The creative economy didn't just benefit from Moore's Law. It created the market demand that justified Moore's Law continuing.

What if Sequoia Capital had funded Squid Game instead of another SaaS (Software as a Service) platform?

What if Andreessen Horowitz had backed the production studio behind Money Heist instead of a fintech app burning $3 million monthly on customer acquisition?

What if Blackstone had recognized Turkish drama as an asset class in 2015 instead of 2022?

Investors have spent the last fifteen years moving capital toward technology in predictable waves. Dot-coms arrived first, followed by mobile apps, then crypto and Web3, and now AI climbs toward its steepest valuations yet.

The Gartner Hype Cycle describes this pattern. A new technology triggers excitement. Media coverage amplifies interest. Expectations inflate beyond what the technology can currently deliver, reaching what Gartner calls the “peak of inflated expectations.” Reality sets in. The technology fails to meet unrealistic promises. Disappointment follows, dropping into the “trough of disillusionment.” Eventually, practical applications emerge. The technology finds its actual use cases and climbs toward what Gartner terms the “plateau of productivity.”

Crypto demonstrated this sequence. Bitcoin generated intense interest in 2017. ICOs raised billions. Prices reached historic highs. Then 2018 arrived. Prices dropped approximately 80% from their peaks. Many projects ceased operations. By 2020, some blockchain applications began finding practical use in specific financial contexts, though far more limited than the transformative promises of 2017.

New technology appears. Expectations skyrocket. Capital floods in. The sector inevitably falls into disillusionment before stabilizing.

Meanwhile, film, drama series, documentaries, and unscripted formats receive a fraction of equivalent investment attention despite having constant demand, global adoption, and near-zero consumption friction.

Think about the last time you opened a streaming app. You didn’t read a manual. You didn’t watch a tutorial video. You didn’t struggle through onboarding flows or get stuck on a paywall strategy screen. You pressed play. The story started. Within seconds, you were either hooked or you moved on to the next title.

No customer success team reached out to check if you understood the features. No retention email campaign tried to win you back with gamification badges. Software companies spend millions trying to achieve this kind of friction-free experience and rarely succeed. Stories have had it since humans gathered around fires.

A grandmother in rural Ethiopia watches the same Turkish drama that a college student in Mexico City binges on weekend afternoons. A taxi driver in Lagos streams Nollywood films on his phone between fares. A teenager in Seoul watches American superhero movies with Korean subtitles. None of them needed a user manual. None of them attended onboarding. They just watched.

Content sits in the same cognitive layer as electricity and running water. Consider what happens when a household faces financial pressure. The luxuries disappear first. The gym membership, the restaurant outings, the new clothes. Then the semi-luxuries. The premium car, the vacation fund, maybe even the second car.

Even in low-income regions, even when budgets tighten to subsistence levels, households preserve entertainment access long after cutting nearly everything else. The satellite dish stays on the roof. The streaming subscription remains active, or if it doesn’t, YouTube fills the gap at zero cost. The family still gathers to watch something together after dinner.

Hard drive capacities exploded from megabytes to terabytes because people wanted to store music libraries, photo collections, and video files. Not spreadsheets. In 1991, a typical hard drive held 40 megabytes, enough for thousands of Word documents. By 2000, average consumer hard drives reached 20 gigabytes. By 2010, 500 gigabytes became standard. Today, multi-terabyte drives are common.

This expansion wasn’t driven by enterprise database needs. It was driven by iTunes libraries, digital photo albums, and downloaded movies. Apple’s iPod launch in 2001 promised “1,000 songs in your pocket.” That single device pushed the entire storage industry to miniaturize and expand capacity simultaneously. Music and video consumption created the economic incentive for storage innovation.

Smartphone camera technology followed the same pattern. The first iPhone in 2007 had a 2-megapixel camera. Manufacturers could have stopped there. People could take pictures. Email worked fine. But consumers wanted to create content. They wanted to shoot videos. They wanted to become photographers, filmmakers, creators.

By 2010, smartphone cameras reached 5 megapixels. By 2015, 12 megapixels with 4K video became standard. Today, flagship phones pack 48 to 108-megapixel sensors with computational photography that rivals professional cameras. This evolution happened because billions of people wanted to feel creative with a device in their pocket. Instagram launched in 2010 and reached 100 million users within two years, proving that camera technology wasn’t about documentation but about creative expression and storytelling.

