Strategies for launching streaming content: Assessing movie-country relatedness and its impact on international popularity

The study proposes a way to measure the relatedness between countries and movies (movie—country relatedness density) and to test whether this relatedness is an important factor in predicting the popularity of a movie in a certain country. The results show that both movie—country relatedness density and movie ubiquity (i.e., popularity across many countries) are positively associated with a movie appearing in a country’s top 20 list even after considering other covariates. Based on these findings, we suggest an OTT (Over-the-tops) movie launching strategy with regard to movie—country relatedness density for both global and local OTT companies. Our study contributes to a growing body of research on movie consumption patterns and provides insights into the factors that determine a movie’s success on a global scale. The importance of cultural similarity in adopting films and television shows is widely recognized, but the concept of movie—country compatibility is introduced to take into account the content attributes that cannot be explained by cultural differences. The results suggest that movies that are related to other popular movies in a given country and movies that are popular across many countries are more likely to appear in a country’s top 20 list.