Digital Storage Was The Star At The 2026 NAB Show

InnovationEnterprise TechDigital Storage Was The Star At The 2026 NAB ShowByThomas Coughlin,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Covering Digital Storage Technology & Market. IEEE President in 2024Follow AuthorApr 21, 2026, 09:49pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.A gold stargettyThe media and entertainment industry is a big user of digital storage for content creation, post production, distribution and archiving. The current shortages of significantly increased the costs of solid-state storage. Although the prices of HDDs have risen as well, the cost of SSD storage capacity is now more than 20 times that of HDDs. A big focus of my discussions at the 2026 NAB show were about the shortage of digital storage and its impact on the industry.The upcoming Coughlin Associates report on digital storage for the professional media and entertainment market anticipates a 9.8% cumulative annual growth rate, CAGR, for digital storage revenue, reaching close to $25B by 2021, as shown below.Media and entertainment storage revenue estimates and projectionsCoughlin AssociatesAlthough the price of HDDs increased less than SSDs, they have still increased over 35% over the last year. HDDs are hard to get and this is prompting some media and entertainment customers to buy LTO magnetic tape and off-load less used content from their HDDs to their magnetic tape. The magnetic tape companies I saw at the show reported a significant uptake in interest in their products. So, the demand for storage capacity to support M&E workflows has flowed down the storage hierarchy and we should expect an increase in demand for magnetic tape capacity in 2026. In addition to lower storage costs than SSDs and HDDs, LTO tape library systems consume less energy since the magnetic tapes consume no energy until they are loaded into tape drives. Magnetic tape technology has a...