Both satellite companies grew their subscriber base by around 13 percent over the last year, but there are signs that the rate of growth may be slowing. EchoStar, the second-largest satellite broadcaster in the United States, added 225,000 subscribers to its Dish Network in the last quarter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 11.46 million. Rival DirecTV added the same number of new customers in the United States over the same period, taking its total subscriber base to 14.67 million. The company signed 964,000 subscribers in the quarter, but the number of net additions was down on the same period the previous year, due to slightly higher churn. EchoStar reported total revenue of $2.1 billion for the three months to the end of June, up 18 percent on the corresponding period the previous year, with a net income of $856 million, ten times more than for the same period the preceding year. DirecTV revenues for the same period were $3.18 billion, with a net income of $162 million, the first profit in two years, compared to a loss of $13.3 million a year ago.
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...