Why this still feels like a gut business
Picture a familiar room: a handful of people around a table, a trailer paused on someone’s laptop, and that moment where a decision is about to turn into a belief system.
One person says, “I love it.” Another says, “I don’t get it.” Someone else likes the lead but hates the ending. Nobody’s wrong, because entertainment is personal. Taste is identity. IP is memory. Creative risk is the whole point.
Then the circle gets bigger. Studios, streamers and producers have to align with creators, talent, agents, and lawyers. Everyone needs a shared language for “worth it” before money, timing, rights, and careers start moving.
The problem: Too much noise, not enough signal
When people try to “prove” a show has momentum, the instinct is to grab whatever numbers are closest: a spike here, a trending clip there, a surge of chatter that looks like certainty.
Except the signals are scattered. Some live inside platforms. Some live out on the open internet. Some reflect real intent, others reflect a moment. And when the outcome is known, it’s easy to cherry-pick the one metric that makes the past look obvious.
We don’t need less emotion. We need better measurement of the attention economy.
Supply × demand: Treat entertainment like a market
Here’s the shift that calms almost every argument in that room: stop treating entertainment as unknowable, and treat it like a market.
Markets have two forces:
- Supply is what exists and where it’s available.
- Demand is what audiences actually do when they care.
That framing does not try to outsmart taste. It gives taste something solid to stand on, especially when you’re valuing content, talent, and IP through the lens of attention.
What “demand” really means (and why it’s not just views)
If demand were the same thing as views, life would be easy. But entertainment spills outside the player.
People don’t just watch. They search. They argue. They rate. They post clips, dig through wikis, read recaps, follow cast interviews, and share reactions in tiny pockets of the internet you would never think to monitor manually.
That’s why a global view of demand pulls from multiple behaviors: search, open streaming activity, social video, and social media.
One detail matters more than it sounds: not all engagement is equal. Creating something inspired by a show and passively scrolling past a post are both “activity,” but they do not mean the same thing. A demand system that weights higher-intent behaviors more heavily is closer to how attention actually works.
Why executives should care: demand connects to outcomes
Everyone in entertainment loves a smart metric. What they really need is a metric that behaves like the business.
When catalog demand is compared to subscriber scale for major streamers, the relationship is strong across different time windows, with R² values shown from 0.86 up to 0.96 (and 0.93 in another window). That’s a fancy way of saying: more demand reliably travels with more subscribers.
The practical takeaway is the one that changes meetings: catalog demand is tied to subscriptions and revenue, and supply and demand are shown to correlate with revenue.
A case you can feel: Spanish and Portuguese originals scaling fast
You don’t need a theory to see a supply shift when it’s this big. Spanish and Portuguese streaming originals grew from 183 pre‑2020 to 1007 by Q4 2024.
That growth did not come from a single corner of the market. Releases stack up quarter after quarter across Netflix, Prime Video, Globoplay, Disney+, Max, and other networks. It looks like a long, deliberate build.
This is what “supply” looks like when an industry decides a category matters.
Follow the money: revenue share is shifting, not just interest
The loudest argument for global audience attention is not applause. It’s revenue.
Globally, the revenue share of non-English speaking titles rises across 2020–2024 and lands in the low 20s by the end of 2024.
Within that, Spanish and Portuguese content shows up as a meaningful piece of the non-English revenue mix over time, with Spanish the larger share and Portuguese adding a smaller layer.
And the totals are not subtle: global streaming revenue generated by SPLATAM content climbs through the period, reaching $651.6M in Q3 2024 and $647.9M in Q4 2024.
Zoom out one more level and you get a simple leaderboard for 2024: Japanese (27.2%), Korean (18.4%), Spanish/Portuguese (14.0%), Hindi (9.5%), French (6.1%).
That is not a niche story. That is a mainstream revenue story.
A better scoreboard than “popular”
“Popular” is a party trick. It’s not a business metric. A more useful scoreboard asks what a title actually does for a service:
- subscribers acquired
- subscribers renewed
- total global subscribers engaged
You can see the shape of a hit when you look through that lens.
Reina Roja (Red Queen) shows 303,566 subscribers acquired, 2,158,034 renewed, and 2.5M total global subscribers engaged.
Criminal Code (DNA Do Crime) shows 76,058 acquired, 728,873 renewed, and 804k engaged.
Those are two different jobs being done. The point is not to crown a winner. The point is to know what you are buying, what you are renewing, and what kind of slate balance you are building.
The part everyone wants: where the next opportunity is
Once you can see both supply and demand, “opportunity” stops being a vibe. It becomes a set of gaps.
One of the clearest signals here is geography. For SPLATAM content, growth in streaming revenue is much higher outside LATAM: UCAN 17.8%, EMEA 20.9%, APAC 25.6%, versus LATAM 3.0% over Q3 2023 to Q3 2024.
Then there’s platform fit. A snapshot of Spanish/Portuguese revenue share versus supply share (as a share of non-English content) varies by service, which is exactly the kind of mismatch that can hint at over- or under-supply in a category.
Finally, there’s genre. The whitespace callouts are straightforward: Mystery, Adventure, History.
If you are deciding what to commission, what to acquire, or which package to finance, these are the questions that sharpen taste instead of replacing it.
Data doesn’t replace taste. It protects it.
Entertainment will always be emotional. That’s why people watch, and why the work matters. The goal is not to drain the feeling out of decisions. The goal is to keep decisions from being held hostage by whatever signal happens to be loudest that week.
Three things to carry into the next greenlight meeting:
- Use supply and demand as the shared language that keeps creative and commercial teams in the same conversation.
- Tie the story to outcomes: subscriptions, retention, and revenue. Otherwise, you are just collecting trivia.
- Use whitespace to guide bets by market, platform, and genre, so risk becomes intentional.
If you’re programming, financing, or licensing, start with one question: where is demand coming from, and what supply is missing?
Want to dig deeper into the numbers behind these highlights? Here are two easy next steps:
- Contact our team if you would like a tailored view for your market, your platform or your content slate.
- Watch the presentation recording below and download the presentation for extra charts that did not make it into this article.
