This paper focuses on recent trends and issues in the EU-25 countries related to one key broadband application area: digital media ‘content’ applications. It draws upon recently completed research addressing current and future uses and applications of broadband in the EU-25 area.
The paper presents key findings from the BEACON project concerning the broadband content trends and issues in the EU-25 countries. First, the paper briefly considers recent literature on broadband and digital media innovations as well as the policy context in Europe, which has an important influence on framing supports for innovation in content and digital media. Next, it addresses a number of key issues that impact upon the creation of content services. These include the high cost of content production and the difficulty of forming attractive business cases given the uncertainties related to user demand, and the IPR and copyright regimes. It will also consider users’ patterns of engagement with broadband content and emerging user applications. Next, the paper discusses whether broadband is reaching a ‘tipping point’, whereby broadband access is becoming the norm and in the next five years we will see the emergence of innovative, dynamic content services. The paper considers whether recent moves by three sets of significant actors (media corporations, the advertising sector, and EC regulators) could be early signs of a tipping point in favour of the creation of and more focused support for broadband content services. 相似文献
Amorphous computing differs from the classical ideas about computations almost in every aspect. The architecture of amorphous computers is random, since they consist of a plethora of identical computational units spread randomly over a given area. Within a limited radius the units can communicate wirelessly with their neighbors via a single-channel radio. We consider a model whose assumptions on the underlying computing and communication abilities are among the weakest possible: all computational units are finite state probabilistic automata working asynchronously, there is no broadcasting collision detection mechanism and no network addresses. We show that under reasonable probabilistic assumptions such amorphous computing systems can possess universal computing power with a high probability. The underlying theory makes use of properties of random graphs and that of probabilistic analysis of algorithms. To the best of our knowledge this is the first result showing the universality of such computing systems. This research was carried out within the institutional research plan AV0Z10300504 and partially supported by the GA ČR grant No. 1ET100300517 and GD201/05/H014. A preliminary, shorter version of this paper has been presented at the Third Conference on Computability in Europe, CiE 2007, Siena, Italy, June 2007 and published in the proceedings from this conference. 相似文献