“Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, argues that the sudden availability of niche offerings more closely tailored to their tastes will lure consumers away from homogenized hits. The ‘tail’ of the sales distribution curve, he says, will become longer, fatter, and more profitable. Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School, set out to investigate whether Anderson’s long-tail theory is actually playing out in today’s markets. She focused on the music and home-video industries — two markets that Anderson and others frequently hold up as examples of the long tail in action — reviewing sales data from Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen VideoScan, the online music service Rhapsody, and the Australian DVD-by-mail service Quickflix. What she found may surprise you: Blockbusters are capturing even more of the market than they used to, and consumers in the tail don’t really like niche products much.”

http://www.citeulike.org/user/mmkurth/article/2984768

Consumers don’t like niche progrmming.

“We Might Want to Keep an Eye on ION”

“If the commission embraces the notion that secondary digital streams really do constitute separate licenses that can be separately assigned, one could easily argue that radio stations that have opted to transmit digital streams (i.e., ‘HD Radio’) should also be permitted to sell those streams as separately licensed stations… For one, the number of radio stations could theoretically double or triple overnight. This might not have the cataclysmic effect of, say, the injection of nearly 700 new FM allotments through the notorious Docket No. 80-90 a quarter century ago, but you never know. At a minimum, if the law of supply and demand were to hold true, the overnight doubling/tripling of stations would likely depress each station’s value. And such a rapid increase in the number of stations would logically lead to a similarly rapid increase in competition for audiences and revenues. Are we all ready for that?”

http://www.rwonline.com/article.aspx?articleId=76922&mnu_id=14

“HD Radio…Watch What You Wish For…And What Is It You Want?”

“Radio continues to chalk up very good cash flow to revenue margins, but revenues are down. Do the business plans of broadcasters include selling smaller audiences on more (HD) signals if HD actually succeeds? Broadcasters have complained about the proliferation of more signals over the past couple decades. Now those same broadcasters are introducing 2 to 3 times the signals with HD.”

http://tinyurl.com/yfqquhh

Extra HD channels will only serve to dilute the analog channels.