Digital storage in professional M&E: the 2014 survey

The last day of SMPTE opened with the presentation of the results of a "2014 Survey of Digital Storage in Professional Media and Entertainment" from Thomas Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates. The results of the online survey, said Coughllin, showed trends in the use of digital storage in professional content capture, editing and post-production, content delivery, as well as archiving and digital preservation. Coughlin compared the results of this 2014 survey to the results from four similar surveys held over the last six years to paint a picture of the evolution of storage technology for professional video use. Among the findings were increased use of cloud storage for post production, distribution and archiving, the continued growth of flash memory in content capture, developing trends for content distribution and the growing use of active archives.

His conclusions were that flash memory is now the dominant technology for content capture, followed by hard drives and optical discs. There are improvements in network storage performance and the resulting production efficiencies are driving the growth of network storage. Likewise, the use of digital storage in the cloud is playing a bigger role in M&E, which is using it to provide OTT content distribution and collaborative workflows. The increase in content resolution and the amount content is driving performance and storage in content delivery system and the growth of online distribution storage. The decreasing costs of all forms of digital storage have made it possible to store much more content for a longer time. Finally, storage capacity and growth in professional M&E show the size of archive digital libraries. The results of his white paper are available online here and will be on the SMPTE site.