Storage Effect

Look out world - here come digital downloads!

This post on Egypt’s problems with network outages seemed mundane when I first read it.    But then I read between the lines: Movie downloads are seriously impacting a developing country’s day-to-day economy!

When I think of Egypt’s economy, digital entertainment doesn’t come to mind.  Yet digital content has risen to a top economic priority due to unexpected but very understandable infrastructure problems.   Why is this such a big deal?  Because it’s evidence that third-world economies and their resulting digital needs will not lag the developed countires nearly as much as one might think.

The developing world is on a unique digital infrastructure path, bringing many poorer, high-population countries much more rapidly into the Digital World than their more economically developed brethren in the Americas, Asia and Europe.

This reminds me of conversations I had last week with our India team on the huge size of the Indian movie industry.  It goes way beyond Bollywood.  Indian production companies are today producing a disproportionate share of the world’s video content, and cinemas throughout India are converting to digital distribution at a rapid pace. 

The lesson here is that the Digital Age is a global phenomenon that will be driven more and more by population size than by per capita income.