Internet bandwidth improvements tell the same story. In 2000, the average US internet connection ran at 56 kilobits per second through dial-up modems. You could check email. You could read text-based websites. Do you think telecommunications companies would have invested $100 billion into fiber optic infrastructure if the internet remained limited to Word documents and Excel spreadsheets?

YouTube launched in 2005. Netflix began streaming in 2007. By 2010, video accounted for over 50% of all internet traffic. By 2017, video represented 75% of all mobile data traffic according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index. By 2022, video traffic exceeded 82% of all consumer internet traffic globally.

Telecommunications companies didn’t upgrade infrastructure for email. They upgraded for Netflix, YouTube, streaming music, video calls, and user-generated content. Global internet bandwidth capacity grew from approximately 2,000 gigabits per second in 2002 to over 600,000 gigabits per second by 2020, according to TeleGeography research. A 300x increase driven almost entirely by content consumption and creation.

The creative economy didn’t just benefit from Moore’s Law. It created the market demand that justified Moore’s Law continuing. Without music, photos, videos, games, and streaming content, there would have been no consumer willingness to pay premium prices for faster processors, bigger storage, better cameras, and higher bandwidth.

Consider what the entertainment and media sector contributed to GDP growth in the technology sector itself. In 2022, global spending on video streaming services alone exceeded $89 billion. Gaming revenue reached $184 billion globally. Music streaming generated $17 billion. Photography and video equipment sales totaled $28 billion. These numbers represent just the direct revenue from creative content consumption, not the spillover effects on device sales, internet service subscriptions, and storage solutions.

Apple doesn’t sell iPhones because people want better email. They sell iPhones because people want better cameras, music players, video viewers, and gaming devices. The App Store generates $85 billion annually, with gaming, video, and music apps dominating revenue. Remove creative content from the equation and the smartphone market would barely exist.

Technology investors love to talk about how their portfolio companies are changing the world. But the dirty secret is that content and creativity provided the economic justification for most of the infrastructure they now take for granted. The cloud exists at scale because people stream video. 5G networks deployed globally because people consume content on mobile devices. Camera sensors advanced because people want to create.

Lest we forget.

The expensive infrastructure work has already been done for you. YouTube built a global content delivery network and placed cache servers inside telecom facilities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Netflix spent billions creating worldwide streaming infrastructure. Amazon Prime constructed logistics for digital content delivery that mirrors their physical goods network. Free ad-supported streaming television channels established reach across every device. Local broadcasters already maintain transmission towers.

Someone else paid for the capital-intensive distribution layer. What remains underfunded is the production side. The stories themselves. The thing people actually want.

In 2023, global venture capital deployed approximately $285 billion across technology startups. That same year, independent film production across all of Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East combined received less than $3 billion in organized investment capital. A 95 to 1 ratio favoring apps over stories, despite stories being consumed for orders of magnitude more hours per day than any individual app.

The average American spends 3.1 hours daily watching video content. The average Nigerian spends 2.8 hours. The average Indonesian spends 3.4 hours. Even the most successful social platforms capture 30 to 50 minutes of daily attention. Video content captures 3 to 4 times that duration, yet receives a fraction of investment capital.

Stories connected humanity long before we had written language. Cave paintings in Lascaux. Oral histories passed down through generations. The Odyssey. The Mahabharata. Every culture on earth developed narrative traditions because stories do something fundamental to human cognition. They shape identity, transmit values, build empathy, and create shared understanding across difference.

Now we seem obsessed with what this tech or that tech can do. What problem can this algorithm solve. What efficiency can this platform create. Perhaps we should also think about what we should do. What stories should be told. What voices should be heard. What cultural heritage deserves preservation and amplification.

The infrastructure exists. The audience exists. The talent exists. The capital allocation doesn’t match the opportunity.

A $4 million seed round for a SaaS startup typically employs 8 to 12 people. Software engineers, a product manager, maybe a designer, a couple of sales reps. Most of them sit in the same office or work remotely, communicating through Slack. The jobs are well-paid but narrow in scope and geography.

A $4 million film fund producing 40 titles creates employment for hundreds of people across dozens of skill levels and income brackets. Writers, directors, cinematographers, sound engineers, editors, production assistants, location scouts, costume designers, makeup artists, set builders, caterers, security personnel, drivers, accountants, lawyers, publicists.

