Media and entertainment digital storage growth swells with increased cloud and remote services

Coughlin Associates released its seventeenth report focusing on digital storage in all aspects of professional media and entertainment.  The report includes results from a 2021 survey of M&E professionals on their digital storage needs.

As a result of changes in the economics of storage devices higher performance solid-state storage is playing an increasing role as primary storage.   The cloud and hybrid storage including the cloud have assumed a new importance for many workflows during the Covid-19 pandemic.  When the pandemic passes, use of cloud storage will continue to grow in the media and entertainment storage market going forward.   The growth of cloud storage revenue for M&E application from the 2022 report is shown above.

Some additional highlights from the report:

·      The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-2021 had a big impact on content creation during 2020 and 2021, except for broadcast acquisition

·      Spending for digital cinema in 2021 and during the next few years will be impacted by the pandemic

·      Creation, Distribution & Conversion of video content creates a huge demand driver for storage device and systems manufacturers

·      As image resolution increases and as stereoscopic VR video becomes more common, storage requirements explode

·      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) and VVC (H.266) compression and even greater standards for compression to enable 8K and higher resolution and frame rate workflows.

·      Activity to create capture and display devices for 8K X 4K content is occurring with planned implementation in common media systems in this decade

·      Active archiving will drive increased use of HDD storage for “archiving” applications, supplementing tape for long term archives

·      Flash memory dominates cameras and is finding wider use in post-production and content distribution systems

·      The growth in storage capacities will result in a total media and entertainment storage revenue growth of about 2.1 X between 2020 and 2026 (from $9.1B to $19.2B)

·      Between 2020 and 2026 we expect about a 3.2 X increase in the required digital storage capacity used in the entertainment industry and about a 4.4 X increase in storage capacity shipped per year (from about 69EB to 304EB

·      In 2020 content distribution is estimate at 44% of total storage revenue followed by archiving and preservation at 32%, post-production at 5% (due to the impact of COVID) and content acquisition at 19%.

·      In 2026 the projected revenue distribution is 37% content distribution, 23% post production, 23% content acquisition and 17% archiving and preservation.

·      By 2026 we expect about 59% of archived content to be in near-line and object storage, up from 50% in 2020

·      In 2020 we estimate that about 72% of the total storage media capacity shipped for all the digital entertainment content segments was in HDDs with digital tape at about 21%, about 3% optical discs and flash at about 4%

·      By 2026 tape capacity shipment share has been reduced to about 12%, HDDs shipped capacity is about 76%, optical disc capacity is down to about 0.3% and flash capacity percentage is at about 11%

·      Media revenue is expected to increase about 1.8 X from 2020 to 2026 ($1.eB to $2.3B).

·      Although no longer the biggest driver of digital storage growth, the digital conversion of film, video tape and other analog formats and its long-term digital preservation is still a significant driver for archived content

·      Over 141 Exabytes of new digital storage will be used for digital archiving and content conversion and preservation by 2026

·      Storage in remote “clouds” is playing an important role in enabling collaborative workflows, content distribution and in archiving

·      Overall cloud storage capacity for media and entertainment is expected to grow over 13.8 X between 2020 and 2026 (10.1EB to 140EB)

·      Overall object storage capacity for media and entertainment is expected to grow about 5.6 X between 2020 and 2026 (17.1EB to 96.5EB)

·      Cloud storage revenue will be about $3.3B by 2026

·      By our estimates, professional media and entertainment storage capacity represents about 4.9% of total shipped storage capacity in 2020.

·      In 2020 professional media and entertainment consumed about 15% of all tape capacity shipments, 6% of all hard disk drive shipments and 2% of all flash memory shipments.  We estimate that media and entertainment spending was about 10% of total storage revenue in 2020.

The media and entertainment industry is a significant driver for digital storage growth and development, including all types of storage media and storage technology.  Particularly, remote M&E workflows are driving cloud-based storage growth. Forbes