Telcos look to capitalize on the AI Revolution

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‘In the new era, thought itself will be transmitted by radio’ prophesied inventor Guglielmo Marconi and it seems telcos allied with Big Tech are nearing that promise.

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It’s been three years since ChatGPT opened people’s eyes to the potential of AI yet many telcos and their enterprise customers have struggled with how to get a return on investment. The dial is now switching from proof of concept to deployments at scale, according to executives at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“AI has passed the experimentation phase and now is the time for industrialization,” declared Elena Gil Lizasoain, Director of Telefonica’s AI & Data Business Unit. “That said, it is easier to do pilots than to embed AI in real world operations. You need to combine LLMs with your own data which is a process of change management, of training employees how to work with new tech and of navigating ethical and privacy issues.”

KPMG’s Mark Gibson, a partner in its TMT division, shared that contrary to popular belief, 76% of global CEOs believe AI will not reduce headcount and that the overwhelming majority (92%) expect headcount to grow with upskilling and redeployment.

“89% of the highest performing organisations say their business is using AI to fill skill gaps among knowledge workers,” he said.

Results from the survey found 72% of business leaders confident about the economic outlook that will come from digitization and connectivity and that two thirds said they would continue to invest in AI regardless of economic conditions.

The biggest impact of AI at this stage will be in automating operations, both within customer service including marketing and sales, and in the network.

“There are still big questions about how reliable the technology is and how we deploy it in ways that drive actual business value,” noted Lori Driscoll, PwC, Global TMT Consulting Leader.

Mitchell Gunnels, AVP Technology at AT&T explained that AI is transforming his company to be digitally efficient.  “We started with AI primitives - basic things like copyright protections, a rock solid AI policy and abuse monitoring built into the platform. Once we’d laid that foundation we could run applications on the platform.”

The telco has trained its AI on 20 years of legacy code to bring new software delivery requests forward from weeks to just 15-30 minutes.

“Beyond our internal IT we are now looking at external revenue generation,” Gunnels said. “This area is exploding within AT&T.

“In order to get GenAI to do tasks for you, you need to understand how to work with a co-intelligence,” he advised. “That’s something we will all have to do.  Don’t think about a standard chatbot GUI. You need to embed AI in your workflows and your networks.”

Enter the Agents

On the customer service side, a quick win for telcos is to introduce AI-powered agents.  So called Agentic AI are persona-based agents that operate with a high degree of autonomy.

“It is hard to understate the importance that this is the year of agents,” said Calum Chace, CMO, Conscium. 

In one sense agents have been around for a while. Alexa is part of the furniture for many households, albeit one that is extremely simple, Chace said. “It can’t reason a series of activities and carry them out without human intervention. We can now create agents that do that. Everyone concerned about AI safety is saying let’s not develop AI agents because once out in the world we cannot control them. But it’s too late. The horse is half way out of the stable.”

He said his company which he described as a “conscious AI research organisation” can verify that agents “will do what want them to do and will not go rogue.”

On the Agentic front, Chinese consumer electronics brand Honor said it was investing U$D10 billion on transitioning into an “AI-first device ecosystem company”, away from solely building smartphone hardware. Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone have partnered with Honor in the shift. With Google Cloud and Qualcomm Honor will launch “an intelligent smartphone” later this year which will feature a personal AI agent capable of managing schedules, making reservations, and optimising daily tasks using contextual awareness and adapting to user behaviour.

Autonomous AI are “clearly the future” in the burgeoning space industry, said Kimberly Washington, Co-Founder & CEO at Deep Space Biology whose clients include NASA, but more was needed from a regulatory perspective. “The space sector needs to establish a governance system but we are not quite sure who owns the moon nor the planets beyond it,” she said.

Everything connected

In a conference session asking ‘Are Telcos Prepared for 35 Billion Devices by 2030?’ the consensus was that this figure was too low.

“There are already more people with mobile devices (8 billion) than with toothbrushes in the world today,” said Mikael Bäck of Ericsson.

Noting that at two decades ago no-one in the telco industry saw much business in everyone owning a smartphone, Ray Dolan, CEO of Cohere Technologies said, “The number of business models that have collapsed because of failing to bet on what we now take for granted means that we should be open to disruption. But for innovation to scale there needs to be a common control plane with a diversified user plane on top.”

One application riding a wave of mobile connectivity is expected to be esports. According to Dario Betti, CEO of trade body Mobile Ecosystem Forum, “Mobile gaming, already a dominant segment of the gaming market, is increasingly becoming a cornerstone of the esports ecosystem.

“YouTube, Twitch, Huya and Trovo will continue to host massive audiences for esports events, with mobile players and creators playing a central role. This may drive demand for smartphones with superior cameras, high-quality microphones, and robust editing software, as aspiring esports players and streamers look to produce professional-grade content.”

Wearing a pair of Orion AR glasses Meta’s Rafael Camargo, VP, Wearables Systems, Reality Lab, said that his company is on a mission to merge the physical and digital world.

