I’ve got a couple of different complaints.

The first big issue was that I couldn’t find the USA vs. Canada hockey game televised last night. They built it up all week as much as possible, and then I go to watch it and it’s not on. I’m hearing updates about it on Facebook but can’t find it on the TV schedule.

That issue alerted me to something else. AT&T is a sponsor of the Olympic Games and I am a proud AT&T U-verse customer. They released an expansion of their “Multi-View” to help with coverage of the Olympics. Multi-view allows you to enjoy a 4-channel picture-in-picture function so you can keep from missing anything you want to watch. The problem there is that every time I’ve tried to use the Olympic multi-view, I’ve yet to see any Olympic coverage other than on the main channel I’m watching.

The other frustration I have with Olympics TV coverage is that we don’t see these sports covered hardly at all throughout the year. With cable networks with 100’s of channels, why can’t we see more of these non-mainstream sports covered through the year? Where’s Chris Anderson’s Long Tail of TV sports coverage?

And lastly, why can’t I watch curling on TV on my DVR? I’ve yet to see it covered anywhere except on online video. Perhaps I’m too busy.

Post from: EveryJoe

Frustrated with Olympics TV Coverage

I often think of how the long tail concept applies to ideas. What happens during the validation process to see if an idea is worthwhile, and beyond that, when you’re actively working on an idea is the realization of new ideas.

So one idea begets another, which begets another, and so on. Ideas are points on a chain (or graph) not points in space with no reference or connection to anything else.

The long tail isn’t just about one thing coming out of another. It’s the realization that many smaller things combined may be bigger than the most popular or biggest thing in that space. There are a handful of extremely popular blogs; the long tail is everyone else. At the end of the day, “everyone else” is much bigger (and more valuable) than the most popular blogs. That’s what Vernon Lun’s talking about with his site TheGoodBlogs. (Of course, that doesn’t stop many of us from trying to get into that handful of ultra-popular bloggers!)

When it comes to a killer idea, it may pay dividends many times over in terms of your success (regardless of how you measure success.) But its long tail could be even more successful.

Great ideas are meant to spawn other ideas.

Those ideas may be completely new businesses, or they may be corollary’s to what you’re already doing, smaller offshoots that combine to create even more success than the original idea. The blessed long tail.

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Post from: EveryJoe

The Long Tail of an Idea