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Upside for U.S. Consumer Digital Video Storage

While streaming video from the cloud is gaining momentum, when it comes to consumers managing and storing their own home video libraries, downloading and viewing digital video on their PC is still the preferred method.

According to the latest market study by In-Stat, nearly 50 percent of U.S. broadband households report that they store their digital video home library on their desktop PC.

A full 30 percent use their notebook PCs. Smaller percentages store digital video on their gaming devices, portable media players, Flash devices, and mobile handsets.

"The digital entertainment industry is pushing U.S. consumers to shift to electronic sell-through (EST) and to build home video libraries." says Keith Nissen, Principal Analyst at In-Sat.

However, digital video usage models are now a mix of physical discs, free content, video on demand, streaming and rental models, in addition to outright purchases.

Nevertheless, downloading and storing video is a growing and important element in the overall mix. By 2015, collectively, U.S. broadband households will be storing over 4.5 million GBs of professional video content. That's a significant upside market opportunity for PC storage vendors.

This translates to approximately 65GBs of digital video stored, per household.

In-Stat's latest market study findings also include:

- Only 38 percent of broadband households back-up their video libraries.

- Only 10 percent of U.S. broadband households currently view locally stored video on multiple devices.

- Multiple copies of the same content will be stored on separate devices.

- Only TV programs and movies that will be viewed multiple times will be purchased.

- 64 percent of U.S. broadband households acquire, store, and view video content on the same device.

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