Video and Media Driving Storage Growth

We believe that TiVo-like technology and devices will become more prevalent because they will address an important need that is now just emerging. These devices hold video and audio files that come across from TV broadcasters but do so in a way that is mostly transparent to the viewer. In the future, your new DVD player or new cable "set-top" box will sport perhaps a few terabytes of disk space, capacity that will be invisible to you. Your preferred cable company will then be able to stream hundreds of movies down into your cable box each night, making use of idle bandwidth during the "wee hours" and allowing you a much faster pay-per-view experience should you eventually elect to watch some of them. In fact, your cable box full of stored videos may allow you to transfer movies to a handheld video player at super high speed (a few seconds of transfer) so that you can take them along for a long car ride. This is far less practical if the video/audio stream has to originate from cable TV headquarters and fight its way along the cable pipes among all the real-time viewing and Internet traffic streams. Storing content locally for use at some future point in time, caching, will become a general trend within the cable broadcast.

PVRs and DVRs

Personal video recorders (PRVs or DVRs), popularized by TiVo, are finally taking off. These devices, which enable users to record broadcast and other TV signals to disk, were first introduced to the market in 1999. They were somewhat slow to take off, and sales were low through 2001, only reaching 1.2 million units by 2002.^[2] During 2003, sales tripled to 4.6 million units, and 2004 will see sales around 11 million units. According to Price Waterhouse Coopers, by 2008, 20 percent of households will have DVRs, up from 3 percent at the end of 2003.^[3] Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox are all now promoting their versions of a DVR. In addition, PCs and laptops can be turned into video recorders quite easily. Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition enables the hard drive to essentially provide PVR services. Similarly, the familiar consumer electronic companies (Sony, Toshiba, and others) are now configuring DVD recorders with hard disks in order to offer similar capabilities. To be clear: We and others see an enormous number of home-based devices soaking up massive amounts of disk space to save movies and other forms of broadcast content.

^[2] http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=39.

^[3] http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2004-07-28-tivo-cov_x.htm.

Local data caching allows the users of data to experience dramatically increased performance when retrieving stored content. Under a content-caching scenario, the material (be it a movie or song or a picture of your dog) is "stored" in multiple locations throughout a network, possibly in addition to your own home entertainment system. A new movie (for example, one of the Lord of the Rings sequence) is initially released for video and cable viewers only. A large cable provider starts with a single electronic copy of part three of the trilogy that has been transmitted to them by the movie distributor. The cable company then places the movie on its main content server in a location that is central to their coverage area. The cable provider then broadcasts the movie out to each regional cable office, which stores it and rebroadcasts it out to each cable head end (the in-town distribution point). The cable head end may then rebroadcast it to neighborhood waypoints, and then in turn down to your local set-top box, perhaps without you ever asking for it or knowing about it beforehand. Why? The closer (geographically) to its final destination the content is stored, the less performance impact there will be on the cable provider's network when it comes time for you to actually watch the movie.

It is conceivable, therefore, as cable providers move forward with digital content, that the Lord of the Rings movie will be stored on 80 million different disk drives across the United States. If a typical DVD-quality movie is 4 gigabytes large, one movie alone could consume as much as 300 million billion bytes. (The storage industry has not yet invented a term like terabyte or petabyte to describe this much data.) In a bit of an odd twist, as rapid and massive as all this storage growth around us will be, we will be increasingly unaware of it.

Today, we know perfectly well that our home computers and laptops contain disk drives. Disk drives store our files and pictures and audio and video media. We select which files to store, and we occasionally manage them (move material around, delete some, add some, etc.). We have to interact with them when they run out of space or performance begins to suffer, or, heaven forbid, they crash and we have to replace them and the data they once contained. By contrast, TiVo-like devices shield us from all of that. We do not see a C: drive. Instead, we are presented a view that is far more application-tailored. We believe the box is holding movies, but we are indifferent as to whether they are on some spinning disk or coming in from some wired or wireless signal, or some of both.

In the Inescapable Data world, repository-type data will be stored in a caching fashion all along a series of access points, and we will be unaware of the actual location or type of media holding the data; we will be thinking only in terms of the business or consumer object (e.g. the movie), and the infrastructure will shield us from the underlying complexity. We are moving toward a world where the network seems to hold our data rather than specific devices (or specific locations), driven by the super-thick movie and video files that value the significant performance gain.