Tyranny of Locality and Physics (pg 17)

Typical movie theater serves customers in a 10 mile (16km) radius, smaller radius for music and bookstores, even much less (1-2 miles) for video rental shops.

Due to the cost of distributing goods and maintaining retail outlets, 'retail' companies serving customers (including theaters), have no choice, but to consider only content (ie movies, books, music) that are destined to be hits to offset the cost of retail and distribution.

Other drivers to this hit-driven economics is the constraint of the physical world - physics:
Radio spectrum can only accommodate so many stations, Cable can handle a maximum number of channels,
TV stations have at most 24 hours of programming a day