Ochieng Umira
Africa does not have a film production problem.
Africa has a film circulation problem.
For decades, we have focused almost entirely on how to produce films while paying far less attention to how films move.
How they reach audiences.
How they generate value.
How they survive after production.
And perhaps this is why many conversations about African cinema still feel incomplete.
Because production without circulation is like building roads that lead nowhere.
Taylor Swift understood something profound about the digital age.
When the world moved toward unlimited streaming and infinite access, she did not simply surrender music to digital abundance.
She reinvented scarcity.
Collector editions. Timed releases. Exclusive versions. Fan driven anticipation. Limited access experiences.
In other words, she recreated the logic of the old Hollywood windowing system inside a streaming world.
Not everyone gets everything at the same time.
Access itself becomes part of the value.
This is what Hollywood understood for decades.
Cinema first. Then DVD. Then television. Then streaming.
Each window protected economic value through timing and exclusivity.
But digitisation disrupted something fundamental.
It introduced what economists call the “zero marginal cost” problem.
Once a film, song or digital file is produced, the cost of reproducing and sharing another copy approaches almost zero.
This changed everything.
Scarcity collapsed.
Control weakened.
Informal circulation accelerated.
A film could now move across continents through Telegram, Bluetooth, WhatsApp or piracy websites almost instantly and at virtually no cost.
The audience did not disappear.
The economics changed.
And Africa entered this digital transition without the formal infrastructure that historically protected cinematic value in Western markets.
Yesterday it was pirated DVDs on street corners.
Today it is IPTV networks, illegal streaming ecosystems, hard drives and mobile file sharing.
But perhaps we have been interpreting this reality too narrowly.
What if informal circulation is not only a legal problem?
What if it is also evidence of demand, accessibility gaps and infrastructural failure?
This is why the closure of Showmax should concern us beyond the business headlines. Showmax was one of the few major platforms consistently investing in African originals and local storytelling. Its struggles revealed how difficult it is to import subscription driven streaming economics into fragmented African markets with uneven purchasing power and deeply informal media cultures. (kbc.co.ke)
Perhaps the mistake was assuming Africa would eventually replicate Hollywood’s infrastructure.
More multiplexes. More subscriptions. More centralized streaming systems.
But Africa’s entertainment culture has always moved differently.
It is younger. More mobile. More communal. More socially driven. More informal.
Maybe the future of African cinema will not emerge from copying Western distribution systems.
Maybe it will emerge from redesigning circulation around African realities.
Imagine a different kind of windowing system.
Community screenings first.
Campus tours.
Influencer led premieres.
Mobile access windows.
Diaspora circulation.
Offline to online distribution pipelines.
Social media driven discovery.
Not the absence of structure.
But a different structure.
Taylor Swift did not defeat digitisation by resisting technological change.
She adapted value creation around it.
And perhaps African cinema must begin asking the same question.
In a world where copying is nearly free, how do we redesign value around circulation rather than control?
Because stories are already moving across the continent.
The real question is:
Are we willing to redesign film distribution around how Africans actually consume culture, or will we continue forcing African audiences into systems designed for entirely different economic realities?
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I am a film scholar and educator investigating the convergence of digital technology, media policy, and creative economics in Africa
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