Tech’s Long Tail

• When you decided to obtain a DVD for your science fiction assignment in Module 4, where did you go to find a movie based on a Philip K. Dick book? Did you rent or purchase a DVD, or did you view it digitally on your computer using Netflix or a similar vendor of video on demand?
• Is the current competition between DVDs and video on demand an example of increasing returns or Red Queens? Justify your response with sound reasoning and specific examples.
• Where do you think DVDs and video on demand are on the four criteria of McLuhan’s tetrad?

Of the six possible choices for the Philip K. Dick assignment (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Next, Paycheck, or A Scanner Darkly), I own two on VHS, including Total Recall which was my selection, two on DVD because they came out after I began my DVD collection, and two that I don’t have (Paycheck and A Scanner Darkly). I have never heard of Paycheck, and I was a little bit freaked out by the first Scanner movie, so I am have not concerned myself with adding any of them to my collection of over 800 movies.

It has been over a decade since I rented a movie or had cable television; I managed a VHS rental store for a little over a year while I was working my way through community college (I won’t mention how long that was), which made for a lot of study time and even more free movies. I have yet to venture into BluRay, even after its recent victory over HD, because I can still purchase DVDs for my collection at a fraction of the cost to purchase the newer BluRay disks. When the day comes that I can no longer purchase new releases on DVD or my cathode ray tube television gives up the ghost, whichever comes first, I will migrate to the latest and greatest movie format and mount a new piece of tech on my wall with all the bells and whistles that make up a modern home theater.

Many of the DVDs I purchase also come with digital copies, but I have yet to load one on my computer to watch a movie, perhaps I will prior to my next enforced traveling adventure so that I do not have to carry on my own entertainment in anything other than the laptop that goes everywhere with me.

Chris Anderson, in his TED presentation, discussed the four phases that most technologies go through: critical price, critical mass, replacing another technology, and free. My purchasing habits in building my movie collection reflect these characteristics pretty closely. It was not until VHS and DVD players and their video formats could be purchased cheaply, where they had reached critical mass, did I enter the marketplace. And, it is not until the new technology has fully replaced the old nearly free technology that I venture into the new media. I hung out in the nearly free realm for as long as I could.

While I know many people who are Netflix fanatics, I still like owning my own stuff rather than renting or pulling it out of the cloud, since you never know when the server will go down or blow up. On rare occasions when I am feeling nostalgic for an old movie or television series, which I don’t already own, I log on to Hulu and watch the available free stuff. While many people flock to Netflix or other video websites, I watch movies from the comfort of my living room without any annoying streaming delays. For me, this new way of watching movies has little appeal. While DVDs may be on McLuhan’s obsolete tetrad for the rest of the world, for me they are anything but obsolete. And while, video on demand may be an emerging technology and provide increasing returns over its disk-based competition, it has very little appeal to me.

Someday, I expect BluRay too will also go away, replaced fully by digital media in a time when television, stereo, telephone, internet access, VOIP, and all other digital devices meld into one, but I imagine that I will enter that realm toward the free end of the digital format phase and store all my movies on my own personal storage device, as I once did with over 200 CDs, which currently resides on my laptop, desktop, and Blackberry. Have I mentioned the over 6,000 hardback, paperback, and trade editions that I am not sure how I will ever replace? I still don’t have an eReader…

Reference:
Anderson, C. (2004). Tech’s long tail [Video]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/
chris_anderson_of_wired_on_tech_s_long_tail.html