arts, I'll probably never get anywhere near it, but I think almost every developer here would love to see this kind of market emerge, if only so we can play what comes out of it.

Bnoopy: The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens.

iTunes has over one million songs in it?s catalog. You know how many have been bought at least once?
Every one.
Completely counter to the traditional 80/20 rule, every iTunes song has been purchased at least once.
What this says to me is that the tradition 80/20 ?rule? is more a function of consumers having their expectations set by the limits of physical inventory in retail stores than it is about real human nature. Amazon and iTunes are great examples.

I've been reading a bit about the "long tail" economy that is quickly supplanting the "80/20" rule. Basically it goes like this: in the past your choices were limited to physical inventory of the business you visited. WalMart is big, but it doesn't have everything. Amazon and iTunes have figured out that there are viturally no limit to physical inventory (iTunes has it better than Amazon for sure) when a storefront is simply online.

The long tail...the long tail....the long tail. Just keep repeating it until you come up with the next great business idea.