Netflix Was Impossible

The Problem:

It’s 1995. You have an idea: unlimited movies, streamed to any home, on demand.

There’s just one issue. A single 4K movie needs 50GB of storage. The average home connection runs at 56 kbps.

At those speeds, downloading one movie would take three months. Running 24/7.

Your idea isn’t just hard. It’s physically impossible.

The Disruption:

But technology curves don’t care about “impossible.” Storage costs dropped 100x. Bandwidth exploded. What couldn’t exist in 1995 became inevitable by 2007.

Netflix launched streaming. Today, 400 million subscribers stream 90GB per month each.

The Implications for Investment Research

AI in investment research is on that same curve, except steeper. Cost per unit of analysis is falling 10x every year.

What feels “too expensive” today becomes standard practice tomorrow. What seems impossible now becomes your competitor’s edge next year.

The question isn’t whether the economics will shift. They already are. The question is whether you’re designing your investment process for the world that’s coming.

Or the one that’s already gone.

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