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Storing it all at CES - January 10, 2008

LAS VEGAS--The high-def DVD format war grabbed the headlines at CES, what with Warner Bros. abandoning its long-time partner Toshiba to embrace Blu-ray. But the real story in media storage wasn’t about optical discs but set-top and solid state storage. Among the notable developments:

• Seagate Technologies introduced its PipelineHD Series hard disk drives for DVRs, capable of storing up to 1 Terabyte of information. That’s about 200 hours of HDTV, or 1,000 of standard-def.
• PortoMedia or Galway, Ireland plans to use Seagate’s pocket-sized WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled DAVE flash drives (Digital Audio Video Experience) to roll out take-out movie download kiosks in the U.S. Backed by IBM (which is building the kiosks) Porto’s system can transfer a movie to the portable drive in about 90 seconds.
• Kaleidescape Systems demoed the latest version of its home media server featuring 1TB of storage.
• 4GB and 8GB USB drives were ubiquitous, and higher-capacity models were readily available, including a 32GB thumb drive from Corsair (for those keeping score at home, that’s more storage than a dual-layer HD DVD disc and you can carry it on a keychain).
• Slightly larger solid-state form factors, still suitable for portable devices, were also everywhere, capped off by 2.5-inch SSD from BitMicro capable of storing 832GB of data, with transfer speeds up to 100Mbs. That would be about 120 DVDs worth of movies in a single, slightly oversized iPod, or nearly every song you could ever name.

I could go on.

Some of the prototypes shown at CES may never make it to market, of course. Or they may initially be too expensive for consumer applications. But others will be coming soon to a Best Buy near you.

The trend, moreover, is clear: Cheap, miniaturized and portable storage is coming, and it has the potential to be very disruptive, not just to content owners but to distributors, aggregators, marketers and network providers as well.

A TiVo with a Terabyte of storage (and inevitably 2 or 3GB soon after) should be enough to give pause to studios looking to sell downloads or DVD boxed sets of TV series. But you also have to wonder whether a household with that kind of storage capacity would ever watch another advertisement again.

And how much cable service do you need to pay for when you can store that much of your hand-selected content? Especially when the TiVo has an broadband Internet connection and can retrieve the content directly.

By the way, Corsair had a 64GB thumb drive on display as well. That’s more than a dual-layer Blu-ray Disc, for those keeping score at home.
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