Coughlin Associates has released its 2026 report on Digital Storage in the Media and Entertainment Industry . Let’s look at some of the findings from this report.

Data storage is a key element in the modern content creation, editing, distribution and reception. Data capacity and communication speed increases, changing form factors, and the growing familiarity with digital editing, digital intermediates and various forms of digital distribution are key components in the continued growth and development of entertainment.

The rising use of data analysis and various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the media and entertainment industry favors new mixes of various storage and memory technologies. These factors drive growth in data storage for all entertainment content applications.

However, in 2025 and 2026 the prices of all digital storage and memory technology have increased due to the massive build out of data centers for AI training and inference. This led to significant increases in storage prices, which are changing the way that digital storage is used.

There also has been a slowing of the growth in the use of storage resources in the cloud, in the industry with some repatriation of data from the cloud to local storage or private clouds for various reasons, including cost controls and controlling content access.

In February through July of 2025 Coughlin Associates conducted a survey of professional media and entertainment professionals on various digital storage topics . The figure below shows the percentage of various recording media used by the 2025 survey recipients in professional video cameras. Flash memory and HDDs dominated the responses with 4% of participants recording directly to the cloud.

Postproduction storage demand is increasing with more multi-camera 360-degree projects, higher resolutions, more bits per frame and higher frame rates. This drives overall storage requirements as shown below. The chart shows a growth in cloud storage that will be larger than local network storage, but overall, more content remains local rather than in the cloud.

Long term storage of video content requires inexpensive content storage. However, today archived content is accessed more readily than older passive archives, often off-line in cold storage facilities. For this reason, many archives are now “active archives” that provide lower latency archived content access. The ultimate storage for these active archives will be on magnetic tape (mostly LTO), optical discs and hard disk drives.

Although there is still a considerable amount of older video content that has not been digitized, much of the content that will be digitized has been or will be in the next few years. For this reason, future archive growth will be increasingly driven by archiving of new video content as shown below.

We focused the report on digital storage using SSDs, HDDs and magnetic tape, although with the activities of several optical storage startups, optical storage could play an increasing role in archival storage by the end of the decade. The pie chart below shows our estimates for 2025 of digital storage capacity used in the industry for HDDs, flash (SSDs), magnetic tape and optical storage.

Digital Storage feeds every aspect of modern media work flow. As professional video content size grows to support ever more immersive experiences, so have the requirements for performance, latency and storage capacity.

The report provides 195 pages of in-depth analysis of the role of digital storage in all aspects of professional media and entertainment. Projections are given out to 2031 for digital storage demand in content capture, post-production, content distribution and content archiving are provided in 62 tables and 129 figures.

Digital storage and memory vendors are creating new storage products to meet the needs of video professionals so they have the tools they need to express their visions.