Nine Years of Media and Entertainment Digital Storage Surveys

Digital storage plays a significant role in the professional media and entertainment (M&E) industry. Digital storage for the M&E industry has demanding characteristics that are often very different from typical IT storage because of the performance requirements of realtime video in capture, editing, and post-production, as well as distribution. These trends are driving demand for flash memory in post-production as well as content delivery. On the other hand, the growing archive of long-tail digital content and increasing digitized historical analog content is swelling the demand for cold as well as warm archives using tape, optical discs, and hard drive arrays. The growth of IP-based workflows is driving demand for block, file, and object storage for various M&E applications. As a result, the prices of digital storage have declined. At the same time, the availability of digital storage hardware, software, and online services has increased. This brings up the question of what sort of storage systems and services do M&E professionals require for various parts of their workflows. What drives their storage decisions and how are these demands changing over time? Coughlin Associates, Inc. has been conducting a survey of M&E professionals from all over the world on various digital storage topics for nine years. The surveys were broken down into several usage segments to reflect broad differences in storage requirements, including content capture, editing and post-production, content delivery, as well as archiving and digital preservation. Results from the nine years of this survey will be compared to show changing storage trends for these various M&E applications, including storage capacity growth, cloud storage, flash memory, hard disk drive, tape, and optical disc demand. These surveys served as a basis for our annual Digital Storage in Media and Entertainment report, and some projections on the drivers and growth of digital storage will give insights on the future of digital storage for the M&E industry.