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The 205-page Coughlin Associates report on Digital Storage for professional media and entertainment looks at all aspects of professional media and entertainment. The report has projections for capacities and revenues out to 2019 and including data from surveys taken between 2009 and 2014. Tom Coughlin is the author and President of Coughlin Associates.
Some highlights from the report:
- As image resolution and frame rates increases and as multi-camera video becomes more common, storage requirements explode.
- Several petabytes of storage may be required for a complete stereoscopic digital movie project at 4K resolution, and there is some production work as high as 8K. By the next decade total video captured for a high end digital production could be hundreds of PB, approaching 1 Exabyte
- As image resolution and frame rates increases and as multi-camera video becomes more common, storage requirements explode. Hours captures per hour of final content is increasing
- Several petabytes of storage may be required for a complete multi-camera digital movie project at 4K resolution, and there is some production work as high as 8K. By the next decade total video captured for a high end digital production could be hundreds of PB, approaching 1 Exabyte
- The development of 4K TV and other high-resolution venues in the home and in mobile devices will drive the demand for digital content (especially enabled by high HEVC (H.265) compression.
- There is ongoing activity to create capture and display devices for 8K X 4K content, with planned implementation in consumer media systems by the next decade
- Survey results show that 40% of professional cameras use flash memory. It is now the dominant recording media used in these cameras. Magnetic tape and film are rapidly declining. Flash memory is also playing a role in content distribution and post-production.
- M&E Storage in remote “clouds” is playing an increasing role in enabling collaborative workflows. Overall cloud storage for media and entertainment is expected to grow 37 X between 2013 and 2014 (322 PB to 11,904 PB). Cloud storage revenue will exceed $1.5 B by 2019
- Between 2013 and 2019 we expect about a 5.4 X increase in the required digital storage capacity used in the entertainment industry and about a 3.8 X increase in storage capacity shipped per year (from 14,449 PB to 50,649 PB).
- The greatest storage capacity demand in 2013 is for digital conversion and preservation as well as archiving of new content (96.5%). Content distribution follows in size with acquisition and post-production using less storage.
- Between 2013 and 2019 media and entertainment storage revenue is expected to grow 2.3 X (from $4.2 B to $9.6 B).
- In 2013 archiving and preservation is estimated to have been 47% of the total storage revenue followed by post-production (25%), content distribution (24%), and content acquisition (4%).
- In 2019 the projected revenue distribution is 38% archiving and preservation, 33% post-production, 26% content distribution, and 3% content acquisition.
- Active archiving will drive increased use of HDD storage for “archiving” applications supplementing tape for long term archives
- The slow down in areal density growth for HDDs will also slow the historical $/GB decline through the projection period.
- Recent developments for Blu-ray optical cartridges are expected to slow the decline in optical archive storage
- By 2019 we expect 64% of archived content to be in near-line storage, up from 43% in 2013.
- Over 50 Exabytes of digital storage will be used for digital archiving and content conversion and preservation by 2019
- In 2013 we estimate that 44.5% of the total storage media capacity shipped for all the digital entertainment content segments was in HDDs with digital tape at 41.7%, 13.4% optical discs and flash at 0.4%.
- By 2019 tape capacity shipments will be reduced to 34.1% of the total shipping capacity, HDDs shipped capacity is 61.7%, optical disc capacity is down to about 3.4% and flash capacity percentage is at 0.8%.
- Storage media revenue is expected to increase about 23% from 2013 to 2019 ($426 M to $524 M).
- Silver halide film as a content distribution media will vanish before the end of the decade.
You can find out more about the report at http://www.tomcoughlin.com/techpapers.htm
