When it comes to video services, the children of Ma Bell have taken their hard knocks. A flood of ventures by telephone companies designed to compete against entrenched cable TV operators received much fanfare in the early 1990s, only to fizzle out as failures before the new millennium passed. But don't count them out just yet. As cable operators increasingly target their data and voice customers, the telephone companies are crawling back from defeat, reinvigorated by a perfect storm of network convergence, broadband technology and the good ol' IP infrastructure. Coming soon to a screen near you: IPTV. "It's one of the hot topics in telecommunications," said Steve West, director of product marketing for fixed solutions at Alcatel, a network infrastructure provider. "We've been actively pushing the space since 1999 or 2000. It is absolutely ready for market. "While traditional cable systems devote a slice of bandwidth for each channel and then cablecast them all out at once, IPTV uses a "switched video" architecture in which only the channel being watched at that moment is sent over the network, freeing up capacity for other features and more interactivity.
When enterprises begin treating AI budget as the line item they protect last when cutting elsewhere, the market has crossed a threshold that analysts rarely name explicitly. That is precisely where Europe now stands. A new forecast from IDC projects European AI spending will reach nearly $470 billion by 2030, expanding at a 35 percent CAGR over the next five years. European enterprises are allocating capital toward AI because the operational returns on cost efficiency, risk mitigation, and resilience are now demonstrable enough to justify sustained budget commitment. The strategic implication is significant: AI has moved from the innovation portfolio into core operational infrastructure. European AI Market Development Generative AI solutions, already embedded across enterprise deployments, are expected to account for more than 55 percent of the total market by the end of the forecast period. Software is both the largest technology segment, at 54.9 percent of total spending in 2026...