Driven by new technology, there are some big changes coming in entertainment, though by all accounts, the massive exhibition at this year's National Association of Broadcasters Show was nevertheless quieter in comparison with recent years. One booth that attracted many from the Hollywood crowd was that of Sony, where delegates -- whether that be tech leaders or cinematographers -- took a keen interest in the images produced by Sony's Crystal LED video wall, which was featured in the center of the booth in an 8K x 4K (and 32 ft. Sony, as well as Samsung, have both proposed their LED panels, offering modular configurations, as a replacement to cinema projection. It's a radical concept when one considers that cinema projection has been around since the birth of the artform. Meanwhile there are still plenty of issues to address, from how to handle sound to the cost.

Driven by new technology, there are some big changes coming in entertainment, though by all accounts, the massive exhibition at this year's National Association of Broadcasters Show was nevertheless quieter in comparison with recent years. One booth that attracted many from the Hollywood crowd was that of Sony, where delegates -- whether that be tech leaders or cinematographers -- took a keen interest in the images produced by Sony's Crystal LED video wall, which was featured in the center of the booth in an 8K x 4K (and 32 ft. Sony, as well as Samsung, have both proposed their LED panels, offering modular configurations, as a replacement to cinema projection. It's a radical concept when one considers that cinema projection has been around since the birth of the artform. Meanwhile there are still plenty of issues to address, from how to handle sound to the cost.

We are all – whether we are aware of it, or not – given customer experiences based on AI in our day to day consumption of digital goods – whether it's Shopping on Amazon, or what we're watching on BBC iPlayer (iPlayer are going to enforce sign in before you can watch on demand, partly in order to serve us more relevant content). We're so used to it in some contexts, those seamless personalised experiences, that we take it for granted and hence underplay the significance. The adoption of AI in the B2B world is much lower – but can be equally powerful. According to a recent article, only 10% of B2B companies are using AI in their marketing. Furthermore, that percentage is predicted to increase to 80% in the next 3 years.

It's said that there was a time when a well-educated individual could be an authority on all the most important areas of science, art and culture. Although that period, if it ever existed, is long passed, you can sometimes believe it's possible to re-enter it by listening, almost indiscriminately, to Radio 4. Did you know, for example, that the word "robot" comes from an old Slavonic word for slave or actually, more accurately, "forced labour"? That was one of the memorable facts recounted by Adam Rutherford in The Rise of the Robots. It was the Czech playwright Karel Čapek who introduced its modern meaning nearly 100 years ago in his play RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots). But as Rutherford noted, these "immigrants from the future" have been haunting the human imagination for much longer than that.

According to BBC boss Tony Hall, the iPlayer needs to be reinvented with new technology such as voice recognition and artificial intelligence to stay ahead of "rapid growth by our competitors". He didn't name them, but those competitors are Netflix and Amazon which have in a relatively short space of time, elbowed their way into the TV market. From Stranger Things and The Crown on Netflix to The Grand Tour and Transparent on Amazon Prime, online only shows have become core components of what we watch. But while both Netflix and Amazon have invested heavily in content, it was the quality and simplicity of their technology that provided the foundation of their success. The iPlayer may have led the online TV revolution, but it has since fallen behind in features and usability. Hall is obviously aware of this, but for all his ambition, there are a host of reasons why the BBC will find it difficult, if not impossible, to make the iPlayer as good.