Cea

Gone in a Flash - The End of the Hard Drive?

In just a few decades, the delivery media for audio, video and data have evolved dramatically. From such analog media as vinyl records, 8-tracks, cassette tapes and floppy disks, the purveyors of pop culture and their computer-industry cohorts gradually entered the "digital era" with its CDs, DVDs and, now, various forms of "flash memory."

The Magnetic Media Information Service (MMIS), formed in 1965, is a global consortium that provides service, analyses and forecasts for and about the media industry. It reports that worldwide production of audio cassette tape fell below one billion C-60 equivalents in 2007, the latest year with complete figures; a mere ten years ago, production was nearly five times as much. Blank cassette demand will fall to about 110-115 million by 2011, with more than half of the remaining demand coming free insurance quotes online third-world markets. For the technology leaders and early adopters of the industrialized (should we now say "digitized"?) nations, tape is dying, if not dead.

Demand for full-size, blank VHS video cassettes will suffer even greater percentage declines over the next several years. Global demand for units of all playing times, around 340-350 million pieces this year, will fall to just 150-160 million units in 2009. The MiniDV cassette, an analog-digital hybrid of sorts and the only tape format still important in camcorder applications, is forecast to decline somewhat more slowly than other tape media; still, output will fall from about 200 million units in 2006 to around 140 million in 2010.

Although most of today's PCs still come with a 3.5-inch floppy drive, users seldom reach for a floppy disk except perhaps as an emergency coaster for a can of soda; Apple's Macintosh computers haven't had floppy drives since 1998. Although the demand for diskettes in 2006 still surpassed 760 million units, by 2010 demand will have declined by over half, to 320-330 million units worldwide.

In with the new

Compact Disc (CD) technology was first introduced in the 1980s in a form factor known as the "optical disc," essentially a rewritable platter enclosed in a carrier shell; its considerable price tag of about $100 was dwarfed by the $3000-4000 cost of the recording/playback units. The CD soon broke out of its shell, figuratively and literally, and in its present form rose to dominate the distribution of recorded entertainment in short order. In 2009, the standard blank CD-R Generic Drugs about a dime when 100-packs go on sale, and holds 700MB of material-data, music, video, whatever-while CD burners for computers start at about $15.

Next came the DVD. From an original format with 4.7 GB of storage it has matured into a dual-layer medium that can hold 8.5 GB. The technology still making the news in this area, after debuting in the middle of the decade, is HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, with capacities of 15-30GB and 25-50GB, respectively, for single and dual layer media. The "burners" are still pricey at $300 and up, but these prices will fall dramatically upon the spread of the technology. Discs cost from $10 to $30 at this time, depending on capacity, with prices already showing a decline as business picks up.

Today, though, the standard CD and DVD still carry most of the media load. Some 65 percent of all recordable discs manufactured in 2007 came from Taiwan, and just two Taiwanese optical media producers, CMC and Ritek, produced roughly half of that. CMC reported sales of over U.S.$1 billion for 2007, and Ritek was not far behind, but if this sounds like good news, it masks a number of problems.

The optical disc replication industry, which manufactures CDs and DVDs for the entertainment industry, will not remember 2006 or 2007 with much fondness. Demands were down in all global markets. Published figures for the second half of 2007 indicate that retail sales in the U.S. market were down by slightly more than 10 percent (2007 vs 2006), in Japan by between 3-5 percent and worldwide between 4-6 percent.

Worldwide retail DVD movie sales will definitely be down again in the years to come. And yet, with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth at record companies and movie studios, the voice of reason is issuing a clear call: "Check with the end user, and get on the flash-memory bandwagon!"

Consumer is king

Two developments point the way toward the future of content distribution and, by knowing how these tracks intersect and interact, content producers will find plenty of demand to fulfill. The days of pouring movies, music and software into the wholesale and retail channels-then goosing sales with marketing and PR-are gone. Commerce is now "interactive" and many end-users shop without leaving home. Internet shopping has been here for some time, and for products that can be transmitted in binary (0s and 1s), the medium (the web) is not the message anymore, pace Marshall McLuhan; it is the package.

