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Technical advances are reshaping many aspects of the media and entertainment (M&E) industry, from video capture and post-production to delivery and archiving, and these developments are fueling demand for storage, according to a report from IT research firm IDC.
The first report in the series, Storage Consumption and Dynamics in the Media and Entertainment Industry, provides an overview of the storage hardware, software and services vendors who provide essential components to the industry, and IDC’s guidance on how the media and entertainment industry can address evolving media asset management requirements.
The report indicated that cloud adoption is still feared in the M&E industry for security reasons, as any breach would result in direct monetary loss, and content creation and post-production still often relies on outdated and inefficient content-sharing methods.
“New technology and content delivery methods are redefining the M&E industry,” Amita Potnis, research analyst with IDC’s storage systems department, said in a statement. “As the industry continues to grapple with constant change, an ecosystem of storage and services suppliers has emerged, often making it unclear as to where, how and to what extent storage and other related services are used.”
The growing relationship between the M&E and storage industries is expected to drive new approaches to data management and distribution and force acceptance of new technology developments, such as aggressive use of cloud-based storage, across the industry ecosystem.
The report also found the future value of older content is often unclear, which perpetuates an “archive-all” mentality and increases storage demand, while globalization and the delivery of content in different geographic regions with different video standards simultaneously increase storage requirements.
“The evolving complexity of the digital-asset lifecycle is forcing media and entertainment providers to re-evaluate their storage infrastructure and services strategies, as data-center-capacity demands increase beyond the petabyte level,” Paul Hughes, program director of storage and data management services for IDC, said in a statement. “Media and entertainment providers have little choice but to review their existing media lifecycle workflows, eliminate out-of-date processes, revamp existing storage strategies, and adapt in real time to prepare for future data demands being driven by higher-quality video.”
The report also offers an overview of media-and-entertainment market dynamics and the current digital-asset lifecycle for television and cinematic content, as well as insight into how content capture, production, distribution, and archiving are impacting and changing IT requirements for in-house storage and cloud-related storage services.
The first in a series of four reports tackling the issue, IDC’s future publications on the topic will focus on archival strategies for media and entertainment, the changing demands for storage in media distribution, and storage strategies for media capture and post-production.