WW Media/Entertainment Storage Market Growing 1.4X From 2012 to 2017

The eighth annual report from Coughlin Associates, 2012 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report ($7,000), provides 166 pages of analysis of the role of digital storage in all aspects of professional media and entertainment.

Projections out to 2017 of digital storage demand for content capture, post-production, content distribution and content archiving are provided in 59 tables and 83 figures.

The report includes results from a 2012 survey of mostly SMPTE members on their digital storage needs in these target segments (comparing the results to similar 2009 and 2010 surveys). These surveys were used to refine the current report analysis from previous editions and track industry trends. The report benefited from input from experts in the industry which, along with economic analysis and industry publications and announcements, was used to create the data including in the report.

Highlights from the report:

As image resolution increases and as stereoscopic video becomes more common, storage requirements explode
The development of HD TV and other high resolution venues in the home and in mobile devices will drive the demand for digital content
Activity to create capture and display devices for 8K X 4K content is occurring with planned implementation in common media systems by the next decade
Active archiving will drive increased use of HDD storage for archiving applications supplementing tape for long term archives
Flash memory appears to be reaching tipping point in professional video cameras with survey results showing about 37% utilization in 2012 (growing from 2009 and 2010 survey results). Flash memory is also playing a role in content distribution and post production.
Between 2012 and 2017 we expect about a 5.6X increase in the required digital storage capacity used in the entertainment industry and about a four-fold increase in storage capacity shipped per year (from 22,425PB to 87,152PB).
Total media and entertainment storage revenue will grow more than 1.4X between 2012 and 2017 (from $5.6B to $7.8B)
The greatest storage capacity demand in 2012 was for digital conversion and preservation as well as archiving of new content
In 2012 we estimate that about 43% of the total storage media capacity shipped for all the digital entertainment content segments was digital tape with about 41% HDDs, 16% optical discs and flash 0.2% (mostly in digital cameras and some media distribution systems). By 2017 tape will be reduced to 38%, HDDs to 59%, optical discs to about 3% and flash memory will have increased to 0.3%.
Total revenue for storage media and devices used in media and entertainment applications will increase about 1.3X from 2012 to 2017 ($774M to $974M).
Storage in remote clouds is beginning to play an important role in enabling collaborative workflows.
Silver halide film as a content distribution media will vanish before the end of the decade.
There is a pressing need to develop policies and procedures for format conversion to combat format obsolescence
Several petabytes of storage may be required for a complete stereoscopic digital movie production at 4K resolution and there is some production work as high as 8K
Non-linear editing requires high performance storage devices. Over the forecast period lower network storage costs and higher performing low cost storage networks will result in faster growth of network storage than direct attached and local.
ATA HDD arrays are becoming the dominant mode for readily retrievable fixed content storage.
Magnetic tape will remain as an archival media although use in other applications is in decline, particularly content capture
The continued need to storage for higher performance and high capacity workflows are driving strong storage growth in the projection periods – assuming no great negative economic trends.