At the dawn of the millennium, Video-on-Demand ("VOD") delivery was done largely via cable networks. However, research group iSuppli reports that mobile and Internet downloading have grown rapidly over the last few years; by 2010 the Internet could be the major delivery system for digital entertainment. In 2006, iSuppli estimated that total VOD revenues reached almost $2 billion worldwide, impressive growth from about $700 million in 2004. By 2010, total VOD revenues are forecast to reach $12.6 billion, with cable accounting for $5.7 billion (45%), mobile and related revenues $2.4 billion (19%) and broadband Internet $4.5 billion (36%). At the present rate of change, and with the coming "convergence" of home-delivery channels, it could be "all-Internet," all the time, by 2015.

The other track to follow is storage. Since distribution will be via broadband, the "packaging" is no longer the concern of the content producer or retailer; there are no packages any longer. But there is a huge need for storage, and an ancillary need for portability and in-home transmission. Along with growth in home networking (mostly wireless), there will be the continuing development of ever cheaper, ever more capacious storage systems. The main contenders are the active and passive magnetic media-hard drives and flash memory.

Even flash memory, a recent development in relative terms, has gone through its evolutionary changes. Some early types, like SmartMedia, are nearing extinction, while other original entries like CompactFlash are still being used widely. The most popular types of flash memory today are CompactFlash; SecureDigital, mini-SecureDigital and SecureDigital-IO (SD, mini-SD and SDIO); xD PictureCard (mainly for cameras); and Sony's MemoryStick.

Flash memory enjoyed another stellar year in 2007, with each month seemingly bringing yet another announcement of still-higher storage capacity and still-lower cost. SecureDigital cards with 32GB of storage capacity were introduced in 2008, and the street price has already fallen to $75 from the initial $199 cost; the most popular 2GB form factor, which cost upwards of $50 in 2006, is just $10-12 today. By the end of 2007, some 200 million USB flash-memory drives had been sold since their introduction in 2001, and the end is nowhere in sight.

The tracks converge

Flash memory is becoming ubiquitous in the consumer field and it realistically threatens to eliminate not only most current applications for magnetic tape, but many of those for optical media (CDs, DVDs) as well. By 2010, say analysts, 50GB flash memory cards will be as readily available as 2-4GB units are now, and at about the same street price. DVD-quality movies can be offloaded from a consumer's web-connected computer to flash memory via a $9 "card reader"-with three movies fitting comfortably on today's 16GB cards.

Hard drive development also continues apace, and already we have seen the first so-called "hybrid" hard-disk drives introduced, drives that include a flash-memory storage chip that helps to speed up overall PC operations such as initial boot-up. In 2007, flash memory leader SanDisk debuted a 32GB SSD (Solid State Drive, a flash memory unit in a 2.5-in laptop-drive form factor) and laptop manufacturers from Apple to Dell offer models with this silent, low-power, crash-resistant technology.

Even traditional "spinning platter" hard drives are no longer the expensive marvels they once were, and hard drives with capacities of up to 1TB (terabyte, a thousand gigabytes) cost, on average, less than 30 per GB. (The writer's first hard drive, a 20MB external SCSI drive, cost $800 in 1985; today, $800 buys an astonishing 80,000 times as much hard drive storage capacity.)

The challenge for content producers is multifaceted, as they need to confront changes in marketing, production, delivery, technology and customer mindset. With all the attention given to the "connected" consumers, who is servicing (and selling to) the unconnected ones? How much of the sales effort will become educational as technological change continues to hurtle into the future, threatening to leave entire segments of society (and some entire nations) behind?

The only thing certain, the sages say, is change.

By Scott McQuarrie, representing the EZWatch Pro brand, a leading provider of computer based ezwatch-security-camerassecurity-cameras for business, commercial and government applications.

posted by biibj @ 5:40 AM