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.
