THE ALDEN CURVE

The "Alden Curve" is a pattern of content consumption that's evolved in the video-on-demand world of 21st century media, one that graphically displays how we now enjoy video in the new media landscape, brought about by DRV's, Pay-Per-View and the endless amount of on-demand content available on the internet. (See the pink curve, displayed in the second illustration below.)

Contrasted against the old pattern of media consumption in the pre-VOD world, the concept of The Curve shows us just how dramatically a significant aspect of our video consumption has changed. As you'll see, the two patterns actually mirror each other.

Below are consumption curves for TV News and Entertainment in the Pre- and Post- Video-On-Demand worlds:

Here’s what our permanently disrupted consumption now looks like in one media sector, TV News:

We have gone from a world that consumes a limited amount of high-end and low-end content, i.e. a world that consumes mostly content in the middle — simply because that's what makes up the majority of content available live on TV at any one moment — to a world that consumes primarily high-end (documentary) and low-end (user-generated) content.

The two curves completely mirror each other. And all of that has a good deal of significance for content producers, programmers and distributors.

A TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE OF “DISRUPTIVE SELECTION”

One night in 2010, about five years after I first started writing about The Curve, I peaked over the shoulder of my then 15 year-old biology (and "House") obsessed daughter (now a pediatrician), who was studying patterns of biological evolution, and I discovered the below diagrams of evolutionary curves in her bio textbook:

Click on the image to enlarge. (Then back-space to return to post.)

 The curve on the bottom-right—the curve labeled "Disruptive Selection"—looks pretty familiar, doesn't it? 

It's rather remarkable how the curve for what biologists call "Disruptive Selection"—i.e. the relationship between the pre-disruption and post-disruption evolutionary curves—matches up with The Curve for content consumption created by the technological disruption caused by VOD, PPV, YouTube, et al.

Once you think about it a bit, though, it makes a lot of sense:

Technology truly is disrupting the evolution of media, and the pattern of that disruption looks no different than it does in the biological world.

To put it mildly:

It's always interesting when human behaviors in the aggregate match biological imperatives.

p.s. The "Alden Curve" was named by Andrew Hayward, the long-time president of CBS News, during a conversation we were having about changing patterns of media consumption, back in 2004. (And, honestly, who am I to object?)