The BBC announced that it has begun to trial a new program download technology in 5,000 U.K. households that could pave the way to endless TV repeats -- The BBC said it hoped to deliver its interactive Media Player (iMP), or "iTunes for the broadcast industry", by year's end, allowing viewers to download any shows from the previous week. Once up and running, the service, currently in its second stage, will make around 190 hours of TV shows and 310 hours of radio programs available for legal downloading across the U.K., the BBC said. "iMP will allow our audience to access our TV and radio programs on their terms -- anytime, any place, any how," said Ashley Highfield, BBC director of new media and technology. "We'll see what programs appeal in this new world and how people search, sort, snack and savor our content in the broadband world." Increasing numbers of people are using the internet to access audio visual material, but Mr. Highfield has warned that take-up may stall without the necessary content to attract audiences.
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...