Impressive DBS Growth Offers Encouragement for Telcos Deploying Video -- According to Yankee Group estimates, "direct broadcast satellite (DBS) operators DIRECTV and EchoStar had a combined total of 24.8 million subscribers at the end of 2004, up from 21.6 million a year earlier. DIRECTV gained 1.7 million subscribers while EchoStar gained 1.4 million. Although population growth drove part of this growth, much of it has come at the expense of cable. In the same time frame, we estimate that cable operators lost between 600,000 and 800,000 subscribers. Although troubled cable companies Adelphia and Charter accounted for about half of those losses, others including Time Warner, Insight and Mediacom also lost a substantial number of subscribers."
The prevailing narrative around artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of relentless scale. Bigger models, bigger clusters, bigger budgets. The assumption, largely unchallenged until recently, was that raw parameter count translated directly into competitive advantage. New research from Omdia suggests it's time to retire that assumption. According to the latest market study by Omdia, parameter growth in frontier AI models has slowed to around 5 percent annually since 2021, a stark contrast to the more than hundredfold expansion seen between 2019 and 2021. Enterprise AI Market Development For executives who have been making infrastructure and investment decisions based on the assumption that AI would keep demanding ever-larger, ever-more-expensive hardware, this finding deserves serious attention. The race to the top of the model size leaderboard has, at least for now, plateaued. Crucially, Omdia's analysts are not reading this as an AI winter. Alexander Harrowell, senior pri...