Storage requirements by media and entertainment companies will see rapid growth in the next five years, with sales of storage systems growing from $3.8 billion in 2011 to $6.4 billion in 2016, according to Coughlin Associates' 2011 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report.
The report, which includes projections of digital storage demand for content capture, post production, content distribution and content archiving, also predicts that digital storage requirements are exploding due to use of higher resolution and stereoscopic content in the media and entertainment industry.
As a result, the report is predicting that the media and entertainment industry will need about 7.7 times more digital storage capacity in 2016 than it did in 2011 and that the storage capacity shipments per year will grow about 5.6 times from 11,248 petabytes to 62,736 petabytes.
In 2011, the report predicts that tape continues to be the dominant media, with about 43.6% of the total storage media shipped for all the digital entertainment content segments being tape, followed by HDD (39.1%), optical (17.1%) and flash memory (0.2%).
In upcoming years, however, the report expects increased use of HDD storage for archiving applications and that flash memory will find wider use in cameras and content distribution.