“Today our digital screens are isolated from the rest of world. Yet our digital life is as important as our physical life. In Reality Labs we work on how to merge them in ways that are familiar.”

An example: A realtime conversation between people who speak and understand differently languages could be enabled by Meta’s AR headgear. Another example: Conversations between two people in a crowded noisy ambient environment could be enhanced to enable the two to chat without raising their voices.

“The next question is how we develop social norms that ensure you have agency and control. As we get more sensors in glasses it will give you super powers close to your senses, your eyes and ears but society will need standards around this. Should we, for example, enable facial recognition? We could, but we don’t today. It will be a process of social norms and etiquette about how to use the tech. That is a moving path and will take a little while to establish.”

Going Quantum

Quantum computing will take AI to the next level but there is some way to go yet. Nokia’s Mikael Rylander explained, “We are evolving a new platform for digitisation in the world – which will be a mix of compute for AI and traditional compute and communication. We need to be at the Edge and also have central compute capability for rapid inferencing.

When we start to get the first Quantum compute online we will plug that into this digital platform. we call Network Cloud Continuum.

Rylander caveated, “We must also realise that Quantum compute right now is very error prone. A lot of work is going in to handle error correction and get the qubits much more stable. Right now, Quantum can do very advanced compute on very little data which is contrary to where we are with AI.”

With 6G capabilities set to be released in 2028 we are moving into a future where AI is intrinsic to network infrastructure. “AI will be an integral component of network orchestration and management, signal processing and network optimization, structurally changing how we think about and design our communications systems,” said Andreas Roessler of Rohde & Schwarz.

In other words, there will be a shift from AI as a performance enhancement to AI as a key technology component: from AI-assisted to AI-native.

 

MWC2025: EU must standalone in network-AI war

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Europe’s governments and regulators were hammered by their own telcos and Washington representatives for being anti-competitive as innovation struggled to be heard above the noise

Don’t mention the war. Executives at the telecom’s industry’s annual jamboree

Mobile World Congress mostly avoided direct mention of the geo-political split between Europe and the U.S but pressure to bulk up the EU’s capability in mobile internet connectivity and AI smarts was keenly felt.

Although the stakes are now raised, European telco leaders claimed member states had slipped behind the US and Asia in building out high speed broadband networks with knock-on consequences for local economies. The blame is placed squarely on the EU’s fragmented market, oppressive (compared to the U.S) regulatory climate and having to shoulder the cost of trafficking OTT video on network infrastructure it continues to pay  for with little reward in return.

“Twenty-five years ago the European telco industry was the greatest champion of technology change leading standards that sharply changed our way of communication,” lamented Telefonica president and CEO Marc Murtra in a keynote. “We are now in a new era where titanic tech companies are driving change.”

He laid out the charge sheet. “These giants work as dominant players in monopoly markets. They are able to invest huge amounts of capital to develop and dive deep into disruptive technology. All these companies are based in the USA and in China.”

Murtra went on to call out the “excessive regulation, fragmentation and insufficient industry returns” that have weighed European telcos down.

“We are falling behind. This has not happened in the USA, the Middle East or Asia.” He urged a relaxing of regulation so that large European telcos could consolidate in order to build scale.

“If this does not happen the EU’s position in the world will dwindle and we will not have the capacity to decide its future autonomously,” he warned.

While less strident, Mats Granryd, who speaks on behalf of mobile industry trade body (and MWC show organiser) GSMA, said, “Research shows that our industry funds 85% of the infrastructure that drives mobile internet connectivity. Our networks are the foundation of digital economies but our revenue is not growing accordingly. It is not sustainable. Something has to change. Either we stop investing in mobile capex or revenue must increase.”

According to GSMA figures there are more than 2 billion 5G devices connected worldwide “the fastest take up of any generation of mobile” and over 300 5G networks yet only 60% of them have implemented 5G Advanced. If the rest were to roll that out it would enable enterprises to add a further $4.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, Granryd said.

“I know it is easier said than done. Getting ROI is the challenge.”

European telcos challenge regulators

Complaints about the unfair amount of investment that telcos have made for what they consider to be the backbone of all future economic growth are not new but there was an air of exasperation in the pleading for change.

“We have an extremely low growth industry of just 2% on average yet the demand on us in terms of buying more spectrum, taxes and levies is huge,” claimed Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder & Chairman of Indian telco provider Bharti Enterprises that operates in Africa, Asia and Europe. “We shoulder the burden of building out infrastructure, subsea cables and data centres yet the return on capital is 4% on average. We might as well bank the money and go play some golf!”

He wanted governments to lower taxes and offer more affordable spectrum licences.

“You lavish praises on this industry yet for some reason it is heavily taxed,” he said.

Mittal also blamed European regulators for its “restrictive” competition laws and shared stats showing that most countries in Africa had two dominant mobile operators while China and the U.S. have three a piece.

