• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, April 17, 2007

When I was researching the rise of digital distribution in music several years ago, a radio researcher mentioned to me that radio stations had to expand their playlists radically to accommodate a much broader range of listener requests. Instead of maintaining a few thousand tracks to anticipate a niche audience's requests, many stations now needed three or more times that number. People were discovering and embracing a wider range of music. Apparently, the online eco-system had not just transformed the process of distribution but of discovery as well. Whether through viral sharing, recommendation engines or the new ease of sampling that the Web made possible, people's musical tastes seemed to be widening. The long tail was not just about underserved niches finding the wares that had always eluded them. It was also about the tail perhaps getting flatter and longer.

I see this phenomenon in my 15-year-old daughter's iPod. Along with recounting her tales of teen drama whenever I pick her up, Sam also plugs her iPod into the car audio system to keep me apprised of her ever-changing musical preferences. In the last year, she has traversed country, techno, heavy metal, something I am told is "EMO" but sounds a lot like metal, and now trance, which sounds like new age-meets-techno or perhaps the recent Madonna on a lot of Zoloft. Even for a teen, Sam's is an impressive run through a wild range of tastes. I have to wonder how Brooks and Dunn and Broken Benjamin fit into her same cute head. If she extends this capriciousness from music to boyfriends, the next few years could be very tough on Dad. I may need to borrow some Zoloft from Madonna.

When I ask Sam to track back these monthly taste shifts to their source, it is almost always digital. She followed a MySpace friend's profile page samples, or she got a link from an IM buddy, or she was browsing the recommendation engine at iTunes and sampling liberally. The technology was enabling this accelerated process of discovery and even a catholicity of taste that never was possible for many of us. Mobility itself also plays a role. Sharing earbuds is another link in this new distribution chain. Sam and her friends demo their discoveries to one another on their iPods by passing the left or right earpiece to the other.

This same expansion of tastes may be occurring in video as well, and my AppleTV screen could be the way it enters my living room. Jonathan Cobb, CEO at ad delivery system Kiptronic, says that the independent audio and video show producers with whom he works are no longer considering themselves "podcasters" so much as media brands. "Podcasting is just a siloed model," he says. "What podcasting enabled was this huge growth in the quantity of media online, the blogicization of media where you have millions of different sources, and they aren't just putting it into podcasts. In downloadable media they are redistributing it online and into phones."

And this is where my portable media player or my phone connects to my TV screen. As I mentioned in the last column, AppleTV allows a seamlessness of media distribution. The same video shows I enjoy on my iPod are now on my TV. All of those little things like Tiki Bar TV, Rumor Girls, Rocket Boom, G4 video game reviews, and many more, are now mashed up into a single input choice on my TV. The digital discovery process that starts on the PC now extends to all three screen, and the portability the mobile piece introduces into the equation, which I think invites sampling and experimentation, reaches onto the TV. The iTunes-powered system also carries bookmarks across the screen, so if everything has been synced recently, what I start watching on one screen picks up on another when I move across all three.

Now I have a dedicated TV input feeding my living room screen with scores of curiosities that are way off the cable and network grids. Right now Apple only lets me sample movie trailers and top music videos from AppleTV, but I am sure that ultimately AppleTV will access the iTune store and allow deep sampling from the lean-back position.

The model that was inspired by mobile, podcasting, finally ports to the TV. For mainstream media and the advertisers who support them, this can only mean severe pain. Even if 10% of my prime-time viewing shaves off into AppleTV vodcasts, that could represent billions in shifted revenue.

Why do I think this will happen? Again, I use my experience with mobile media, the iPod. Apple brought video to iTunes with the promise of $1.99 TV episodes to go. Downloadable TV is how I got started using my iPod. But once I discovered the burgeoning video library in the iTunes podcast library, my purchases of episodic TV plummeted. The rich diversity and munchably short content in these mini-shows ended up filling my iPod time. And now, that taste for diverse programming is available on my big honkin' TV.

My sense from this personal case study in three-screen media is that the whole will add up to more than the sum of its parts. We are not just seeing media as we know it liquefy and pour across platforms. We may also see tastes in media melt in unanticipated ways. The mobile media experience, and its tendency to encourage sampling and greater customization, will start to inform all other platforms as well.