You walk into a grocery store in the evening. The shelves are stocked with Coca-Cola, arranged in neat rows. By closing time, not a single bottle has sold. The store owner dumps every last one. Tomorrow morning, they restock the entire shelf again, knowing the same thing will happen.
This is the television business in Ethiopia.
Except instead of Coca-Cola, it’s advertising slots. And unlike spoiled milk or expired bread, these slots vanish whether they’re sold or not. The moment a show airs, that inventory is gone, consumed by time itself. You can’t restock it. You can’t discount it the next day. It simply ceases to exist.
A Note Before We Continue
This article is not a vent. It’s not a complaint. It’s not a plea for sympathy.
Every business operates within constraints. Manufacturers deal with supply chain fragility. Retailers navigate razor-thin margins. Airlines price against fuel volatility they cannot control. Constraints are not excuses. They’re parameters.
But broadcasting has a peculiar vulnerability: its product is consumed in public, in real time, by everyone. Every programming decision is visible. Every format choice is open to criticism. The taxi driver has opinions. The university student has opinions. Your aunt has opinions.
Rarely do people comment on the kind of cement a contractor is using as they pass a construction site. Nobody debates the thread count of a textile factory’s output while stuck in traffic. But everyone, everyone, has a take on what’s wrong with Ethiopian television.
So this is an attempt to make the constraints visible. To show what the equations actually look like. Not as defense, but as context. What you do with that context is up to you.
When Supply and Demand Point in Opposite Directions
In most markets, scarcity drives value. Limited supply meets high demand, prices rise, producers profit. Classic economics. But Ethiopian television operates in an inverted ecosystem.
Millions of Ethiopians watch TV. Hundreds of thousands tune into prime time. The demand for content is enormous. But the money to support that content, the advertising budgets, barely exists. Media economists call this an “adverse power ratio”: abundant audience supply, scarce advertiser demand.
The normal math says content cost should be less than or equal to ad revenue. In Ethiopia, content costs run five to ten times higher than what ads bring in.
Let me illustrate with a simplified example. Say a drama episode costs 100 birr to produce. The broadcaster sells ads during that slot for maybe 15 birr. Sometimes less. You’re spending 100 to make 15. Do that every day and the operation becomes unsustainable within months.
Why Advertisers Aren’t Spending As Much
Three reasons, all structural.
First: Direct attribution obsession.
Ethiopian businesses operate on a simple principle: If I can see the sales without advertising, why would I pay for advertising? It’s the curse of small markets. When your entire customer base shops at a handful of locations, you don’t need brand building. You need shelf space and word of mouth. Advertising becomes an expense with no visible return.
The advertiser’s logic: “I spent 1,000,000 birr on TV ads. Did we get 2,000,000 birr in additional sales?” In mature markets, brands understand the compounding effects of awareness, consideration, preference. In Ethiopia and many other emerging markets, the market leans toward campaigns with direct, observable impact. When the link between advertising and sales isn’t clear, spending becomes cautious.
Second: The advertiser scarcity problem.
There aren’t enough advertisers. Period. You can count the companies with legitimate brand advertising budgets on one hand. Maybe two. For example, Unilever. A telecom or two if they’re launching something. A handful of banks when they feel generous.
That’s it.
Everyone else is small and medium enterprises with inventory to move. They’re not building brands. They’re clearing stock. They show up before a holiday, run a short campaign to generate cash flow, and disappear. Their priority is cash flow, not long-term brand building, and you can’t blame them for that. They run short bursts around key moments, look for quick traction, and avoid long commitments they can’t comfortably sustain.
Third: The love of dashboards and the everyone-is-on-digital bias.
There’s a seductive narrative in marketing circles: everyone is online now. Digital is where the audiences are. And digital comes with dashboards, beautiful, real-time dashboards that show impressions, clicks, engagement rates, all updating by the minute. Marketing managers can watch the numbers move. They can screenshot the graphs for Monday’s presentation. They can feel like scientists running experiments. And when media planners spend their days inside urban digital ecosystems, it becomes easy to assume the country looks like their timeline. That bias shapes budgets far more than anyone admits.