Each production pumps money through local economies. Hotels book rooms for cast and crew. Restaurants feed production teams. Equipment rental companies supply cameras and lighting. Local businesses provide props and wardrobe. Transportation services move people and gear. The economic multiplier effect is immediate and geographically distributed.

Consider the employment profile. A tech startup might hire one senior engineer at $180,000 annually. That same budget could employ six camera operators, three sound technicians, four production assistants, two set designers, and five makeup artists across multiple productions, all earning livable wages in their local markets.

Yes, perhaps sooner than later you will with AI. This article is not about that. Because that kind of an argument can lead to infinite regress. Where AI will replace this and then that and then this and then that. Next, you might even have Neuralink reading your brain waves and crafting a movie perfect for your cortisol levels. Do we want that? Moving on.

In film and TV, every frame requires coordination between departments. The director works with the cinematographer to frame the shot. The production designer collaborates with the costume department to establish visual consistency. The sound team coordinates with the editor. The lighting crew responds to the needs of the camera department. A modest independent film might employ 30-50 people, while a major theatrical release can employ 500-1,000+ crew members.

This isn’t three engineers in hoodies working in isolation, communicating through code commits. This is 30 to 50 people on set at once, problem-solving in real time, building something together that none of them could create individually. The social infrastructure of film production trains collaboration, negotiation, project management, and creative problem-solving in ways that solitary coding rarely does.

And unlike software companies that can relocate or outsource at will, film production happens in physical space. When you fund a Nigerian production, Nigerian crews work. Nigerian caterers feed them. Nigerian hotels house them. Nigerian equipment houses rent to them. The economic activity stays local while the product distributes globally.

Movies and series cannot patch themselves after release. The investment mechanics still mirror early-stage venture capital.

A large share underperforms. A meaningful middle returns moderate revenue. A small minority produce disproportionate outcomes.

Content has no maintenance burden. A finished film is complete. A finished season has no technical debt. There is no versioning, no security overhead, no support load.

The output is final. Its long-term economics rely purely on licensing, syndication, advertising-supported and subscription streaming expansion, and international format travel.

A strong narrative jumps borders effortlessly.

Turkish dramas travel to Ethiopia. Korean romances travel to the Middle East. Spanish thrillers travel globally. Nigerian titles break into Netflix’s international charts. Indian crime dramas reach Europe and the U.S.

This happens because the emotional architecture is universal. Joy, betrayal, ambition, loss. These do not require cultural translation. The majority of digital apps do not have this property. They require language localization, legal compliance, user education, and credibility-building within each market.

A scalable show functions as a global product. Unlike software, it retains value for decades.

“Local stories with universal emotions beat generic global content every time.” - Reed Hastings, Netflix co-founder

What if you had funded Squid Game?

Production budget. $21.4 million for nine episodes.

Netflix reported it generated $891 million in impact value.

That’s a 41x return from a single title. That figure captures only the direct platform value. It doesn’t include merchandise licensing, format remakes already in production across multiple countries, tourism revenue to filming locations, cultural penetration that drives subscriber acquisition, long-tail viewing for years after release, or derivative content and spin-offs.

Money Heist. Narcos. Dark. Lupin. All Quiet on the Western Front. The pattern suggests something worth noting. Non-English content has become a tradeable global asset class. Production costs are a fraction of what English-language equivalents require.

Korean drama budgets run $200k to $400k per episode.

Turkish drama budgets run $150k to $300k per episode.

Nigerian film budgets run $25k to $100k per feature.

Indian regional content runs $50k to $150k per feature.

These are seed-round investment amounts producing asset-class returns.

“We’re now seeing that stories from anywhere can be for everywhere. The economics have fundamentally shifted.” - Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer

Consider a three-year slate of 40 titles.

Budget per title at $100k. Total investment of $4M.

Expected outcomes based on comparable global markets look something like this. Roughly 20 titles break even or lightly underperform. Roughly 12 titles generate regional licensing at $60k to $120k each. Roughly 6 titles land international streaming deals on advertising-supported or subscription platforms at $150k to $400k each. Roughly 2 titles break out globally at $500k to $2M each.

Even conservative assumptions yield a 5-year return in the 1.3x to 2.0x range.

This excludes remakes, dubbing and subtitling, derivative formats, brand integrations, and long-tail YouTube and free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channel revenue.

Tech portfolios work differently. Early-stage software failure rates run 70 to 90 percent. Content failures rarely go to zero revenue. Something almost always sells.

