For the past few years, consumers have been constantly reminded (in louder and louder voices) that cloud storage is a critical solution for content. Yet according to a report from the NPD Group, only 22 percent of consumers in the U.S. are even familiar with the term. Now we’re hearing about the personal cloud and research group Forrester predicts it will be a $12 billion dollar market by 2016. It begs the question: What does the personal cloud look like to consumers? Do they even know it exists or what it really provides? Seems like it’s going to be a new avenue to reach a myriad of consumers – both at the office and at home. Whoever defines it the best will be the winner in this space.

Put yourself in a consumer’s mindset. Why should they pay a premium price with a service provider to keep their content on the cloud when they can do it themselves for next to nothing? What consumers aren’t hearing is how their specific needs are being met or how their lives are improved.

As a cloud service provider, you should keep in mind the many different media strategies of consumers. In other words, different people have different media needs. What kind of personal cloud services will people really want? There are really many different possibilities. Some consumers may be perfectly willing to trust a provider to store and protect their music, but be reluctant to trust anyone with the most personal of photos and home videos (and not the pics they’re comfortable sharing on Facebook and Flickr).

Also, when it comes to storage, do consumers really want to spend money to store content on some other company’s server when they can store it for free at home? Sure, some might choose to spend that extra amount to back up their content. In fact, cloud storage is getting cheaper so more people who are comfortable with the option are saying ‘yes’ to putting all their content in the cloud.

When you think about it, the move to the personal cloud is a fundamental shift in the way consumers view the relationship with their content and how it’s experienced. In the past (and still today to a certain extent), we’ve had ownership of content in the form of CDs, DVDs, digital downloads, etc. But now, consumers don’t have to actually possess something to own it. In other words, access is now equating to ownership and the growing market for on-demand streaming media is proof of this behavioral change. Instead of actually possessing content, we’re renting streamed movies and video games, listening to streaming music through subscription services, and subscribing to a host of other media services.

Subscription services have been around about a decade, but it’s been a slow evolution to convey a strong enough value proposition for consumers. A service like Spotify is a great example of tapping into the power of the cloud. Just load the software, search for music, and it not only goes through its own databases looking for songs to play, but it also does a local search in your music library. So that means Spotify expands your personal music by accessing the cloud and making that content accessible to subscribers anywhere. This is another flavor of personal cloud service that consumers are embracing.

To get this right, cloud service providers must cater to a variety of consumers and their specific media strategies. It’s not an all or nothing thing – people want options tailored to their personal needs.

Content submitted by Gary Brotman, director of product marketing at Qualcomm Atheros.