“Europe does not need to have 4-5 operators in each country or 100+ across EU member states. It restricts the potential for scale and investment making it pointless building large infrastructure today,” Mittal said.  “This industry cannot have multiple players. How many duplicate towers and other infrastructure do we need? Yes, competition is an article of faith but we need to allow for more consolidation.”

Executives lined up to beat the same drum. “When we had the first mobility wave we created a lot of value for the industry but not much for ourselves,” opined Usman Javaid, Chief Products and Marketing Officer for Orange. “We missed the opportunity with the cloud wave too. Let’s not miss the opportunities for AI. We need to have an eye on the new revenue.”

Single market for EU telcos

Vodafone CEO Margherita Della Valle said, “In the global race to 5G it is fair to say Europe is not winning.” In fact, Europe is not just falling behind the U.S or China, she said, “We are falling behind an increasing number of small- and middle-income countries.”

Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Hoettges at least acknowledged that it sounded like groundhog day. “We are repeating the same story,” he said. “There is no reason every market has to operate with three or four operators, we should build a European single market.”

With this he was repeating the EU’s own proposal published in September that encouraged the EU to adopt harmonised rules regarding spectrum allocation, cybersecurity and consolidation at the EU rather than member state level.

Author Mario Draghi had also bought into play the idea of fair contribution – charging content and application providers to use the networks that carry their data.

“If we cannot increase consumer prices, if we cannot charge the OTT, players we have to get efficiencies out of the scale we created,” said Hoettges.

AI to the rescue

Moaning aside, what leading telcos had in common was a hope that they can AI their way out of the problem.

A recent GSMA survey found more than half of global operators are allocating between 10% to 25% of their digital budgets towards AI, covering everything from data systems and LLMs to customer service and network ops. The biggest impact of AI at this stage will be in automating operations, both within customer service including marketing and sales and in the network.

“AI-driven personalisation will deliver tailored content, services, and advertising with unparalleled precision,” said Dario Betti, CEO of trade body Mobile Ecosystem Forum. He warned that heightened scrutiny over data privacy and intellectual property will follow. “As AI becomes increasingly integrated, ethical considerations and the need for transparency in algorithms will remain pressing challenges.”

Consumers can look forward to deeper more intelligent interaction with AI-driven agents, like Alexa but on steroids.

“It is hard to understate the importance that this is the year of agents,” declared Calum Chace, co-founder of Conscium which is researching artificial consciousness. “Everyone concerned about AI safety is saying let’s not develop AI agents because once out in the world we cannot control them. But it’s too late. The horse is half way out of the stable.”

Wearables like Meta smart glasses which rely on 5G and 6G mobile networks will merge physical and digital closer together. “The world will be a lot more digital at the same time as it will feel more human,” forecast Mikael Rylander, Tech Leader at Nokia. “AI will remember you. It will know what makes you happy and what you need. We will see a lot of new services which are much more tailored to our personalities.”

He added that rollout of such AI capabilities will require consumer trust. “Suddenly you will have a companion with you that sees what you do, what your family and friends do so you need to trust the company that has that data.”

With 6G capabilities set to be released in 2028 we are moving into a future where AI is intrinsic to network infrastructure. Unlike in 5G, where AI and ML are applied in specific use cases, AI will be fundamental to the 6G network. In other words, there will be a shift from AI as a performance enhancement to AI as a key technology component: from AI-assisted to AI-native,” said Andreas Roessler of Rohde & Schwarz making one of the show’s surprisingly few interventions around 6G.

Europe’s telcos may be feeling the pressure but there was a similar theme at Telstra, the giant Australian based network, whose CEO Vicki Brady, claimed that value from investments in 3G and 4G “went to others because the telco industry didn’t change its commercial models.”

She said, “This time we are thinking about our network as a commercial product and challenging ourselves to think differently about how we price it and how we go to market.”

She was optimistic that this approach, using AI, would be different. “The last time we faced an inflection point like this was in 2000 when the mobile internet first appeared. The next revolution in connectivity is here now so we’ve got to make a step change. There is no version of the future that does not rely on technology and it all needs to be connected.”

EU regulators under pressure from the U.S

But there is a rift here too opening between Big Tech in the U.S and the European market. With the EU’s AI Act and the European Commission’s Digital Services Act (DSA) now in force the chair of the Federal Communications Commission which governs communications policy in the U.S was in Barcelona to read the riot act.

“For U.S technology companies that do business here, the censorship that is potentially coming down the pipe from the DSA is something that is incompatible with both our free speech tradition in America and the commitments that these technology companies have made through diversity of opinions,” said Brendan Carr, a Trump administration appointee.

Responding to the notion that the AI regulation hinders innovation Don McGuire, SVP/CMO, Qualcomm was unequivocal. “The idea that the advanced AI industry would have no regulation is frankly crazy even if that appears to be the view of the current US administration. Aviation, pharmaceuticals, finance all have power to harm consumers and are regulated. Advanced AI is very powerful and can harm people so it has to be regulated.”

