Slumdog Millionaire in your right pocket

My colleague asked me the other day if I wanted to watch Slumdog Millionaire. I declined saying I would watch it on the big screen. Did she have a pirated DVD, I asked. Well, sort of, she said. "What was sort of ?" I asked. "Actually, its on a pen drive," she smiled. The whole movie?". "Yes, it's a 1 GB drive, it fit quite neatly," she smiled.

I met Nicholas Negroponte, the author of the famous book,  Being Digital, more than a decade ago in Melbourne (of all the places !), where he spoke of how increasingly, we would carry more and more things in the form of bits and not atoms.

His simple illustration then: whenever he travelled, he never carried big files, instead he stored all the content on a storage device like a floppy drive. On reaching his location, he would print the whole thing out.

I reckon even Negroponte would not have predicted the rapid atom to bits transition that has close to decimated the music industry and now is slowly choking  the movie  industry.

Is digitisation the culprit here ? Of course not, piracy is. But the sheer ease with which you can pump millions of mega bytes of content over the Internet back and forth and finally into storage devices such as the 1 GB pen drive my colleague carries make the whole thing simpler and thus tempting by a factor of ten, or I so I would think.

Who would have thought that you could store the whole of Ramesh Sippy's  three-hour plus magnum opus Sholay (and more) in a 2 inch by ½ inch device which fits so neatly into your trouser pocket or purse it could get lost.

So storage is getting cheaper and compact. I have already seen 32 GB pen drives in the market, they cost upwards of Rs 4,000 by the way. I am guessing you could store at least 40 Divx (the format) movies in one such drive. The prints are not terrific, close to VCD quality but I can assure you many don't care.

And guess what, the new Pioneer DVD players, for instance, even have a USB port located in the front. So, instead of inserting a DVD, just plug in the pen drive and you are good to go.

What's new here ? For one, in India the digitisation of content, at least from a scale point of view, is only now beginning to take off.

Partly, because of the ability to store and carry which I spoke off. Second, internet speeds. India does not offer the real blistering stuff you experience in North America and parts of Asia but it's good enough for the nerds and enthusiasts. Which means that given the general appeal of Bollywood movies, songs and the like, content producers in India have an additional headache. These are the challenges.

The opportunity of course is really what Negroponte predicted many years ago. Digitisation is a great way to cut costs, manage information flow and even travel light. Every industry or business will find more solutions. The television industry, for example, has to rely less on physical tapes now. Which means space saved. Not to mention money.

Or at home. You could digitise all your CDs and store them on a hard disk. But earlier, even then you could run out of space. A few weeks ago, my friend from Detroit landed up in India with a 1 Terabyte (1,000 GB) hard disk and all his video and audio content, transferred over the years. Needless to add, I bought one myself and asked him to do the needful.