M+E Daily
Entertainment Industry’s Storage Needs To Increase Tenfold By 2015: Report
Story Highlights
Media and entertainment companies will increase their digital storage capacity requirements tenfold by 2015, when storage media makers will respond by shipping products representing more than 47,000 petabytes in capacity, according to storage consultancy Coughlin Associates.
The 47,000 petabyte figure is roughly equivalent to a head-spinning 1 billion DVDs. Yet some entertainment companies are already operating on a petabyte level: as of 2009, Blizzard Entertainment reportedly utilized 1.3 petabytes of storage to operate its massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft.
Coughlin says that the entertainment and media industry dedicated 93% of its total storage capacity to content archiving and preservation in 2009. A majority of the total storage media shipped for digital entertainment content applications was tape-based (86%), with hard-disk drives accounting for only 10%. The research firm expects the industry’s use of hard-disk drives to grow by 2015, when HDD media will account for 14% of all storage shipments to tape media’s 83% share. Coughlin Associates