He continued, “The idea that a bunch of people in Silicon Valley are creating enormous powerful systems which rules our lives and we all just carry on and watch regardless is also for the birds.

“The EU has adopted the right risk-based approach. That is, there are certain types of AI that won’t harm anybody [so regulators shouldn’t interfere], there’s a middle level where AI developers have to show due diligence before release, and the highest level which are the AI’s we don’t necessarily want.”

On this list he put public facial recognition systems. “I don’t think we should ban all facial recognition but you have to start somewhere. It is lamentable that Europe is leading the world in regulation but is not part of the industry actually developing AI. AI should not be a duopoly between the US and China.”

Openly acknowledging the elephant in the conference, Gregory Allen, Director at the Washington-based thinktank Center for Strategic and International Studies said, “For better and for worse Donald Trump is a wake-up call on the reality of European freeriding. Trump likens himself as the ultimate deal maker but there's no deal [Trump’s] going to make with Europe where Europe agrees that Europe is the enemy. That's just not going to work for them. Europe cannot be the enemy in a future in which the United States and Europe cooperate effectively. Somehow, we have to come back from that brink.”

 

Juno Innovations is about to bring VFX at scale closer to home

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The dream of every VFX facility is to be able to run dynamic and cost-effective pipelines tailored to each project. In theory, cloud offers the most flexible infrastructure to do this but with legacy hardware and legions of artists tied to workstations it is proving harder in practice to make the shift. A U.S startup is on the verge of launching a VFX studio as a service which answers many of these problems.

“Everybody says cloud is expensive and painful but the reality is that cloud is not the problem. It's a design issue,” says Alex Hatfield, CEO Juno Innovations and Juno FX. “If you design it right then cloud is insanely effective.”

He and six colleagues have spent three years developing a platform that can be run on-prem or in the cloud offering almost instant access to workstations for freelance VFX artists located anywhere.

“We could theoretically out scale any studio in the world if we wanted to,” Hatfield claims. “And at a fraction of the cost of traditional workstations.”

It is running trials with several major studios. The innovation that has caught their attention is the ability to ‘slice’ GPUs to allow multiple artists to work on the same machine at the same time. 

Modern GPUs play a pivotal role in AI and ML by handling parallel computations and processing large datasets rapidly.  Juno has found a way to adapt the concept to VFX pipelines so that the same GPU is shared among different workloads.

Hatfield explains, “With the AI boom the major developers were horizontally scaling out to train their models. While they have huge budgets they're also trying to squeeze as much as they can out of every single server. The margins are nowhere near as good in visual effects, but we're trying to squeeze as much out of each render node as we possibly can, so every single dollar you spend is actually being used.”

There's an environmental benefit too. “Because you're squeezing more performance out of the servers you don't need to power nearly as many. You don't need as much hardware because you get more out of it. The slicing is what enables density and density enables the ability to scale. Slicing becomes more and more valuable as your team becomes more active.”

All of this is orchestrated in Kubernetes, the open source system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management, and hosted in AWS (although any cloud provider could be used).

“The idea is that if a large scale studio decides to come and use us they can then use the render operator to essentially go through and launch render nodes dynamically and slice their servers to get more utilisation out of the servers that they have, whether on-prem or in the cloud.”

Origins story

Hatfield started in the industry as a gaffer in LA before joining Digital Domain in Florida as stereoscopic compositor then VFX compositor. After leaving DD, he worked at a number of studios on the East Coast which is where his vision for developing a way for an artist to work securely from home was born.

“I'm originally from South Florida and I found myself travelling up to Boston or New York City for work, staying there for six months compositing on commercials, renting a supercheap apartment, and coming home to stay with my parents in Florida for half a year so I could wakeboard.  I did that for three years straight. I wanted a way that I could avoid extensive travel, enjoy the outdoors life and still do what I love which is to work on movies.”

Right from the start of his career Hatfield had been both artist and technician, learning scripting languages like Python on his own initiative, so he could expand and enhance on existing pipelines. 

“I was trying to figure out how I can use the cloud so that myself and fellow artists can do great work from home.”

An earlier attempt to found his own cloud-based studio in 2013 didn’t work out. “It was clunky, like a glorified Dropbox and we didn’t have the security that studios required.”

While working at Cinesite including on projects including Spider Man: No Way Home he started learning Kubernetes and began to wonder if he could containerise workstations in the cloud. This involves building self-sufficient software packages that perform consistently, regardless of the machines they run on. 

“Some of my friends said this was impossible. But I was at least going to try.”

Further clues came from observing the way large banks had set up IT systems to handle masses of simultaneous transactions. “I realised that 90% of the infrastructure had already been solved over the past 10 years by other industries. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just need to go look for inspiration elsewhere.

“For instance, when a massive influx of transactions hits a bank server and the bank is running on Kubernetes, Kubernetes can react to that and issue more servers to be able to handle the workload. Then when its finished it will automatically scale back down.

