Brazil is on the leading edge of Internet trends, but there is one huge sticking point; bandwidth. According to Internet World Stats, 34 percent of Brazilians are online, which is nearly 68 million people. However only 7 million had broadband access in 2008. Nearly everyone with whom I spoke in Sao Paulo echoed the same sentiment; download speeds suck and a robust connection is still very expensive. So what does that mean for the evolution of the Web?

A lot of great content is out there in video form. According to YouTube’s blog, users upload more than 20 hours of video each minute. In fact, there are lots of great stats about YouTube (none of them having to do the company earning a profit–yet), such as this Neatorama story that said in 2007 YouTube used as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.

My hunch is that social media is popular for exactly this reason. With download speeds that can be maddeningly slow, who wants to wait for huge video files to load? Chatting, commenting on profiles and sharing low resolution photos can be done with a minimum of delay in all but the worst scenarios and, these activities happen to be the stock and trade of social media. With the exception of commenting on profiles, all of the aforementioned behaviors first appeared in the chain-letter days of dial-up home Internet access

[Map of world Internet use 2000-2007]

Getting to the point where every Internet user can stream large video files will be a momentous occasion. Although I spend more time watching ‘The Family Guy’ on Hulu than lectures from Academic Earth, the potential is amazing. A wealth of information is available about entrepreneurship, philosophy, computer science or medicine for anyone with the time and connectivity. The same is true at TED, Big Think or Current, where knowledge seekers can slake their thirst for information.

This is not to say that important information is not disseminated through light-weight social media apps, such as Twitter. The media would like us to believe that Twitter is singly responsible for the protests in Iran, but while this may overstate the role of Iran’s roughly 9,000 tweeters, the microblogging site was an important conduit sharing for on-the-ground experience. To further underscore the primacy of low-bandwidth content, some of the most gripping footage from Iran has been short, grainy cellphone videos such as the death of Neda, whose face is now known to the world.

Companies like Boxee, Qik or Mogulus are revolutionizing the way we consume video and, seemingly limitless bandwidth, in the U.S., let us not forget that communication is more than the flashiest video player. When we find new ways to unlock the knowledge stored in video content and share it throughout the low-bandwidth ecosystem, we have the chance to radically change the future for good. Already we can earn college degrees in front of the computer, learn how to speak French or hear a lecture on the history of Chinese food. When we can share this resource beyond the nations of the industrialized world, what a future that will be.