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.
As more organizations adapt to a hybrid working model for their distributed workforce, enterprise CIOs and CTOs are tasked with delivering new productivity-enabling applications, while also seeking ways to effectively reduce IT cost, complexity, and risk. Traditional IT hardware infrastructure is evolving to more software-based solutions. The worldwide software-defined infrastructure (SDI) combined software market reached $12.17 billion during 2020 -- that's an increase of 5 percent over 2019, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). The market grew faster than other core IT technologies. The three technology pillars within the SDI market are: software-defined compute (53 percent of market value), software-defined storage controller (36 percent), and software-defined networking (11 percent). "Software-defined infrastructure solutions have long been popular for companies looking to eliminate cost, complexity, and risk within their data cente