“Our idea was to create a system with the exact same mentality, but one that is able to handle a massive amount of render tasks. Once done, we delete the render nodes out from underneath it. If you looked at our infrastructure, we look nothing like a VFX studio. We look way more like a financial institution.”

When the VFX industry was hit by redundancies as a result of the pandemic, Hatfield and his colleagues resolved to go for the final push.

“Could we build tools and applications to make working in our industry easier and enjoyable for both studios and artists? Why can't we just sacrifice the infrastructure instead of the people?”

They prototyped the technology using inexpensive Raspberry Pi boards, a miniature PC and an old game server. “I thought, I’m never gonna be able to pay for a cloud provider’s bill so what I have to do is build everything locally and then hopefully if we get a project we'll push it up to AWS and see if it works.”

They trialled the home-built server on student film projects managing to run three compositors working off the same stack. “It was far from perfect but we proved that it worked and at that point I reached out to AWS to talk about what we were doing.”

With ECR (Amazon Elastic Container Registry) every component is containerised allowing rapid replication to any region in the world. They use EFS (Amazon Elastic File System) for storage along with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). Juno is also able to rely on Amazon’s security.

“When you bring in Kubernetes the actual infrastructure is so abstracted that you're basically describing concepts,” he says.  “That means we can deploy anywhere, scale to as many workstations as needed and operate with extreme efficiency. We literally sync the media back and forth which eliminates a lot of the ingest and download issues.

“We wanted to do really cool work and we also felt like if we can build it in such a way where we could scale down just as fast as we could scale up. That means that we could technically compete and even lead the rest of the industry in a new way of working, to be able to actually work remotely and access talent anywhere in the world.”

Prepping to launch

In theory, Juno FX could take on projects of huge scale and work with artists located anywhere in the world. In practice, the startup is taking things step by step.

“We could go out and compete for the biggest VFX projects if we wanted to but we’re not really targeting that right now. We want to grow in a very controlled manner.”

All development to date has been done by the colleagues in their free time. “We're trying to get enough funding to be able to hire more full time developers early 2025. We are actively doing PoC deployments for on-prem density on rack. When they finish in the spring we'll be able to start supporting bigger accounts. Plus, we're starting to invest a lot of our effort into getting business from other industries [including medical research, AutoCAD and architectural visualisation].

“It’s so hard to get through building a startup to the point where you finally see a workstation turn on, you deliver a frame and you get that first pay check but every second has been worth it. This has been our passion. All my colleagues came to my wedding, so they are literally like family to me. And as a side effect, because we believed in it so much, we literally built what we think is the future of visual effects.”

European telcos cry foul over OTT traffic - again

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Telcos have been crying that they are being treated unfairly by Big Tech for at least a decade and the record seems to have stuck. MWC in Barcelona provided another chance for European operators to vent their frustration and this time they are armed with the provisional backing of the European Union.

“Most of the telco providers are exhausted,” said Bocar Ba, CEO of the Samena Council at the rhetorically titled ‘Is It Time for Big Tech to Pay Their Fair Share?’ conference session. “If nothing is done soon, they could face the same problem for another decade.”

Because European telcos are required to invest in covering rural populations of each member state with high speed broadband “the digital divide is actually widening in Europe” because at the same time their revenues are declining.

Last February the EU drew up a lengthy to-do list in a white paper for the next EU Commission, hoping to make the bloc more competitive on the global telecoms stage.

This was followed in September by a report on the EU’s competitiveness that effectively argued for a single telecoms market. It encouraged the EU to adopt harmonised rules regarding spectrum allocation, cybersecurity and consolidation at the EU rather than member state level.

Author Mario Draghi had also bought into play the idea of fair contribution – charging content and application providers to use the networks that carry their data.

Referencing the two documents, Laura Ballarin Cereza of the European Parliament said that if 2024 was a year of assessment then “2025 should be a year of action.”

Data traffic is skyrocketing at 35% a year while the market cap of telcos declined 31% in the last decade, she said.

She claimed that just six companies generate 60% of global internet traffic. “This is a huge imbalance in relation to the contribution of infrastructure costs. Euro200 billion is needed to meet the digital target of coverage across Europe. A more balanced ecosystem is needed.”

Telco execs at the event repeatedly warned that investment required to sustain the network infrastructure is outpacing the funding model. It would take U$D450 billion to bridge the digital divide between those connected to mobile services and those who are not worldwide, with the bill for Africa alone estimated at U$D108bn.

“Telcos are investing billions every year in networks, fibre expansion and spectrum licencing,” said Ba.  “Yet their revenue is stagnating, the revenue per user is declining amd the cost of 5G Advanced rollout is increasing.

“Meanwhile Big Tech cloud providers and content aggregator are thriving from internet connectivity without directly contributing to internet costs. It is a question of sustainability and fairness,” he said.

Shahid Ahmed, NTT Data, EVP New Ventures and Innovation was pessimistic that Big Tech could be forced to pay mainly because Netflix, Amazon, Google and others would simply pass on increases to their customers.