Television offers none of this. No dashboard. No real-time feedback loop. No way to watch your campaign perform while sipping your morning coffee. Just the ancient proposition: put your message in front of people and trust that it works.
The problem is that “everyone is digital” isn’t true. Not in Ethiopia. Smartphone penetration is growing, yes. But the majority of the population, still watches broadcast television. The audiences are there. They’re just not visible through a dashboard.
So budgets migrate to platforms that offer the illusion of precision, while the medium that actually reaches mass audiences gets starved of investment. The dashboard wins. The broadcaster loses.
The Unscripted Format Solution
So what do broadcasters do?
They don’t stop broadcasting. They can’t. The moment you go dark, you lose your audience, your distribution relationships, your entire infrastructure. Instead, they do what any rational business does when the margins collapse: they cut costs.
The answer is unscripted content.
This isn’t an Ethiopia problem. This is a free-to-air-without-adequate-revenue problem. Anywhere in the world where advertising or subscription revenue doesn’t support the budgets that scripted content demands, broadcasters get cornered into the same solution. Talk shows. Variety shows. Panel discussions. Interview formats. Game shows. Anything that doesn’t require writers rooms, location shoots, actors on retainer, or months of post-production.
Unscripted isn’t cheap. But it’s cheaper than scripted. More importantly, it’s faster.
Back to our 100 birr drama (remember we are using 100 birr as a unit to illustrate). That cost doesn’t just sit on a balance sheet. It sits in time. A drama episode might take six weeks from script to screen. That’s six weeks of carrying costs. Six weeks of paying crews who aren’t generating revenue yet. Six weeks of inventory sitting in production limbo while your ad slots keep expiring every single day.
An unscripted show might cost 20 birr to produce. And you can shoot it today, air it tomorrow. The capital isn’t trapped in production purgatory. The time variable collapses. Now you’re losing 5 birr instead of 85 birr per slot. Scale that across hundreds of hours of programming and the difference is existential.
The 95/5 Grid Reality
Look at any Ethiopian broadcaster’s programming grid. Actually look at it.
If they have a drama or sitcom at all, it occupies maybe 5% of total airtime. Perhaps a single hour in prime time, a few days a week. The remaining 95% of the grid has to be filled with something. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
That’s roughly 168 hours per week. If drama takes 5 hours, you still need 163 hours of something else.
You get talk shows. Re-runs. Over and over again. News and more talk show formats. Content that can be produced quickly, aired, re-run, and forgotten.
The grid demands feeding. Unscripted content is the only food that’s affordable.
The Penetration Problem
There’s another dimension to this that rarely gets discussed.
Byron Sharp’s work on brand growth emphasizes penetration over loyalty. Growth comes from acquiring light buyers, people who purchase occasionally, infrequently, almost accidentally, not from squeezing more purchases out of heavy buyers who already love you.
Apply this framework to television.
Drama is a heavy buyer category. It demands commitment. You need to watch episode one to understand episode five. Miss the first three episodes and you’re lost. The plot threads mean nothing, the character arcs are incomprehensible, the emotional stakes don’t land. Drama requires you to show up, on time, consistently, from the beginning.
On a non-on-demand platform like broadcast TV, this creates a penetration challenge. Your potential drama audience isn’t “everyone who might enjoy this show.” It’s “everyone who happened to be watching on premiere night and committed to returning every week thereafter.” And if your premiere doesn’t hit critical mass immediately, the show struggles. Not because people wouldn’t like it, but because they can’t enter midstream.
Unscripted content operates differently. A talk show discussing some artist or current event or cultural moment requires zero prior knowledge. You can tune in at minute 35 of a 60-minute program and understand exactly what’s happening. A variety show featuring musicians works whether you saw last week’s episode or not. Every episode is its own entry point.
This is light buyer territory. Low commitment. Easy access.
Solving for Penetration Probability
At Kana TV, we’ve had to engineer around this constraint.
The challenge with serialized drama on linear broadcast is fundamentally probabilistic. If a viewer misses the window where episode one airs, their likelihood of ever joining that show’s audience drops precipitously. Each subsequent missed episode compounds the problem. By episode five, a new viewer faces an insurmountable narrative deficit.
