Several years back, I remember attending a storage conference in San Jose. During an evening session, panelists and analysts presented a bullish outlook on the storage industry, predicated on factors like file storage, image storage, and the emerging world of digital video. I was pretty skeptical; at the time, QuickTime and some grainy MPEG files were the norm, but there wasn't much else.

A year or two later, TiVo and ReplayTV were introduced.

Now, imagine what a broadcaster has to deal with. At the Storage Visions conference that helped kick off CES, Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering for Turner Entertainment Grou, talked about the demands that digital video places on his own servers. It's so bad that that Tarasoff said the next step is holographic storage, a technology that has long been talked about, but not delivered.

Today, digital video simply sucks bandwidth. According to analyst Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates, a "2K" (2048x1556) HD film. At an average of 172,800 frames per film, that's 5 terabytes, uncompressed, for a single film. So-called 4K and 6K films that are being shot kick that up to 22 TB and 49 TB per film, respectively. Interestingly, Turner archives its content in full resolution, reformatting the content as needed for the PC and even mobile phones.

But here's some interesting data: according to Turner's own numbers, there are 113 million homes in the U.S. with televisions. Of those, just 15.5 million homes are HD capable. Of that, just 12.7 million homes actually receive an HD signal - that means just under 3 million homes are watching standard-def video on an HD digital television. The top five HD markets may also surprise you: Los Angeles (where the Hollywood film buffs live) is on top, with 1.15 million homes; followed by Washington D.C.; New York; Dallas/Fort Worth, and then San Francisco.

Fortunately (or not) a large number of what Turner shows are small files. At any one time, the broadcaster has 30,000 active commercials on its server, and 33,000 active promotions ("Saturday night, Jean-Claude Van Damme is kicking butt and taking names!"). Oddly enough, a substantial portion of Turner's commercial content is also short-form: almost 5,000 hours of cartoons lasting six minutes or so, as part of the broadcaster's Cartoon Network and Boomerang channels. That's actually more content than the 4,500 hours of archived video that Turner Classic Movies stores.

The problem is that the commercials and promotional bumpers actually require more work than archiving a copy of Gone with the Wind: once it's archived, it's archived. About 1,644 new pieces of content are archived per month, most of them movies, according to Tarasoff.

Although it built a football-field-sized digital storage facility in 2003, Turner was nearly out of space by the end of last year. Through a revamp, the broadcaster increased its capacity by 237 percent, to about 87 terabytes of local storage, 73 terabyte of Fibre-Channel connected disks, a couple hundred terabytes of DVD-RAM discs, and ofline data tape storage of about 8 terabytes.

In the future, Turner will move to holographic discs. "We're moving away from DVD-RAM and moving to holographic discs," Tarasoff said. "They have the capacity, and very fast throughput. Getting the content on and off the discs is very fast. But the key thing is the random [data] access."

Tarasoff also mentioned that they're working with Warner Bros. on a "Cinema HD" format, which would raise the storage requirements for a given movie 20 times what they currently are. It makes the hundred or so gigabytes of personal multimedia files consumers own somewhat trivial by comparison.