Chris Anderson writes about the long tail effect on bollywood.Bollywood makes at least 800 films every year. In American alone, there are 1.7m people who are first or second generation Indians, most of whom can speak Hindi (the main language of Bollywood films).Every year only a handful of those films get distribution in the few US theaters that even consider showing Indian movies. Although there's a huge potential audience here,it's too spread out to fill theaters anywhere but in a few urban Indian communities. This is the tyranny of geography at work: bricks-and-mortar distribution requires customers to be geographically concentrated, which is usually not the case for niche goods. The alternative is corner DVD rental shops, but the ones that specialize in Indian films are also found mostly in urban Indian neighborhoods, which still leaves much if not most of the potential market underserved.
Netflix really gets the Long Tail. I note that they now carry 40,000 titles, of which 98% are rented at least once each month.This is exactly identical to the percentage of the top 10,000 music titles rented each month at Ecast, the digital jukebox company. Excellent data.
Category : Long Tail, Bollywood.
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