Wired has a piece on how online businesses roll up niche markets into a larger, virtual whole. Here’s my take:
Netflix claims that, unlike Blockbuster, 99% of its extensive catalog is rented out every single year… people are wired differently from birth and then actively fragment their interests. This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s skimmed the morass of offbeat personal Web sites… [or] readers of Sepia Mutiny or one of its spiritual ancestors, the Usenet group alt.culture.us.asian-indian in its heyday.But what does surprise new Netflix members is the service’s extensive selection of Bollywood films, which it apparently rents out profitably… Outside Netflix… the situation is grim:
An even more striking example is the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, India’s film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazon’s Internet Movie Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.
…virtual aggregation is our best-case scenario. Either that, or start making babies!
Somehow I don’t think too many 2nd or 3rd generation Desis will go for Bollywood over Hollywood, not least because of the language barrier & assimilation.
I doubt even summing all the Bollywood movie watching of (politically conscious leftists) plus (can’t-hook-up-with-non-Desis CS nerds) is comparable to Hollywood movie watching.
The Bollywood market in the US is Indian immigrants, not 2nd gen Indians…
Ah — I thought you were quoting the wired piece, so I clicked through all excited that they had mentioned SepiaMutiny and acuai, and was dissapointed when I realized what had happened.
They’re not mutually exclusive.
That’s broadly true, but there are plenty of second-gen Bollywood fans.
However, the broad market I’m talking about is for all diasporic cultural goods. That includes second-gen films and novels in English. You don’t see it much yet in the U.S.– Jhumpa Lahiri is one example– but it’s a significant market in the UK.
Oy, clarity problems. Fixed, thanks.