Storage Effect

Bill Watkins on surveillance and the content subscription model

The BlogHaus was hopping last night.  CEO Bill Watkins came by and mixed with the blogger community.  He and Robert Scoble talked about how surveillance innovation and the content subscribtion subsidy business model are driving dramatic growth in storage. 

Add-on storage: not just for PCs any more! 

There’s storage behind almost every exciting innovation at CES 

It’s wild and crazy here at CES , but if you listen carefully, you can hear a giant sucking sound: massive storage being pulled by incredible new audio and visual consumer technology.  They’re mostly just incremental improvements on existing technology.  Their adoption will drive TBs of capacity to make them real. 

• Lots and lots of home theater systems  - from the high end (like Kaleidascape and XStreamHD) to the mainstream (MS Media Center, Home servers and many others).  All of them making it very easy to pull DVD collections and TV episodes in, requiring TBs per home.
• Bigger LCDs - which mean higher resolution.  It’s hard to see the difference between standard definition and HD on a 32″ TV.  But as TVs get really big (like the 150″ monster demoed by Panasonic), even HD isn’t enough.  Every resolution increase multiplies the size of the content being shown (and stored)

Robert Scoble broadcast live from the BlogHaus last night on mogulus, answering questions.  He thinks HD and Autos will be where the energy is at CES this year.  In particular, BuRay will come on strong. 

Don’t expect Google to be active this year, he says, although they may be in the back rooms working on Android. 

On flash vs. disk, he mentioned Seagate’s DAVE technology.  I’m going to see a demo on this later today.  60GB in your pocket that streams content to your phone, video player, car. 

I didn’t attend Bill Gates’ CES keynote, but someone else did and shared their video with me at the PodTech BlogHaus.  Unfortunately, I can’t seem to download .MOV files on WordPress.   I’ll keep trying.

You can see the official ‘clean’ version of the keynote at Microsoft’s site if you like.  Personally, I like the rock concert quality of the bootlegged video.  Thanks Kate!

I’m sitting in the PodTech BlogHaus at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, just settling in for a few days of looking for what’s new in the consumer storage world. 

Robert Scoble is across the room broadcasting live on mogulus.  Check it out - personal TV stations!   

Let me know what you want to learn about here at the show.