Once upon a time there was Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread and its competitors were the ultimate short tail product. Americans liked the idea of getting a packaged good that was fresh and didn't go stale in a day; they also liked the colorful and hygienic packaging and the convenience that came with a pre-sliced and uniform format. Judging from common parlance, it might be safe to say that they found sliced white bread to be a great thing. To make things even better, everybody went out and bought electric toasters. And thus toasted white bread became for many the second greatest advance of the Twentieth Century.

What happened in bread was matched in other daily pursuits. Where once there were Hudson, Packard, Studebaker, Kaiser, Jeep etc., there remained Ford, Chrysler and GM And for a while these giants manufactured a wide range of brands and models but, alas, over time, and consistent with a new bean-counter logic, they'd reduced that choice to a few simple bodies and chassis differentiated by a little chrome, and a lot of hype boosted by tailfins and leaning girls in shorts, one hand on the hood ornament.

But lowest common denominator marketing didn't stop with molecules. The spectrum was also consolidated as thousands of local stations were marshaled into the columns of three major networks. Likewise for print, so whereas a city might have had 5 daily papers, the count dwindled down to one or two.

Market-share dominators, it seems, like first and foremost the idea of managed, predictable choice for their customers. From this perspective it's good that at the multiplex this week you were choosing, say, among Wedding Crashers and the Island or going back to see War of the Worlds for the third time. Quite simply, the supply side dominates this equation.

But this long, hot summer, after a string of good money years, there's a cold shadow hanging over Hollywood and once again we hear talk of a crisis in the industry. Could it be that Hollywood, long shielded from real competition, has become the last of the "white bread" or short tail industries? Like white bread, with Hollywood you always are supposed to know what you are getting-- sometimes they throw in raisins and cinnamon, sometimes a dose of poppy seeds, sometimes the loaf is round, sometimes it's square but the proven formula stays true.

For people in the biz, the quality of the product is not the problem they most often cite in the face of declining seat sales. In a TV interview with one of the producers of the Island, this week, pirating and its impact on time to DVD were given as the main reasons for the slump. She might as well have got her talking points from the music arm of one of the studios.

Concurrently, virtual DVD store, Netflix, announced that it now has available more than 45,000 titles for its customer base. Netflix subscribers pay a monthly fee for the privilege of being able to choose among those 45,000 titles and to have a certain number of DVD's on hand at any given time --at Netflix you can keep a disc for as long as you want; when you are finished with it you mail it back to them and they send you out another. Given the reliance on choice, in contrast to Hollywood and the Network owners (BTW,one, Viacom, owns brick and
mortar competitor, Blockbuster), Netflix is the ultimate new economy or long tail company. If you feel like hunkering down with a season of Tony Soprano, just let them know by putting those discs at the top of your queue. Netflix's policy is to have what you want on hand by the time you are ready to have them sent out. Netflix has clearly learned a lot from Amazon,
another long tail success story.

The customer chooses from this wide variety, and importantly, rank what they've seen. Mining this feedback, Netflix can then let one customer know what other people with similar tastes have also recommended or rented. Recommendations lead to other recommendations and as you browse, you find yourself adding ever more films, you may have known little about, to your queue.In perspective, with all of its 45,000 titles, Netflix has been able to gather and retain a subscriber base of little over 3 million people. Their recently reported quarterly gross revenues came to just over $146 million, the typical three week gross of a single semi-successful film. Clearly, Netflix, in its present form, resembles more the fly in the ointment than the 800 pound gorilla in the room. But there are also rumblings that Netflix is busy this summer building the technical infrastructure to pave the way for its holy grail, the downloading of films on demand. What this opens up to is something more broadly called IPTV, or, TV over the Internet. At present day Internet speeds, even the fastest DSL, IPTV is mainly a novelty, no more relevant, say, than VOIP, or voice over the Internet was, back in the early days of dial-up Internet access. But what it will mean eventually for the cable companies, is real competition. Nonetheless, at present network speeds, we are far from IPTV. Still, that hasn't stopped a rapid acceleration in activity lately.