Take Kara Para Aşk (Black Money Love / ጥቁር ፍቅር), one of the most beloved Turkish series we’ve aired, later acquired by Netflix, which tells you something about its global appeal. 165 episodes. A complex narrative of crime, romance, and moral ambiguity that builds methodically across three seasons. Miss the first ten episodes and you’re watching strangers do things for reasons you can’t possibly understand. The show doesn’t work unless you know why Elif is in that situation, why Ömer carries that particular burden, why their collision matters.
165 episodes. One entry point. Episode one, or nothing.
The probability of any single viewer adopting a serialized drama depends on three factors multiplied together: whether they’re aware the show exists, whether they encounter it at or near the beginning, and whether their schedule allows them to watch at the broadcast time. For a single-slot, single-run show with no structural intervention, you’re multiplying three small numbers. Awareness might be 40% if you’re lucky. Catching it near episode one might be 5%, one week out of a 40-week run. Schedule compatibility might be 60%. The compounded probability leaves you with staggered capture at best, losing potential viewers at every stage of the funnel.
So we manipulate the distribution.
Instead of a single prime-time drama slot, we run three. Each slot carries a different show at a different stage in its run. At any given week, one show might be on episode 3, another on episode 47, another just premiering. This staggers the entry points across the calendar, increasing the probability that a casual viewer encounters some show at or near its beginning.
Then there’s the weekend marathon strategy. We run rerun blocks, multiple episodes back-to-back, specifically designed as catch-up mechanisms. A viewer who heard about Kara Para Aşk (Black Money Love / ጥቁር ፍቅር) from a friend, who missed the first month, who wants to enter the narrative, now has a compressed window to achieve narrative parity with committed viewers. The marathon block functions as a probability multiplier for late adoption.
But we can’t stop there.
We produce dozens of trailers. Social media cuts. Teaser campaigns. Countdown content. Every new show requires an education campaign. Not just “this show exists” but “this show is starting now, and here’s why the first episode matters, and here’s when you can catch it.” The marketing spend exists specifically to inflate that awareness term, because without it, even perfectly scheduled content dies in obscurity.
Each intervention expands the probability terms. We’re not changing the fundamental constraint. Linear broadcast still has structural penetration limits. But we’re optimizing within those constraints.
Unscripted Attention vs Scripted Attention
So unscripted content has its advantages on accessibility. Case closed?
Not quite. Accessibility isn’t everything. And this is where the calculus gets complicated.
Unscripted content may offer easy entry, but it often fails on total time spent viewing. More critically, it fails on attention quality.
When someone watches Kara Para Aşk (Black Money Love / ጥቁር ፍቅር), they’re not half-watching while scrolling their phone. They’re invested. They need to know what Ömer discovers next. They need to see how Elif navigates the impossible. The narrative has them, beginning to end, episode after episode. This is captive audience territory. Not background television. Not passive consumption. Active, leaned-in attention.
For advertisers, this distinction matters enormously. Reach with distracted eyeballs is not the same as reach with engaged minds. A viewer who’s genuinely absorbed in a story processes the commercial break differently than one who’s waiting for the talk show to say something interesting.
Drama delivers committed viewers with higher attention density. Unscripted offers easier entry but shallower engagement per session. Each has its economics. Each has its trade-offs.
Lights Out
And then there’s the variable we cannot control at all.
Power outages happen. Across Africa, this is a shared reality. Infrastructure that’s still developing, demand that often outpaces supply, the thousand small disruptions that come with building systems in real time. It’s not a complaint. It’s a parameter.
For serialized drama, outages introduce a layer of statistical complexity that compounds every other challenge.
When power goes out during episode 47 of a 165-episode series, what happens? Some viewers miss the episode entirely. Some miss half. Some, in areas unaffected by that particular event, watch the whole thing. The next day, your audience is fragmented. Some are on episode 47, some are mentally still on 46, some have given up entirely because the gap broke their narrative momentum.
You cannot know, in real-time, the geographic distribution of an outage. You cannot know if it affected 10% of your audience or 60%. You cannot surgically re-air episode 47 only to affected regions because broadcast doesn’t work that way. It’s one signal, everywhere, all at once.
