Michael D. Smith

“the entertainment industries’ existing processes for capturing value from blockbusters start with a set of experts deciding which products are likely to succeed in the market. Once the experts have spoken, companies use their control of scarce promotion and distribution channels to push their products out to the mass market. In short, these processes rely on curation (the ability to select which products are brought to market) and control (over the scarce resources necessary to promote and distribute these products). Long-tail business models use a very different set of processes to capture value. These processes—on display at Amazon and Netflix—rely on selection (building an integrated platform that allows consumers to access a wide variety of content) and satisfaction (using data, recommendation engines, and peer reviews to help customers sift through the wide selection to discover exactly the sort of products they want to consume when they want to consume them). They replace human curators with a set of technology-enabled processes that let consumers decide which products make it to the front of the line. They can do this because shelf space and promotion capacity are no longer scarce resources. The resources that are scarce in this model, and the resources that companies have to compete for, are fundamentally different resources: consumers’ attention and knowledge of their preferences.”
― Michael D. Smith, Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment