Higher performance SSD will play a bigger role in future

The 2020 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report, from Coughlin Associates, provides 257 pages of in-depth analysis of the role of digital storage in all aspects of professional media and entertainment. Projections are given out to 2025 for digital storage demand in content capture, post-production, content distribution and content archiving are provided in 58 tables and 128 figures.

The 16th annual report includes results from a 2020 survey of Coughlin Associates, Digital Production Buzz, HPA and SMPTE members on their digital storage needs in these target segments (comparing the results to similar 2009, 2010 and 2012-2019 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. As a result of changes in the economics of storage devices, higher performance solid-state storage will play a bigger role in the future. 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.

Highlights from the report:

* The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 will have a big impact on content creation in 2020 and likely into 2021, except for broadcast acquisition.

* Spending for digital cinema in 2020 and 2021 will also be impacted by the pandemic.

* Creation, distribution and 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.

* HDD areal density increases are slower but flash memory growth has increased and the price declined. This, plus the growth in higher resolution and higher frame rate content, is causing 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 in this 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 is finding wider use in post-production and content distribution systems.

* From 2019 to 2025 entertainment and media digital storage TAM (without archiving and preservation) will increase by about 1.8 X from $7.3B to $13.3 B.

* The growth in storage capacities will result in a total media and entertainment storage revenue growth of about 1.6 X between 2019 and 2025 (from $10.3 B to $16.5B).

* Overall annual storage capacity demand for non-archival applications is expected to increase over the period from 2019 to 2025 by 5.0X from 24.3 EB to 122.4 EB.

* Between 2019 and 2025, we expect about a 3.0 X increase in the required digital storage capacity used in the entertainment industry and about a 3.4 X increase in storage capacity shipped per year (from 70.8EB to 241EB.

* In 2019, content distribution is estimate at 31% of total storage revenue followed by archiving and preservation at 29%, post-production at 22% and content acquisition at 18%.

* In 2025, the projected revenue distribution is 33% content distribution, 25% post production, 23% content acquisition and 19% archiving and preservation.

* By 2025, we expect about 56% of archived content to be in near-line and object storage, up from 48% in 2019.

* In 2019, we estimated that 74.7% of the total storage media capacity shipped for all the digital entertainment content segments was in HDDs with digital tape at 19.0%, 2.7% optical discs and flash at 3.5%.

* By 2025, tape capacity shipment share has been reduced to 13.0%, HDDs shipped capacity is 76.4%, optical disc capacity is down to about 0.5% and flash capacity percentage is at 10.1%.

* Media revenue is expected to increase about 1.2X from 2019 to 2025 ($1.8B to $2.2B).

* 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 and its long-term digital preservation.

* Over 116 Exabytes of new digital storage will be used for digital archiving and content conversion and preservation by 2025.

* 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 13X between 2019 and 2025 (2.2 EB to 29.0 EB).

* Overall object storage capacity for media and entertainment is expected to grow about 3.7 X between 2019 and 2025 (14.3 EB to 52.7 EB).

* Cloud storage revenue will be about $3.7 B by 2025.

* By our estimates, professional media and entertainment storage capacity represents about 5.8% of total shipped storage capacity in 2019.

* Professional media and entertainment consume about 28% of all tape capacity shipments, 4.9% of all hard disk drive shipments and 2.3% of all flash memory shipments in 2019. We estimate that media and entertainment spending was about 9% of total storage revenue in 2019.