[Hindustani]

Originally Posted by moviegeek1992

Sorry, but I don't agree with this.

Partly agreed. There are few points you made. Those cannot be denied. You havent looked at the whole picture yet.

There are many Indians or South East Asians all over the world but hardly many are interested in blu-rays let alone blu-rays of the films you have mentioned.

I cannot talk much about Pakistanis, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankans as you said South Asian. Majority of Indians are cinemagoers not just hollywood but also for regional, local movies. Its a cultural & traditional thing. There is limited interest in BluRays and definitely not the craze like Hollywood.

If there is not enough craze for bollywood, european companies (REM, ALIVE) will not be releasing BluRays for latest bollywood flicks. Do not believe me? Go check out official REM website. Both Germany and France have been releasing BluRays regularly as latest as 2015 for Bollywood

The Indian dvd industry is already in decline to the point where a title sometimes appears on TV the same time as it's dvd release.

The world BluRay industry is in decline. Fair amout of ground has been lost to VoD. Even 4k UHD HDR recent movies & classics like SAN ANDREAS, BLACK MASS and GOODFELLAS have shown up in VoD in 4k UHD HDR long before BluRay.

One of the biggest distributors for Bollywood films, Eros International (who released the first Bollywood blu-ray) have abandoned blu-ray in favour of their own on-demnd website

EROS INTERNATIONAL is the worst example of how they have treated Bollywood recent mega blockbusters and Bollywood classics heritage. Best example is EROS despite holding the rights for most popular Bollywood blockbuster (SHOLAY) an equivalent of THE GODFATHER (popularity wise, not content wise), they failed to even release properly authored DVD and never bothered to release BluRay ever. And the movie has already gone massive digital restoration and Dolby Atmos upgrade as recent as 2014.

EROS treats Indian movies fans like they do not exist. Their only real interest is distributing the movies and getting foot falls into cinemas on opening weekend and week. After that, they do not give a damn about home videos. Their DVDs were some of the worse ever aurhored with the fanciest, most expensive covers. Its like gift wrapping garbage to fool audiences to sell DVDs for $20.

and another giant Shemaroo are probably seeing more revenue through ads as they slowly upload their catalogue to YouTube than dvd sales for those individual titles would have attained.

Shemaroo is the largest rights holder of Bollywood classics. But recently, they have been very friendly. They signed deal with Eagle Entertainment to have latter release few 1970s classics or past blockbusters. I myself own few of the shemaroo titles release by Eagle. They are of average quality but definitely digitally restored (shemaroo themselves do it in-house now) 1080p.

To top it all off, these distributors are extremely protective of their properties and are unlikely to license out to anyone else, Mughal-E-Azam and Sholay being prime examples.

Yes. they are protective. But. No true overseas professional company like CINELICIOUS or CRITERION has appropached them.

They might want to do one-off business with a company like CINELICIOUS on "First to 3000" BluRays basis. Any one of the above 6 titles mentioned if released on "first to 3000 blurays" basis will sell out even at $39.99 in a year. But no Indian overseas company is professional enough. This is where CRITERION or CINELICIOUS can step in fill the gap.

Think of this way, over in the US, every crappy movie makes its way to blu-ray (including Syfy channel schlock) yet the total number of Bollywood blu-rays probably isn't more than 150 (if that), and that's from 2007 till now!

YASH RAJ FILMS (YRF) BluRay branch releases BRs for even their recent garbage releases which flopped at the boxoffice. A recent movie (GUNDAY) rated 2/10 on IMDB is released by YRF on BD with "TrueHD Advance 96k Upsampling" 5.1 audio.

Brand new Digitally Restored print of PYAASA (means Parched) (1957) has recently been screened in Europe and Canada.

Indian Classic Pyaasa Restored for Upcoming Venice Film Fest

A company like CINELICOUS can benefit big time if they release this enormously popular B & W classic on BD25 which will be much cheaper.

Silicon Valley alone has 1 million Indian diaspora and Indian diaspora is some of the richest diaspora I have seen. They are the first adoptors of HDTV, 4K, UHD stuff.