> Long tail/"short tail" paradigm was about the distribution of purchases/views/streams etc. A statistical property, not about mere quantity. The author doesn'

> Long tail/"short tail" paradigm was about the distribution of purchases/views/streams etc. A statistical property, not about mere quantity. The author doesn't provide any evidence that the decades-long trend of "more options = broader distributed viewership" has broken, and the person you're replying to has shown that the "more options" trend is largely continuing. The author is cherry-picking also-not-relative-distribution numbers from a relatively small time frame and extrapolating wildly. Let's look at the longer timeframe. From Wikipedia for I Love Lucy: "The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a then-record rating of 71.7, meaning that 71.7% of all households with television sets were tuned to the program, the equivalent of some 44 million viewers.[71] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[71] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[72]" MASH: "The series premiered in the US on September 17, 1972, and ended on February 28, 1983, with the finale, showcased as a television film, titled "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen", becoming the most-watched and highest-rated single television episode in US television history at the time, with a record-breaking 125 million viewers (60.2 rating and 77 share)" By the time we get to something like Friends we're down to 52M live viewers for its finale, and it's only shrunk since then. Netflix doesn't give equivalent counts or US-only ones, as far as I can find, just "at least two minutes within N weeks" type stuff and similar; I believe if they had that level of cultural ubiquity, they'd be shouting it to the rooftops more explicitly. And if they did, the linked article would be citing it. But instead, they're just speculating that all the numbers and trends we do have better measured are wrong. If you look at ticket sales counts instead of box office for movies you'll see a similar large representation of older stuff, and that's a quantity comparison even with a smaller population to boot .