Western Digital Announces WD Photos™

Western Digital announced WD Photos™ (photo), the newest release of its photo viewer app, which is now optimized for iPad™ and iPhone®4. Available as a free download from iTunes®, the WD Photos app provides remote access to photos stored on a WD network hard drive including My Book® World Edition™, My Book Live™ and WD ShareSpace™. The images are displayed in native iPad and iPhone resolution, and users can access up to 285,000 of their favorite photos anywhere they can access the Internet by simply copying their pictures into the "Shared Pictures" folder on their WD network hard drive. The WD Photos photo viewer app offers a variety of new features that allow users to stay connected to more of their digital photos, including:

• Pinch and zoom functionality so consumers can digitally zoom in on the displayed photo;
• Horizontal split view for iPad;
• Option to instantly post photos from the WD Photos app to users' Facebook® wall;
• New slideshow transitions including pan and zoom, page curl, and cube;
• Increased 5 GB capacity to support iPad's larger memory and higher resolution;
• iPad full screen support at 1024x768; and,
• iPhone HD/OS 3 & 4 support.

WD Photos photo viewer app, optimized for iPad and other leading Apple® mobile devices, fulfills the growing demand to view, store, and consolidate photos on the go. Although digital photo viewing is not new, our Consumer Storage Opportunities report found that, 68 percent of broadband households viewed digital photos at least monthly in 2009, compared to 59 percent in 2006.

Revenues from Network-Attached Storage to Exceed $4.4 Billion in 2014

DVRs and video downloads will push the storage needs of U.S. broadband households to almost one terabyte by 2014, creating a parallel rise in the market for file backup and storage solutions, according to international research firm Parks Associates.

Parks Associates’s new report Consumer Storage Opportunities finds almost 50% of households are performing regular backups, including external storage, flash drives, and online backup, up from only 35% in 2006.

This is a classic example where growth in one area is spurring another industry. As people accumulate more digital content, the prospect of losing that data becomes more ominous. Companies marketing network-attached storage (NAS) and home server devices should target high-use consumers such as videophiles and music enthusiasts and demonstrate the ease with which these products protect against loss of critical data.

The majority of consumers still use less-reliable media such as CDs, DVDs, and flash drives, but in the past four years, portable hard drives and direct- and networked-attached storage have become more popular. This trend will accelerate, fueled by growth in digital media and dropping storage costs. In particular, product revenues from NAS devices will nearly quadruple between 2010 and 2014.

Storage Visions Announces Agenda

Parks Associates is supporting the Storage Visions event again this year. For information on research on storage, please check out our new report: Home Servers and Consumer Storage: Analysis and Forecasts

Storage Visions is the two days before the International CES at the Flamingo Hotel. Storage Visions is where you can find out about the technologies that will lead to economic recovery. Storage Visions has speakers from leaders and analysts in the industry including Keynote Talks by experts from Universal NBC, Samsung, Panasonic and Warner Bros.

Agenda: http://www.StorageVisions.com/2009Register.htm.

Netbooks and Net(work-hosted) Storage

Network-hosted storage began as an alternative for purchasing another hard drive. Companies such as eSnips and Box.net are moving it from a strictly backup and storage solution to a way to share and use files. Box.net even lets the user post stored pictures to sites like Facebook, edit pictures through sites like Picnik, and work with documents in applications like Zoho. Now through collaborations with ShoZu and Cortado, files can be shared, uploaded, downloaded, or simply accessed by mobile phones. Need a bigger screen? The new Dell Inspirion Mini 9 comes with 2GB of Box.net storage, making the case of the netbook stronger.

Digital Media Changes Our Storage Cabinets

Prior to the abundance of digital cameras, mounds of pictures and negatives filled shoe boxes and plastic containers around the house. Prior to MP3 players, stacks of cassettes and CDs lined shelves. Prior to movie downloads, shelves of VHS tapes and DVDs surrounded the entertainment center. Though the previous formats still exist, households are moving away from the physical copies of their media and to digital versions. With this migration toward digital, shelving units are being replaced with larger hard drives.

Today, we estimate that the average broadband household has about 226GB of digital photos, music, and video stored on the various devices in the house. This includes all of the music ripped from the CD collection and those hours of television and movies stored on DVRs. We predict that this collection of digital media will increase to nearly 900GB by 2012, driven in large part by video downloads, managed copies of Blu-ray discs, and increasing use of DVR recording capabilities.

Protection of the physical copies typically meant that the negatives for the most cherished family photos were kept in a safety deposit box and additional copies of albums were made “just-in-case.” However, that too is changing. Our research, detailed in Home Servers and Consumer Storage, found that though respondents from 40% of broadband households show an interest in protecting their data and digital media by backing them up to another storage solution, only a small percentage of consumers are actually doing this consistently. Most frequently they are encouraged to get in the habit of backing up after losing important files. Those that are backing up their files, tend to still be doing so on optical media such as CDs which does not provide the same quality of backup as an external hard drive provides. Can you imagine our stacks of CDs or DVDs storing almost a terabyte of media? Consumers need to realize that their ability to keep their digital media in the current form indefinitely is tenuous and that they need to move toward solutions more suited to the use and safekeeping of these files.

Network-Attached Storage Should Feature File Allocation, Searching, and Media Sharing in addition to Increased Capacity

Sales of NAS devices to reach 13 million by 2012

The rapid growth in digital content libraries will push worldwide sales of network-attached storage devices to nearly 13 million units by 2012, according to Parks Associates’ Home Servers and Consumer Storage: Analysis and Forecasts.

In targeting this broader market, companies should develop storage solutions that emphasize easier file allocation, searching, and media sharing, Shields said. Manufacturers and retailers must carefully select the features to market. Messages that emphasize content sharing have as much resonance with this new audience as do those that stress backup. Intuitive user interfaces and installation processes, allowing easy backup, file sharing, and new device connectivity, will help consumers discover these and other features and grow accustomed to networked storage. In this way, NAS devices will expand their role in the home into media servers.

Home Servers and Consumer Storage: Analysis and Forecasts defines several categories of consumer storage solutions – from online/network-hosted services to network-attached storage and home servers. It provides primary consumer research about recent and planned storage uses and purchases and includes worldwide forecasts for network-attached storage devices.

For the full press release, please visit: http://newsroom.parksassociates.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=5089