I'm glad to be back in the U.S. after our whirlwind European tour, but I'm now going through snooker withdrawal. To explain: Back in my college days in England, I developed an addiction to televised snooker -- the geometry of the shots, the bright colored balls on green felt -- and would watch it at a friend's house as often as I could (my flatmates and I couldn't afford a telly of our own). Before bed some nights on this trip I watched the Masters tournament at Wembley; perhaps fueled by the market issues we were focused on during our trip, I now see that my desire for snooker coverage is a perfect example of Chris Anderson's Long Tail.

A commercial on EuroSport for snooker warned that watching it on TV is addictive. For me that's certainly true. I don't know if it would be true for others, especially in the U.S., and I doubt if ESPN any time soon is going to conduct an experiment by airing it, even on ESPN 8 "The Ocho." Mass media is by definition for the masses, and I understand why snooker isn't on any of my Comcast packages. But can the Internet be a vehicle to get me my snooker on the wrong side of the pond?

Not right now, it seems, at least not easily. I did find a BBC news stream of the Masters final between the Scotsman John Higgins and the eventual champion, Irishman Ronnie O'Sullivan. (Being both Scot and Irish it was hard to choose, but O'Sullivan is so incredibly good I wanted Higgins to win an upset; O'Sullivan routed him). I had to miss the final, as I was on an Alitalia jet over the Atlantic on the way home when it aired. But I quickly bailed on the video stream, as it is such low quality that the bright red balls look like little pixel squares from a vintage Atari game.

Well, my colleague Jim DeLong is always saying you get what you pay for, and that stream was free. So I did a search to see if I could purchase snooker on DVD. I could -- if I had a Region 2 coded DVD player, which I don't. Ah, that thorny issue of interoperability that we spent so much time on in Brussels and Milan.

A little patience may pay off for me here. After all, I've gone the last 20 years without snooker, maybe a year or two more is bearable. But I know that Comcast keeps upping my download speeds without asking me or raising my monthly rate. I know that Verizon just a stone's throw from my northern Virginia abode is laying fiber to the home, and is offering video service. The Long Tail shows that people like me, with a narrow interest in the wrong geographic location, will spend generously to satisfy their interest. The success of eBay also shows that (no longer do I have to find an antiquarian store in a large city to buy an antique map, another weakness of mine; there are thousands of them at any given time on eBay, a far greater selection than even the Philadelphia Print Shop).

A word of warning, though, if snooker does become more available to U.S. broadband consumers -- it really is addictive viewing. I'm not the only Yank with this problem.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 9:44 AM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation

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