Back when I covered storage networking a lot more closely, I learned to anticipate the industry's rhythms. If any one of EMC, HP, IBM, or NetApp introduced something, one of the other three would frequently contact me on the QT to let me know why their solution was still superior.The other seasonal rite I could count on was all the Apple storage news during the National Association of Broadcasters' tradeshow -- all that video content had to be edited and stored somewhere. I used to shrug off video as a little too niche-y, but these days I'm giving it a lot closer look.

Part of the reason is YouTube -- have you heard of it? Maybe you watched one of more than 3 billion videos downloaded from the site in January. That was only one-third of 9.8 billion videos downloaded in January, according to ComScore.

YouTube wants to improve that experience -- especially since January's numbers for downloaded videos lagged December (10.1 billion). A YouTube founder promised back in November that the site was testing high-definition content. Now apparently they've started adding HD content, albeit slowly.

The other video trend I want to call attention to is the surveillance piece. A couple startups written about here are tackling the issue of how to archive video surveillance, which can only be on the upswing in our post-9/11, all-we-have-love-is-fear-itself world.

It's easy to imagine this continuing to grow on a nice, constant arc. Lots of doors, gates, road intersections, highway entry/exit ramps, and airport spaces (for starters) where IT or others might want to dial back to a specific minute of an important day. I don't want to dwell here too much longer.

What's good for storage vendors will prove challenging for storage managers. Video promises to be the double-edged sword, but it's not like we don't see it coming -- it's clear as can be at 1080p resolution.