Bollywood's distributed demand

I've often pointed to the Indian film industry as a perfect Long Tail candidate. Each year Bollywood makes at least 800 films. 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).

Yet each 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.

The reason I bring this up is that I've noticed a lot of Hindi-language films appearing in my Netflix new release RSS feed. I just checked, and they now have more than 600 Bollywood DVDs, which is twice the size of even their French film inventory. That's even more than the Bollywood specialists online.

Further evidence that Netflix really gets the Long Tail. I note that they now carry 40,000 titles, of which 98% are rented at least once each quarter. Which, as it happens, is exactly the percentage of the top 10,000 music titles rented each month at Ecast, the digital jukebox company whose CEO first blew my mind 18 months ago with his observation of a long, long tail of demand. Neat.

Comments

[emeka okafor]

The long tail would also apply to the market for Nollywood Movies (http://timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com/2003/11/incubator-nollywood.html) that appeal the similarly widely spread African Diaspora.

[james governor]

take a look at emusic's selection of bhangra and bollywood. its HUGE, and they came along one day...

[Richard Campbell]

Rented per quarter, not per month. "On average, members rent 98 percent of Netflix's movie titles each quarter"

[chris anderson]

Richard,

Good catch. I've fixed it. Thx!

[Chaitanya]

The real long tail with bollywood movies is the piracy industry it has spawned. Almost all indian stores in the US carry pirated cassettes, cd's and showcase them brazenly in the store. They don't have to worry about inventory because they simply copy more if there is a surge in demand for any title.
You can call these stores the long strands of hair on the long tail!
Unrelated to the post but related to the long tail...you should look at work by Barabasi (http://www.nd.edu/~alb). He has a paper in the current issue of Nature suggesting that human behavior exhibits a "heaavy tail" in some aspects.
This would predict that individual buying stats should reveal a long-tail which is correlated to the perceived risk of that investment (e.g. indie movie, unheard of book).
Does this mean that the long tail is (also) because of an otherwise typical customer making an abnormal buy, or a consistently atypical buyer investing in his interest, which differ from the usual?

[rbhhatia]

The facts and figure in your write-up/site are really amazing; I am a person who has just entered in to the Bollywood film industry and have completed first ever H.D.(High Definition) mode Movie in Hindi in the world known as 'Kahin Ek Raat' and also took over one running 'post production studio' in Mumbai; I want to know more about the possibilities of direct distribution of my above film?
thanks and regards
R B

[Rajesh Shah]

They have about 1200 different titles of Hindi movies. I have been a memeber since they opened, in January. They have improved since then. And they contiune to add new titles, as i can see.

[Rajesh Shah]

Sorry teh Companies Name is Hindiflix. and their website is www.hindiflix.com

[web design company delhi]

Bollywood has come a long way from unethical money to corporate financing era, as well as marketing online with their own website design particularly to themes and online contest, which is creating a positive effect and people are showing interest in bollywood.

[cyberwar44@gamil.com]

you all have to checkout my websites .

[Sandeep]

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