So much so, that long before we get to the high speed broadband that makes it really fly, there's already a flurry of activity: thousands of regular video bloggers (vloggers) turn out original content in all forms and shapes, streaming video is a regular feature of NYTIMES.com coverage of major events, eyewitnesses capture video on their mobile phones and upload it to grassroots news sites that scoop the network, regularly providing the most striking shots of dramatic events as they unfold; and most recently major players like the BBC, the Associated Press, CNN and CBS have all announced streaming video services on their websites. And just last week, a record number, nearly 450,000 people watched the launch of Challenger via live streaming video And for the two companies that most profit from a long tail world, Google and Yahoo, it was no time too soon to announce extensive additions to their video search and play services. In typical Google fashion, this ia a Beta site http://video.google.com but it also includes a downloadable video viewer. Google video not only locates
potential videos but lets the searcher know if the actual video is available on line as part of the search result.

Other groups, in a race to gather content, have announced that they will host downloadable video files on their servers at no cost to the content owners. And formats like Bit Torrent have
been developed that help to speed up downloads of (more compact) higher definition video formats. On university campuses where 2nd generation high speed broadband networks
are available, pirated and copyright-free long films are being distributed. The other day, for instance, someone made available, legally, the silent German expressionist film the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,which apparently is old enough (1918) to escape the long fingernails of the Sonny Bono copyright extension act.

The history of the Internet is the story of the long tail. Analysts often forget that Google, EBay, Amazon and Yahoo (the four great dotcoms still standing), owe their success to the long tail. Google, of course, devours content as fast as it appears and spits it out in small, manageable doses. Their business model goes: you supply the content and we deliver it decorated with paid ads-- we get paid, you get traffic. EBay, of course, no longer just sells the long tail remains of old attics, closets and cellars. Buyers often nowadays go on it looking for items so new they haven't yet been imported much less hit the shelves of stores. The Internet works even in its most mundane manifestations because it is the anti supply-driven channel. Can't find a handle you are looking for in Restoration Warehouse, Expo or Lowe's, just go onto the web. It's there somewhere, just Google it and off goes UPS.

IPTV requires next generation bandwidth. Right now, that means the cable guys and the telephone guys, period. Maybe IP over electric lines will work, who knows. Maybe high bandwidth across spectrum will function and there will be some sort of competition, though as we noted above, even three players, isn't usually enough. There is also a role for Congress in pushing to speed up Internet 2.

If it stays at only two, Hollywood will eventually be forced to team with those two main future high-speed distributors, Cable and Telco. Yes, cabin fever will always be with us, especially for the young, but as we can see already today in the percentage of business DVD now delivers, big screen, surround-sound, home-entertainment centers will provide more and more of the seats for the movie industry and video on demand will become the main source of paid entertainment. It should be noted that already Cineplex seat sales represent only about 50% of the revenue that a movie brings in. Not too long ago, that number was 85%. High price tickets, the string of in-theatre ads, baby-shit smelling popcorn, kinky babysitters and choked roads make getting out of the house less and less of a viable alternative for many people. Hollywood will have to look past the pox-faced kids in the multiplexes and try to figure out what the Gen X,Y and boomers at home will want to download. The year of IPTV? No, not quite but the decade of the long tail, you bet!

So where does IPTV (or, better, the future) leave Netflix? Netflix faces the perennial middleman problem, owning neither the content they move nor the distribution channels. Their real value is in knowing who their customers are (not terribly important in a two player broadband world, where the Cable and Telco's own the customers) and in the original content they have gathered from their customers through their rating and buying patterns. There's value there, but not a home run. In our eyes that makes Netflix a buyout target and the future of the long tail, guaranteed. If Rumsfeld can understand it's time to switch business models in Iraq and start pulling the troops out, Hollywood will probably get the message, too. That's the real value of being a dinosaur, you don't have to be too sharp. Most of the time, you can count on the other guy screwing up and as you finally do swing around your tail, that most critters have no choice but to duck and get out of the way. Tune in later for more on tail.

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