So you make decisions under uncertainty. Do you re-run the episode for everyone, forcing the unaffected majority to either rewatch or skip a night? Do you push forward and accept that some fraction of your audience just lost the thread? Do you add an extra marathon block on the weekend and hope affected viewers find it?
Every choice has costs. Re-running means your schedule slips, your grid planning cascades, your other shows get squeezed. Pushing forward means audience attrition. Extra marathons mean cannibalizing other content.
You’re not optimizing against a known distribution. You’re optimizing against uncertainty layered on uncertainty, where the underlying parameters are themselves unpredictable and correlated with factors you can’t observe.
This is the operating environment. Not just the economics of production costs versus ad revenue, but the compounding uncertainty of trying to deliver sequential narrative content when sequential delivery isn’t guaranteed.
Unscripted content, by contrast, shrugs off contingent events entirely. Miss tonight’s talk show? Tomorrow’s is a completely fresh start. No narrative debt. No catch-up required. No statistical fragmentation of your audience into cohorts with different information states.
The resilience asymmetry is enormous.
The Behavioral Inertia of Free
Someone always asks: “Why don’t they just move to pay TV? Subscription models?”
Because behavioral change is expensive. And in emerging markets, it’s nearly impossible.
Ethiopian audiences have been getting television for free since television arrived. You’re asking them to suddenly start paying for something that has always been free. That’s not a small ask. It’s rewiring decades of conditioning.
Some might argue: what about the audiences who are already paying for something? What about digital? Surely they’ve crossed the psychological barrier.
Not quite.
The few Ethiopians who are on digital platforms already pay for data. They’re paying Ethio Telecom and Safaricom. And with that data, they consume TikTok and YouTube for free. From their perspective, they’re already paying for content. They’re just paying the telco instead of the content creator.
If you calculate time spent on TikTok and YouTube as a percentage of data costs, it functions like an indirect subscription to streaming. Except they’re not streaming “content” in the traditional sense. They’re paying for access to the internet, and content happens to live there. The payment isn’t for the content. It’s for the pipe.
This doesn’t translate to TV audiences.
Could it, eventually? Maybe. I want to believe there’s a future where Ethiopian audiences pay directly for television content. But I don’t think that future arrives in the next five years. The infrastructure isn’t there. The trust isn’t there. The behavioral patterns aren’t there.
And critically: not everyone is on digital yet. We assume universal smartphone penetration because we live in cities, work in media, spend our days online. But vast swaths of the Ethiopian audience aren’t on YouTube. They’re not scrolling TikTok. They’re watching broadcast TV because that’s what’s available.
So subscription models remain theoretical. Interesting to discuss. Irrelevant to today’s economics.
The Brazil Parallel (And Why They Escaped)
Brazil faced this exact problem in the 1970s.
Rede Globo was burning money trying to produce telenovelas when their advertising market was just as underdeveloped as Ethiopia’s today. The answer? They didn’t stop making dramas. They industrialized them.
Globo built massive production facilities. They standardized scripts, sets, shooting schedules. They turned drama production into an assembly line. Costs dropped. Quality stayed high enough. Advertisers finally showed up because the audiences were massive and loyal.
But what made it work was scale. Brazil has 215 million people. Ethiopia has 136 million, but the monetizable audience, people with purchasing power that advertisers care about, is a fraction of that. And Brazilian advertisers learned to value brand building because their market was sophisticated enough to demand it.
The Kenyan Exception (Sort Of)
Kenya produces more scripted content than Ethiopia. Shows like Makutano Junction and Mother-in-Law ran for years. But dig into the numbers and you’ll find the same brutal economics, just slightly less brutal.
Kenyan advertisers spend more per capita. Their telecom wars (Safaricom vs. Airtel) created massive brand advertising budgets. NGOs funded educational dramas (including Makutano Junction) because they wanted public health messaging embedded in entertainment.
Even then, production companies struggle. Most Kenyan shows survive on a mix of broadcast licensing, international donor funding, and ancillary revenue. Pure broadcast revenue? Still not enough.
The Skill Is There
This is not a talent problem.
Look at content from across Africa and you’ll realize by contrast that Ethiopia has tremendous storytelling abilities. This is a nation that thrives on rhetoric. On drama. On the spoken word. The oral tradition runs deep. The appetite for narrative is embedded in the culture.