“I don’t think putting a tax burden on OTT companies will be adopted by them,” said Ahmed, who also advises the FCC. “If we do, I think it will negatively impact the consumer, whether through increases in price or a lowering of content quality,” he suggested.

He favoured working with two principals in the EU proposals. One was to judge the competitiveness of a market based on innovation, product and services, not on price alone.

“The second is to open up the regulatory framework so companies can merge and partner to offer better services at a more economic price, one that allows them to do more investment and coverage. To me those are the two tenants that will allow the telcos to continue more capital expansion and provide better services to consumers.”

He noted that in the US, the FCC had for years incorporated a Universal Service Fund onto customer telco bills which was ringfenced to expand the broadband network into rural areas of the States.

Likewise, the EU is trying to balance the needs of digital consumers with the needs of its citizens in an age where high speed connectivity is like electricity or clean water, but in a much more fragmented marketplace.

Ballarin Cereza suggested it was reasonable to look into “a voluntary agreement from content providers and network operators” – that those who benefit the most should play the most active role in the network’s expansion and maintenance.

She said the aviation industry provided an example of how this would work in practice.

“There have been years of discussion and now we need to accelerate the discussion because we need to take further steps to close the digital gap.

“We are not naïve. We know there are obstacles that Big Tech will play. We would also encourage efficiency measures like compression technology as a complementary means to reduce network overload while maintaining quality.”

It is noteworthy that, unlike previous editions of MWC, there were no keynote speeches from any content aggregator or streamer. If they were present, Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney and Warner Bros. were keeping a low profile. But then, they may already have won the argument.

 

 

Trump trade war rewires the geo-political importance of Big Tech

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Sweeping tariffs imposed by the US on China, Canada, Mexico and potentially the European Union represent a potential rewiring of the global trade order with technologies like AI at the center of the power struggle.

“For better and for worse Donald Trump is a wake-up call on the reality of European freeriding,” said Gregory C. Allen, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Governance Project at the bipartisan, nonprofit policy research Washington-based organization Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Mobile World Congress in a keynote addressing the geopolitics of technology. “But there still has to be common ground. Europe cannot be the enemy in a future in which the United States and Europe cooperate effectively. Somehow, we have to come back from that brink.”

The is not does just concern defence and military spend or tariffs on raw product like steel but a rift that is opening up between the U.S and the China and the U.S and Europe impacting collaboration and competition on emerging tech like AI and quantum compute.

“We're entering a more protectionist, politicized, and polarized world in which everybody's thinking about diversifying and embracing new opportunities,” said Keyu Jin, Global economist and author, Harvard University. “For every action, there's always a reaction, and there are unintended consequences. Because of Trump 2.0, you can see actually attitudes turning a little bit warmer towards China from the likes of Europe.”

Pressed on the decoupling of the U.S from China and what that means for technology, Allen said, “We are all used to the pace of exponential progress described by Moore’s law but the progress in AI is greater than that. The fact that AI capability today is useful but not world shattering doesn’t mean that we’re perhaps only a handful of years away from jaw-dropping transformational change.

“As the U.S looks to future where AI is 10,000 times better than today, they are looking at a future which they don’t want to invite China to.”

He reasoned that the U.S had woken up to the importance of owning the means of semiconductor manufacture on its own shores, and that Trump was only doing to China what China had been doing for decades.

During Covid when supply chain disruptions caused a shortage of semiconductors it cut 2 percent from U.S GDP, he said.

“Semiconductors are analogous to oil in terms of the economic dependence on this technology.”

Allen said that China has openly declared its intention to tighten other countries dependence on China. “If China is not going to become the new Saudi Arabia of oil maybe it can outspend everybody in semiconductor investment and develop a new means of economic coercion. For all the talk about diversification, the most common kind of diversification that I hear about is ‘anywhere but China’.”

President Trump had openly called for decoupling between the United States and China but in the high-tech field, decoupling has been China's policy for quite some time, said Allen.

He pointed to solar panels, electric vehicles and digital media as industries in which “Chinese domestic companies ultimately pushed out foreign suppliers.”

Google, Amazon, Microsoft have all had a very tough time in China over decades, he added.

Keyu Jin responded that there’s a “dangerous obsession” in Washington with China that is not reciprocated.

“China's internal opportunities, opportunities, and challenges are primarily internal,” she said.

“When tech control sanctions are imposed on China what happens is it mobilizes the entire country from top to bottom from private sector to universities to go after high tech. Technology has been listed as a national priority in China. Just imagine all the money that was spent on importing chips is now redirected to domestic industries because they feel an existential crisis.

She added, “I don’t think any country wants to be at the mercy of another. They don't want to be at the mercy of the U.S. either. We are seeing global fragmentation and regionalism with diversified payment systems going on outside of the core Western economies. The old model of globalization based on efficiency and cost has gone and a new block of economies are emerging to trade with each other.”

These included the Gulf countries, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Europe, she said.

