The Law of Peanut Butter & Video

Friends, colleagues and fellow consumers of video content, after years of experience consuming
video content across different media channels, I have formally identified a theorem.

The Law of Peanut Butter and Video (PB&V)

Summary: over time, quantity of video content grows exponentially while quality of video
content remains constant -- across all channels.

In more detail: The quality of video content grows logarithmically over time and has, since the
late 1980's reached a fairly stable plateau. Meanwhile, the quantity of video content has grown at
an exponential pace -- although its growth was at first slower than the initial growth in content
quality. This is shown in the below figure.

In the early years, quality was spread over a small number of television channels. This meant that
it was relatively easy to find good content. In more recent years, however, because content
quality has plateaued and quantity has exploded, the quality is now spread over a huge swath of
channels. The same good content is there; however, it has spread like peanut butter over 500+
channels (versus 30 or fewer as in the past).

The advent of Internet video content fits perfectly into this theorem. While content quantity has
exploded, the quality of web video content is, at best, terrible [1]. It's truly a long-tail of garbage.

The Peanut Butter Coefficient

Some may observe that with the advent of transformational video media, such as Cable TV and
YouTube, quality must go up at least incrementally. The theorem handles this with the Peanut
Butter Coefficient. The Peanut Butter Coefficient is a constant coefficient that, in fact,
incrementally increases quality given transformational video media. See the figure below. The
incremental increase in quality gets spread, like peanut butter, across the exponentially growing
volume of content.

Okay, that's it for my tongue-in-cheek analysis. But, if like me, you're fed up with the peanut
butter spread of content, it's time to fight for universal content access.

Universal content accessibility is the next huge thing in the video content market. Should all past
content be accessible anytime, anywhere, by anyone, then by extension all high quality content
will be immediately available. If a company (or industry) can conquer universal access to
content, and empower consumers to engage with quality content on their own terms, they will
reap untold dividends -- much like Apple was able to do with music.

[1] The most-viewed non-music video on YouTube is "Charlie bit my finger - again!" (see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_...)