After reading Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”, I immediately recalled an experience I had a few years ago that confirmed the existence of the “Long Tail”. While on a trip in Kenya, I met a student from Britain who I quickly got in a conversation about movies with. One of his favorite movies happened to be an obscure Japanese movie I had never heard of. After returning to the United States, I searched for the title at the Blockbusters and media stores around my area. Having no luck I turned to amazon.com, which I had previously used with much success to find some obscure items. After failing to find the film on amazon I began to doubt its existence but after numerous google searches I found the DVD on an Asian import site called yesasia.com and in a few days time the DVD arrived on my front porch.

Although I definitely benefited form the existence of the “Long Tail” in the movie industry, I believe iTunes is inadvertently turning the movie business back to a megahit business model. When iTunes first made movie purchases available in its online store, it was hard to justify purchasing a lower quality digital movie for the same price as a DVD unless you were buying it for the sole purchase of watching it on your iPod. The biggest problem with purchasing movies on iTunes was that it was nearly impossible to figure out a way to get them on your television. To remedy this inconvenience apple created appleTV, which allows users to transfer their digital media to a box that is attached to their television. AppleTV soon evolved to include services like Youtube and podcasts offering infinite hours of free entertainment with only a connection to the Internet. ITunes and appleTV have recently made a large stride in digital media distribution with the advent of digital movie rentals. With a click of a button iTunes users can now rent any movie in the iTunes library with nearly instant gratification. ITunes users do not have to bother with online rental service subscriptions, waiting for their movies to ship, or returning them. They simply have to download and watch. ITunes is also making strides to deliver high definition content, something difficult for movie rental services to provide with the ongoing battle between bluray and HDDVD.

The problem with iTunes movie rentals is that they offer a significantly smaller library than an online rental service like Netflix would offer. By making a smaller library so easily accessible iTunes is effectively shortening the “Long Tail”. ITunes seems to offer mostly large blockbusters instead of smaller independent films. The recommendation one finds after purchasing an iTunes movie are usually movies of relatively the same “blockbuster” scale. Unfortunately the easy of iTunes is nearly impossible to refuse. The newest megahit films are heavily publicized on the iTunes store homepage so it is incredibly easy to continue to rent the megahits instead of digging deeper into the libraries for less well-known films. Unless iTunes begins to greatly expand their movie database and begin to allow independent studios into their store a shortening of the “Long Tail” may unfortunately take place.