According to the latest research from the Strategy Analytics Connected Home service, technology providers are now overcoming many of the hurdles in the race to develop tomorrow's digital home, where consumers will be able to easily transfer their digital music and video files between the home PC, the home theater and portable media devices. Their report identifies one significant remaining obstacle: major content owners such as Disney, Fox and Warner are still not convinced that digital rights management (DRM) solutions are meeting their needs. Connected home proponents such as Intel, Sony and Philips must give high priority to solving DRM interoperability challenges if they are to maximize the revenue potential from this 144 million connected device market opportunity. According to the report, wider adoption of media-sharing devices will be delayed as long as content owners disagree between themselves on how they wish to benefit from DRM technologies. Technology providers, in turn, cannot develop a horizontal market for connected devices until major content providers have agreed on a common framework of DRM interoperability.
The global cloud computing market is undergoing new significant growth, driven by the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and the demand for flexible, scalable infrastructure. The recent market study by International Data Corporation (IDC) provides compelling evidence of this transformation, highlighting the accelerating growth in cloud infrastructure spending and the pivotal role of AI in shaping the industry's future trajectory. Shared Infrastructure Market Development The study reveals a 36.9 percent year-over-year worldwide increase in spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments in the first quarter of 2024, reaching $33 billion. This growth substantially outpaced non-cloud infrastructure spending, which saw a modest 5.7 percent increase to $13.9 billion during the same period. The surge in cloud infrastructure spending was partially fueled by an 11.4 percent growth in unit demand, influenced by higher average selling prices, primari