Hollywood's infatuation with storage keeps growing

One the most “entertaining” reports (if you can call research reports entertaining that is) is Coughlin Associates annual Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment. In fact, I blogged about the 2011 report here.

Tom Coughlin regularly covers the storage industry on Forbes.com, and his latest post is packed some eye opening findings…here’s a couple that caught my eye:

“Between 2012 and 2017 we expect about a 5.6 X 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 22,425 PB to 87,152 PB).”
“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%.”

Check out more on Tom’s post on Forbes titled: Petabytes are the New Terabytes — Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment. Of course I like any market that demands huge storage capacity, especially one that will see hard drive utilization grow from 41% to 59%.

This is not too surprising considering Hollywood’s movement to an all digital production process from shoot to cut to even distribution with the growth of digital cinemas. Seagate has covered such a movement in previous posts:

What’s more surprising is the growing storage needs for archive and preservation. Granted, there probably isn’t any better way to preserve films for long periods of time than tape, but what is interesting is the growth of what is called active archive – a form of tiered storage. This is where we will see continued utilization of low power, low performance, low cost, yet very high capacity hard drives, otherwise known as cold storage.

As long as Hollywood shoots, cuts, edits, produces, distributes, or archives the movies they put out, hard drives will play a big role not only in the next 5 years, but well beyond that. Just wait for the 16K video resolution…then the numbers get a lot more interesting. Coughlin points out that at 16,000 X 8,000 pixel resolution, 64 color bits/pixel, 300 fps video content would require 307 GB/s data rates and 1.1 Petabytes/hour of content!

Could you imagine the special effects with that resolution? What’s your favorite storage hungry movie packed with special effects?

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