The Coming Great Video Headache - by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Mar 24 2010)

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   If you want to be bullish about the growth of data centers, bet on video for pushing an explosion in the sales of servers and disk storage.  It doesn't matter if you are Joe Consumer, a corporate broadcaster, or a national government agency -- more digital video is going to drive a demand for more data center storage.  If this is "more green," so be it.

   On the consumer level, people are recording family events using anything from the under-$200 Flip video camera to DVD-based and hard-disk based video "camcorders."  Add on all the people who realize they have stuff on (perishable, obsolete) video tape who want/need/have to move previous family memories onto a hard drive and there's a lot of data that needs to be safely and securely stored outside of the home for archival purposes. 

   About the only great surprise is that insurance companies haven't figured out the market for "memory safety" to sell along with their homeowner's insurance policies. If a fire or other disaster strikes your home, don't you want to be protected on ALL fronts?

   Television broadcasters and cable companies are starting to more comfortably embrace video-on-demand as the big solution for home entertainment.  But even as they get into the groove with existing shows, HD demands both bigger hard drives and higher bandwidth -- and it won't be solved by Google giving away 1 GBps pipes to a couple of small towns in America.

   Did I mention that 3-D TV will only aggravate  the situation?  Standards for 3-D TV broadcast are only just being formalized, but the folks at Arqiva -- a company specializing in moving around video -- estimate that a 3-D video stream will take up anywhere from 1.6 to 2 times the space and bandwidth as compared to stock HD footage.  And before you say it, HD and 3-D are "shot" with different processes, so you have two separate media types to store as well; you can't downconvert from 3-D to HD at this stage of the game and the editing process is also totally different.  Do the math, and a 3-D event will "cost" 2.6 to 3 times the storage space as compared to being just shot in HD and you can't ignore HD because few people don't have 3-D TVs and aren't planning to buy them anytime in the near future.

   Finally, for all of the professionally paranoid out there, local, state, and federal government agencies are keen in shooting and storing more video, ranging from mundane traffic footage to the hip world of the  UAV (Unmanned aerial vehicle).   UAVs are on tap for remote sensing, scientific research, and border security, with video storage looking to be a major challenge for users.

   The "green" story here is that digital video doesn't require the processing of film and storage is a lot easier on a hard drive rather than in an environmentally controlled facility.  However, the un-green story is the explosive growth of video will end up generating the need for lots more data center storage.

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