Eagle swoops in on Long Tail

I had a nice chat with Eagle Broadband COO and GM of IPTV Solutions Brian Morrow about one of the company's additional strategies, in light of the Web 2.0 revolution, the advent of “The Long Tail” and the Google-YouTube acquisition. Eagle is in advanced talks with number niche content providers, like a horse-racing broandband TV channel and a Latino one based in Miami. Morrow says the company plans to launch a broad swath of content, including subscription based of pay-per-view adult content and ad-subsidized niche channels like the two previously mentioned. Apart from bandwidth restraints, what does an IPTV provider have to lose? Hawking an additional 500 niche channels through an indexed EPG menu can be ignored by those subscribers that would rather stick to the mainstream offerings, but could also bring in greater revenue streams for advertisers, service providers and the niche content providers alike. IPTV cannot subsist on horse-racing, Latino programming and adult content alone, but differentiation from cable MSOs probably depends on an aggressive embrace of The Long Tail. So when licensing deals with the movie studios are getting you down, take a break and call up the electric model train channel or the Danish tourism channel. Can't imagine them giving you a headache over DRM. While the company is still hashing out the business strategy and the technical execution is still in beginning stages, I think it’s safe to say Eagle is onto something here.