General Electric sure shakes up our Twitter feed whenever they run their popular #DroneWeek campaigns. If the enthusiasm for #DroneWeek says anything, it’s that tech-savvy consumers are excited to see more of what drones can do. Many would love to get their hands on one, if they don’t own a drone already. And manufacturers are stepping up to meet that demand. The market now has drones of all shapes and sizes, with longer battery life, and capabilities that keep getting better for businesses and consumers alike.

Drone demand soars for commercial and hobby uses

According to analysts at Business Insider and KCBP, drone demand is soaring, with the highest area of growth in the commercial and consumer markets. The consumer drone market alone saw an estimated 167% year-on-year growth from 2013 to 2015.

Meeting these demands are the top players like DJI, Parrot, 3D Robotics, and Yuneec. Many new manufacturers are rushing to the scene, especially in China, with models that are great value for money. With reduced prices and wider availability, it’s no wonder that consumer interest in drones, and the desire to fly and own one, is on the rise!

Eyes in the sky

One thing’s clear – whether for business or for pleasure, a growing number of people want drones with built-in cameras. According to e-commerce experts at TeraPeak, consumers already had a solid interest in camera drones back in 2014: nearly 25 percent of drones sold on eBay came with built-in cameras. More recently in China, the International Data Center predicts the camera drone market will grow nearly 70 percent through 2019.

Better aerial video with Tuxera’s file system software

With the growing demand for aerial video, drones need lightning-fast software that can reliably write large, HD video files to the drone’s memory cards. When you spend hundreds – or even thousands – of dollars on a camera drone, you don’t want choppy, stuttering video. Choppy video is caused by a phenomenon called frame loss. When the drone’s memory card can’t capture all the information being delivered to it, information is lost. The lost information then results in a lost or “dropped” frame.

This is just one way our embedded file system software can truly make a difference for drone users. Tuxera exFAT and Tuxera FAT are already inside selected commercial and consumer drones, bringing high-performance support for SD memory cards that store the recorded video. Because our file system software writes data faster and more efficiently than other alternatives, it delivers outstanding performance for video recording – without frame loss.

Fueling the age-old dream of flight

As business and consumer demand for drones continues to grow, one thing’s for sure – more and more people want a bird’s-eye view of the world. Perhaps humankind’s millennia-old fascination with flight (think Icarus and Daedalus) is at least in part responsible for the growing desire to own a drone. For consumers especially, the applications for camera drones are truly up to the pilot’s imagination. And that’s why we’re truly geeked to have our filesystem software inside of drones, helping fuel your imaginations with the best-possible video performance.