The Long Tail
To understand what I am about to say, it may help to know about The Long Tail, first an article in Wired, then a blog, then a best-seelling book. The author Chris Anderson talks about “The Long Tail” - in content, it refers to the niche audiences for certain types of content i.e. "hard to find". And there is no doubt that there is a long tail for content - having proved its existence at iCinema.com, for example.
At iCinema.com the initial audience served is the approximately 3.2 million Diaspora of Indian origin in North America (plus similar numbers in UK, Australia, Africa and the Middle East). Most people can immediately grasp that immigrant Indians in the US want content from Bollywood. After all, if Bollywood has created a buzz even among Middle-Americans, it must be the what this Indian Diaspora is looking for, right? Wrong! It goes deeper than that. Yes, of course there is a demand for Bollywood content, and it cuts across the entire group. But, there is a thriving movie industry in every one of the seventeen regional languages of India (no we are not talking dialects – there are some 300 plus of those). So there is an even longer tail beyond Bollywood audiences, and if you do some “area-under-the-curve” math, you will find those numbers are even bigger than the numbers for Bollywood.
L3 Media is all about “The Long Tail”, and more importantly about monetizing it.
Okay, so you have an audience for Marathi (substitute your favorite language here – Swahili, French, Russian) films in the US. The average market size for each of the Indian languages is roughly 200,000 (about 50,000 households). How do you deliver content to this audience; and more important, how do you monetize it?
But first, let us talk a little bit about how you cannot. Take any one-to-many, traditional, system such as Cable TV or Satellite TV. There simply are not that many channels that these technologies can deliver. If you wanted to service all the Indian languages (or all the Eastern European languages, or all the African languages), you would need about twenty channels even with a single channel per language. And one channel for all the movies, news, interviews etc. that this group might want is simply not enough. There are 65 new movies made in Marathi each year, and the numbers are higher for some of the other Indian languages.
Even if you could shovel all the content for each language into one channel there is only so much of it that could be made available at prime-time. You could hope that people would record it on their PVRs, but then how would you monetize it? Certainly not from commercials, because once the content is on a PVR, there is no mercy from that thumb on the fast forward button.
Coming back to those 50,000 households to whom you want to deliver content. If you leave out the one-third or so who live in New Jersey or Los Angeles or one of the major metro concentrations of Indians (just look for the “paan” stains on the walls) you have approximately 200 households per ‘B-size’ city (another third) and then a dispersed remainder. Tell me Time Warner or Comcast cares about this market, and I’ll sell you a bridge in Bombay. But aggregate them online and suddenly you have a market! Even at a conservative $10/month average per household (alternative entertainment), you have a $6 Million market. But what if you could give them tons of free content (supported by ads of course), you could see a business that is 5-10 times that. Only problem is, with the current paradigm it is practically impossible to do the latter. How do you insert an ad for the sale at Boston Store in downtown Milwaukee into the current episode of “Kyonki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi”. (If you just went “Huh?”, think “Dallas” or “As the World Turns” 20 years ago). The answer to that question is – you can … with L3 technology.
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Copyright (c) Anil Gupte 2006, All rights reserved.
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