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The 2017 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report from Coughlin Associates, provides 248 pages of in-depth analysis of the role of digital storage in all aspects of professional media and entertainment.  Projections out to 2022 for digital storage demand in content capture, post-production, content distribution and content archiving are provided in 64 tables and 115 figures.  

This thirteenth report on this topic includes results from a 2017 survey of Digital Production Buzz, EBU, HPA and SMPTE members on their digital storage needs in these target segments (comparing the results to similar 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 surveys).  These surveys were used to refine the current report analysis from previous editions and track industry trends.  

The report benefited from input from many experts in the industry including end users and storage suppliers, which along with economic analysis and industry publications and announcements, was used to create the data including in the report.  We have made modification to earlier reports to better model current market conditions.  As a result of changes in our assumptions for content acquisition, post-production, video on demand and media there are significant modifications in estimated storage capacity and revenue.

Some highlights from the report:

• Creation, Distribution & Conversion of video content creates a huge demand driver for storage device and systems manufacturers
• 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.
• HDD areal density increases are slower but flash memory growth has increased.  This might cause more applications to use flash memory
• 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
• Optical storage developments for higher capacity write-once Blu-ray optical cartridges will create higher capacity discs and this may help slow the reduction in optical disc archiving 
• Flash memory dominates cameras and will find 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 2.0 X between 2016 and 2022 (from $5.6 B to $11.1 B)
• Overall annual storage capacity demand for non-archival applications is expected to increase over the period from 2016 to 2022 by 10X from 7.6 EB to 51.1 EB (about 6.7 X)
• Between 2016 and 2022 media and entertainment storage revenue is expected to grow about 2.0 X between 2016 and 2022 (from $5.6 B to $11.1 B
• In 2016 archiving and preservation is estimated to have been 41% of total storage revenue followed by content distribution (29%), post-production (22%) and content acquisition (8%)
• In 2022 the projected revenue distribution is 33% content distribution, 35% archiving and preservation, 28% post production and 4% content acquisition
• Between 2016 and 2022 we expect about a 3.5 X increase in the required digital storage capacity used in the entertainment industry and about a 3.7 X increase in storage capacity shipped per year (from 42,568 PB to 156,739 PB
• The greatest storage capacity demand in 2016 is for digital conversion and preservation as well as archiving of new content (about 82%).  Content acquisition follows at 6.3% with post production at 7.2% and content distribution at 4.3% 
• By 2022 we expect about 71% of archived content to be in near-line and object storage, up from 56% in 2016 
• In 2016 we estimate that 68.2% of the total storage media capacity shipped for all the digital entertainment content segments was in HDDs with digital tape at 23.6%, 5.1% optical discs and flash at 3.1%
• By 2022 tape has been reduced to 14.7%, HDDs shipped capacity is 79.1%, optical disc capacity is down to about 1.3% and flash capacity percentage is at 4.8%
• Media revenue is expected to increase about 1.8 X from 2016 to 2022 ($2.2 B to $3.9 B).
• The single biggest application (by storage capacity) for digital storage in the next several years as well as one of the most challenging is the digital conversion of film, video tape and other analog formats
• Over 106 Exabytes of new digital storage will be used for digital archiving and content conversion and preservation by 2022
• Storage in remote “clouds” is playing an important role in enabling collaborative workflows and in archiving
• Overall cloud storage for media and entertainment is expected to grow about 16.5 X between 2016 and 2022 (3,041 PB to 50,128 PB)
• Overall object storage for media and entertainment is expected to grow about 4.7 X between 2016 and 2022 (8,237 PB to 38,381 PB)
• Cloud storage revenue will be about $2.4 B by 2022
• By our estimates, professional media and entertainment storage capacity represents about 5% of total shipped storage capacity in 2016.  Professional media and entertainment uses about 13% of all tape capacity shipments, 8% of all hard disk drive shipments and 2% of all flash memory shipments in 2016

Purchase of the report and the accompanying power point presentation with report figures and tables provides the most definitive information on digital storage trends for the professional media and entertainment industry.

The 2017 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report is now available from Coughlin Associates. To get a copy send a completed order form in the report brochure at http://tomcoughlin.com/tech-papers/or call us at 408-202-5098 or email us.