“DC says, ‘We need to stop China’, but in China the question is ‘When will the U.S finally realize that we're not going anywhere’ and that stopping China is not really possible?’”

Europe appears to be in the middle of the spat between two super powers. At MWC2025 the FCC chair Brendan Carr had branded the European Commission’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a threat to free speech.

“For US technology companies that do business here, the censorship that is potentially coming down the pipe from the DSA is something that is incompatible with both our free speech tradition in America and the commitments that these technology companies have made through diversity of opinions,” Carr said.

The EU’s AI Act which is now in force further threatens to pit U.S Big Tech against European consumer guardrails.

Allen thinks there will be compromise. “Donald Trump likens himself as the ultimate deal maker but I don't think there's any deal you're going to make with Europe where Europe agrees that Europe is the enemy. That's just not going to work for them.

“A deal that could be reached is acknowledging the reality of European freeriding. You now hear openly from senior European leaders that when it comes to defense and security, they have been free riding on the Americans, benefiting without incurring and sharing the costs.”

Jerry Sheehan, Director, Directorate for Science, Technology & Innovation, OECD pointed to AI, quantum computing, immersive technologies and 6G networks as well as synthetic biology as bleeding edge tech with significant implications for economic growth and prosperity.

“In the new geopolitical environment these technologies are vital for economic security and since they also have defense applications, there's a national security concern too.”

He said, “All tech businesses should be paying close attention to what's happening in the geopolitical space because it is changing the alignments. Knowing the benefits and risks of operating in particular regions changes the calculus of how companies should think about their value chains and investments.”

The revelation that Chinese developer DeepSeek had apparently achieved similar algorithmic success to OpenAI but at a fraction of the cost “shows that China had world class teams doing legitimate innovation,” admitted Allen.

He dismissed the idea that China was now leading in AI, arguing that U.S developers were now adopting similar methods.

“DeepSeek has been transformative for the moral of Chinese tech ecosystem. That is unambiguous. Whether that is warranted it is real. They are moving forward and feeling like they have momentum again.”

 

Netflix revenues to overtake YouTube while Barb announce landmark YouTube measurement

Streaming Media

Underlining YouTube’s own declaration that “YouTube is the new television” UK TV measurement body Barb is to become the world’s first to report YouTube viewing on TV set.

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Meanwhile fresh data from Omdia finds that for the first time Netflix will overtake YouTube in total video revenue this year.

However, Maria Rua Aguete, Senior Research Director at Omdia stressed, “I see more collaboration than competition between YouTube, Netflix, and other industry players.”

Netflix pulls ahead of YouTube in revenue

Netflix is forecast to hit $46.2 billion in revenues this year, driven by $43.2 billion from subscriptions and $3.2 billion from advertising, as it pulls ahead of YouTube for the first time, according to Omdia. YouTube is expected to generate $45.6bn this year, with $36bn from ads and $9.6bn from YouTube Premium, the research analyst said.

“In markets like the US and UK, there is significant overlap between audiences,” said Aguete, who presented the figures first at MIP TV London. “In the US, 57% of YouTube users are also Netflix subscribers, while in the UK, that number rises to 67%. This dynamic presents opportunities for both platforms.”

While often positioned as rivals, YouTube and Netflix are increasingly collaborating rather than competing. “I see more collaboration than competition between YouTube, Netflix, and other industry players,” she stated. “Streaming services, broadcasters, and platforms are working together through marketing partnerships, content distribution, and advertising deals.”

An example is Netflix's use of YouTubers to promote Squid Game, leveraging influencer-driven marketing to attract new subscribers. Meanwhile, YouTube is solidifying its role as a premium content platform, outperforming FAST services.

“At the end of 2024, YouTube generated seven times more revenue than FAST platforms, $42.5bn versus $6bn,” Rua Aguete explained. “Major studios are taking notice. Warner Bros., for example, recently released 37 full-length movies for free on YouTube. We expect to see more partnerships like this in the future.”

Looking ahead, YouTube is making a strong push toward TV-like content.

“Large players can turn this to their advantage by entering favorable ad-share agreements or even selling some sponsorship and video inventory directly,” Rua Aguete noted.

She also highlighted the growing role of YouTubers in cinema recovery, with influencer-driven promotions becoming an integral part of movie marketing strategies.

Another major shift is YouTube’s increasing consumption on Connected TVs. “Viewers are watching YouTube on the big screen more than ever before,” Rua Aguete said. “This changes the advertising game, making YouTube an even bigger player in premium video.”

Barb goes deeper into YouTube

Following a successful test with research partner Kantar Media, Barb is to start measuring TV viewing across 200 top YouTube channels with reports beginning in Q3.

While Barb already reports YouTube viewers on TV sets generally, the company claims it will dig deeper to become the first joint-industry committee in the world to incorporate viewing of specific YouTube channels. The channels will be selected based on volume of viewing and categorized by the type of content creator.

