A new report from Pixitmedia by DataCore has revealed a surprising rebound in the popularity of on-prem archiving.
For the company’s inaugural State of Media Archiving report, Pixitmedia questioned 330 media and entertainment professionals to understand the preferences and perceptions of key decision-makers and influencers on their changing approaches to media archiving strategies.
The report revealed that a quarter of respondents (25 per cent) favour on-premises deployment, a figure expected to rise to 31 per cent among those planning to host media archiving workflows in-house over the next 12 months.
According to Leanne Tomlin, marketing director at Pixitmedia, this rebound could be driven by the three C’s: cost, control, and centralisation.
“As the cost of content acquisition continues to rise, having secure control over every asset is moving up the priority list for M&E companies,” she tells TVBEurope. “At the same time, remote production workflows are expanding. Creative and editorial teams may be off-site, but they rely on fast, centralised, in-house access to media archives. This makes high-performance on-prem infrastructure more attractive.
“Modern managed on-prem solutions have also addressed many of the legacy drawbacks such as high setup costs, ongoing maintenance, and limited remote access. As a result, organisations that operate continuous, studio-grade workflows are increasingly likely to choose on-prem for the short to medium term.”
The report also highlights the rise in a unified media approach to archiving, with 85 per cent of respondents stating they are planning to migrate to a horizontally integrated approach in the next 2-3 years, a figure that surprised Tomlin. “Prior to the survey, we had expected this figure to be ~45-50 per cent,” she explains.
“On top of that, adoption is even stronger in house of worship and sports franchises, surpassing the more traditional segments such as broadcasting and studios.”
Globally, less than 5 per cent of respondents said they expect 31 per cent or more of their libraries to be UHD/4K/8K, but this number will be almost double across the enterprise video segment. “Seeing enterprise sectors (e.g. education, government, consumer goods etc) outpace the historically content-heavy broadcast/film/OTT segment in next-generation formats was a particularly welcome surprise,” adds Tomlin.
AI-driven media archiving is rising as a priority across the media and entertainment industry, reveals the report, with up to 39 per cent of studios and 46 per cent of enterprises embedding AI/ML to enhance content operations. Almost half (45 per cent) of respondents cited operational productivity as the primary benefit of AI/ML integration in media archiving workflows, with metadata enrichment, automated search, and deduplication the most in-demand AI capabilities.
“The next leap will come when AI shifts from operational improvements to business-level outcomes, eg reducing content-acquisition costs or increasing the value extracted from each asset,” says Tomlin. “At present, only 15 per cent of digital service providers use AI-enabled archiving for business-value acceleration, compared with 61 per cent who use it for productivity. That balance will eventually flip as AI matures within archive intelligence layers.
Pixitmedia’s 2025 State of Media Archiving survey is available to download here.