Our stories don’t often transcend our borders. Language barriers, distribution challenges, the usual suspects. But the raw capability is undeniable.
Despite the tight economic constraints, despite margins that don’t just squeeze but actively punish ambition, writers, producers, and directors have managed to produce genuine hits. And broadcasters have committed to the promise of content for their audiences. Eregnaye on Arts TV. Besintu, the stellar sitcom that delivers week after week on EBS. Fiker Eske Mekabir on ETV. Lejes on Kana TV. These are some of the best works of television you’ll find on the continent in terms of writing and production quality.
They exist not because the economics made sense, but because talented people and committed broadcasters decided to make them anyway. Despite the math. Despite the margins. Despite everything this article has described.
The constraint isn’t skill. It never was.
Why Broadcasters Deserve Credit, Not Criticism
Ethiopian broadcasters are performing a minor miracle.
They’re keeping multiple channels on air, 24/7, with ad revenue that wouldn’t support a single prime-time drama in Los Angeles. They’re employing hundreds of people. They’re training technicians, producers, directors. They’re maintaining infrastructure.
The fact that you can turn on your TV and find anything in Amharic is remarkable given the economics.
Yes, you’re watching another talk show. Yes, you’ve seen that format recycled a dozen times. But the alternative isn’t better dramas. It’s dead air.
The Non-Replicable Product
There’s one more thing that makes this industry uniquely difficult.
Apple spends billions on R&D, then produces one iPhone. That single design gets manufactured millions of times. Same specs. Same components. Same everything. The product is perfected once, then replicated at scale. Efficiency compounds. Margins improve. Everyone applauds.
Content doesn’t work this way.
Every week, broadcasters have to produce something new. This week’s talk show cannot be last week’s talk show. This week’s variety program needs different guests, different performances, different conversations. The product cannot be optimized at industrial scale because the product, by definition, must never be the same twice.
Each week is a new iPhone version. Except there’s no eighteen-month development cycle. No beta testing. No controlled rollout. You ship on Tuesday whether it’s ready or not, because the grid demands feeding and the slots expire at midnight.
Some weeks, you produce something great. Audiences respond. The formula feels cracked. Then the next week, with the same team and the same budget and the same intentions, you produce something forgettable. The process is a rollercoaster. Consistency is aspirational. Quality control is a prayer.
This is the nature of content. It resists systemization. It punishes complacency. It demands reinvention on a weekly basis while offering no guarantees that reinvention will succeed.
And yet broadcasters show up. Every week. Filling 168 hours. Hoping this week’s output lands better than last week’s.
The Equation That Won’t Balance
The fundamental problem can be stated simply: quality drama requires high production costs, long production timelines, and must absorb contingent uncertainty from infrastructure volatility. The Ethiopian ad market offers a low revenue ceiling. These two realities don’t meet.
And there will always be those with clever theoretical solutions. “Use AI. Shoot on smartphones. Cut your costs.” Easy to say from a conference stage or a LinkedIn thread. Harder to execute when you’re filling every programming slot every week, managing hundreds of staff, and chasing invoices from advertisers who vanished after the holiday campaign. Theory is cheap. Broadcast is not.
So you can’t fix this by demanding broadcasters “make better content.” They know audiences want dramas. They know dramas build loyalty. They know original programming is the long-term play.
But you can’t force an equation to balance when the variables won’t cooperate.
The solution requires either dramatically larger ad budgets (which requires advertisers to embrace brand building), audience willingness to pay (which requires behavioral shifts that take decades), production cost collapse (new technology, cheaper workflows), time compression (faster production methods that maintain quality), or on-demand distribution (which solves the penetration problem but creates new monetization challenges).
None of these are happening fast enough.
So the next time you flip through channels and wonder why 95% of the grid is people sitting in chairs discussing things, remember:
It’s not that broadcasters don’t want to make dramas.
It’s that the math makes it nearly impossible.
And in business, math always wins.
Markets that should work but don’t. Incentives that point in opposite directions. Equations that refuse to balance. This is the terrain where interesting things happen, or where everything collapses into the most boring possible equilibrium.
Which, in Ethiopian TV, means unscripted content. Lots and lots of unscripted content.