The growth engine for the next decade combines smartphones, cheap data in many markets, YouTube and advertising-supported video expansion, free ad-supported streaming television channels, regional streaming services, studio-owned internet streaming platforms, TikTok and short-form ecosystems, and hybrid broadcast and digital models.

Every new device increases total content hours consumed. Every new platform increases total distribution pathways. Every new viewer increases the monetizable footprint of the same catalog.

More users do not increase production expense. They only increase return potential.

The production side focuses on making what people want to watch. The distribution platforms already exist to deliver it globally.

“We don’t own theaters. We don’t own streaming services. We make movies people remember. That’s where the value lives.” - Jason Blum, founder of Blumhouse Productions

Major private equity and venture players have quietly signaled a revaluation of content. Blackstone acquired Hello Sunshine and Moonbug. TPG Growth backed A24 and STX. KKR entered catalog aggregation. Silver Lake controls Endeavor and UFC. SoftBank invested in Japanese animation pipelines. Canal+ scales local content ecosystems in Africa and Asia.

These groups recognized the cash-flow logic and the durability of intellectual property.

A24 built a $2.5 billion valuation from indie films with $1 to $5 million budgets. Their approach combined high creative control, lean production, global festival distribution, and platform licensing. They don’t own theaters. They don’t own streaming services. They make movies people remember.

“We missed the content wave. We kept funding tools when we should have been funding the things people actually want to consume.” - Marc Andreessen

The world treats creative industries as playful. They generate $2.3 trillion in global GDP. Every $1 invested often produces $6 to $7 in economic multiplier effects. Narratives shape identity, mood regulation, aspiration, and social cohesion. All precursors to economic mobility.

A stable entertainment ecosystem functions as productive infrastructure. Right now, the production side is radically underfunded relative to its economic output and cultural leverage.

“Content is the only technology business where the product gets more valuable over time rather than less.” - Peter Chernin, former president of News Corporation

The world has a rapidly expanding base of digital viewers, cheap distribution pathways already built, falling production costs, a global appetite for stories, exportable formats, underfunded creative talent, and a venture community still heavily indexed on apps.

The missing piece appears to be organized capital pointed toward film with the same seriousness applied to seed-stage technology.

Imagine funding a slate of 40 films that collectively cost $4 million and start generating revenue the day they launch, instead of another fintech app that needs $50 million to reach breakeven.

Imagine backing a production company that owns a catalog appreciating in value while streaming platforms bid for exclusive rights, instead of Series A into a logistics platform with 90% customer churn.

Imagine hearing “We just sold our Turkish drama to Netflix for $300k. It cost $120k to make. We own the remake rights in 47 countries” instead of Demo Day pitches about AI-powered blockchain applications.

What if the next Squid Game came from your portfolio? Not as a lottery ticket. As a predictable outcome of capital deployed into a category with universal demand, durable assets, and global distribution rails already built.

A story can scale across continents with almost no additional cost. It does not need onboarding. It does not require an update pipeline. It lasts decades. It generates revenue from broadcast, advertising-supported streaming, subscription streaming, free ad-supported channels, theatrical releases, licensing, format sales, remakes, and distribution channels that haven’t been invented yet.

The audience is waiting. The global distribution rails are already built. The production talent is underfunded and hungry.

This is a category ready for repricing.

The question isn’t whether content will be a venture-scale asset class. The question is whether you’ll recognize it before the repricing happens.

If your investment succeeds, you get to walk a red carpet at Cannes or Sundance or Toronto. You get to tell people at dinner parties that you backed the breakout international hit everyone is talking about. You get your name in the credits.

If it doesn’t work out, the film still exists. Someone somewhere will watch it. The catalog still holds some value. Remember Money Heist struggled on Spanish television, cancelled after low ratings. Netflix acquired it, placed it in their catalog with zero promotion, and it became the most-watched foreign-language series in streaming history at the time. Sometimes a film just needs to find its audience.

A failed enterprise software company just shuts down.

Nazrawi Ghebreselasie is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kana TV, Ethiopia’s leading television network known for bringing global entertainment and original local productions to millions of viewers. A mathematician and entrepreneur, Nazrawi also leads STRATIX, a strategy and creative consulting agency working at the intersection of media, technology, and culture across Africa. His work focuses on audience behavior, media innovation, and building data-driven creative ecosystems.