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Media and entertainment storage drivers and demand are discussed in the latest report from Coughlin Associates onDigital Storage in Media and Entertainment.The 251 page report offers 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 62 tables and 129 figures.

The sixteenth 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 pie chart below, from the report, shows the breakdown of media for long term archives for the survey participants.

Breakdown of media used for M&E archiving from Survey

As a result of changes in the economics of storage devices higher performance solid-state storage will play a bigger role in the future.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.

Some 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.The figure below shows the impact on storage for M&E content acquisition in 2020 and 2021.

Growth in new digital storage for content acquistion

Spending for digital cinema in 2020 and 2021 will also 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.

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 estimate 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

Over116 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.

As a result of the Covid-19 epidemic, M&E content acquisition storage will suffer loses in 2020 and 2021, except for broadcast.This will also impact post production storage.Cloud storage will assume a new importance for remote work.The latest M&E storage report projects out to 2025.

See the rest here:
Media And Entertainment Storage TAM To Exceed $16B By 2025 - Forbes