It prompted industry opinion former Evan Shapiro to call Barb “the most comprehensive measurement of a television media ecosystem in any of the territories that I cover,” at MIP TV London this week.

Barb has previously reported that TV sets account for the largest proportion of in-home, WiFi-based YouTube viewing in the UK. In 2024, TV-set viewing accounted for 41% of all this YouTube viewing among all people aged 4+, ahead of smartphones at 31%. This was the first year in which Barb data showed that TV sets were the most-used device for viewing YouTube. TV sets were also the most popular device for children aged 4-15, accounting for just over half of their in-home, WiFi-based YouTube viewing last year.

Similar trends have been identified by YouTube in the U.S where TV sets are the most frequently used device for watching YouTube.

“YouTube viewing on the TV set increased by 31% in the UK in 2024,” said Lucy Bristowe, CEO UK and Western Europe at Kantar Media, which made a successful pilot for Barb last November.

UK broadcasters including Channel 4 and ITV already distribute hundreds of hours of their programming on the platform. Barb think there is greater potential for broadcasters to use YouTube viewership data to inform the commissioning process.

Shapiro noted that 58% of the U.K. population is over 40; as such, “Boomers and Gen Xers disproportionately weigh the data for the total audience—long live public-service broadcasting and free TV.”

Shapiro noted that across all screens in the UK, the BBC still leads in terms of total audience at 24 percent, “but with all audiences, YouTube is now the second place channel, and Netflix is dependably in the top four, with ITV in between.”

“When you look at TV only, broadcasters do appreciably better, but Netflix and YouTube are in the top,” he added.

Barb CEO Justin Sampson, said, “In recent years we have gone beyond broadcasters and beyond linear to deliver a fundamental step-change in our industry’s understanding of how people watch programmes and ads.

“We’re now starting to deliver on a commitment to report more of the content people watch on YouTube. This commitment came off the back of an industry consultation which established a buy-side consensus on the need for transparent reporting of content with contextual indicators of quality.”

Netflix signed up to Barb in 2022 and is part of the measurement service’s daily reporting which includes aggregate-level viewing to SVOD/AVOD platforms, as well as content ratings for shows on the leading SVOD services.

How Barb works with YouTube

Since 2021, Barb has reported how people watch content on YouTube that’s distributed by TV companies, as well as service-level audiences for YouTube. This reporting was limited to viewing that takes place on a TV set at home through a WiFi router.

Now Kantar Media will use audio-matching automatic content recognition (ACR) to identify when these channels are watched by Barb panel members on TV sets. Audio-matching ACR relies on access to the audio output of devices, which is only possible on TV sets.

This technique is harnessed with URL detection via the router meters installed in Barb panel homes to confirm YouTube as the source. Audio-matching ACR is the same method Kantar Media uses to identify programme viewing on linear channels and VOD streamers.

Barb says it is exploring how to ensure its list of YouTube channels is complementary to the YouTube channels measured on non-TV devices by Ipsos iris, the service for UK online audience measurement body UKOM. This would give advertisers and media companies a holistic view across all devices.

Oscars 2025: Craft winners

IBC

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It was the greatest day for Sean Baker at the 97th Academy Awards as the American auteur’s freewheeling sex comedy Anora took home five Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Screenplay, as well as Best Actress for Mikey Madison’s effervescent performance.

Added to the Palm D’Or, his win is a triumph for indie cinema, made avowedly outside the studio system and with a low budget as a consequence of retaining creative control. He refused to test screen Anora and didn’t even let the film’s chief financier, FilmNation, see a cut of the film until it was complete.

Here’s a rundown of select winners:

Best Editing: Anora

Sean Baker had two scenes clearly in mind when creating Anora. The first was a fight scene which pivots the movie, Tarantino-style, into darker territory. “It was meant to be shockingly funny,” he told IBC365. “I knew I wanted it to take place in real-time in the middle of the film, so the screenplay was structured around that. We were covering every second. It couldn’t be montaged. Every angle was calculated, shot-listed, stunt coordinated.”

The second was the final shot which slowly closes in on Anora in the front of a car while the windows cake up with snow. “It’s important for me to figure out the endings before I ever write a word,” he says. “We actually wrote an epilogue. I won’t tell you what happened, but it was for me and the actors to sort of understand what I was thinking about.”

To CinemaEditor he admitted: “I don't think my script would get past day one of notes from any sort of studio or mini studio, let alone the edit. To be honest, even people that we trust within our team, like our financiers and distributors, were seriously questioning whether I wanted to keep the ending to Anora. I knew I would hear that criticism eventually. But because I don't have to rely on a studio to give me a greenlight I told producer Sam Quan, ‘We're gonna make this film, put it out into the world and pray that it connects’.”

Baker won for editing despite an early struggle with the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA). “Writing, directing and editing are indivisible and equally important to me yet I wasn't able to credit myself the way I wanted to on this film as ‘written, directed and edited by’,” he said.

Best Cinematography: The Brutalist

British Director of Photography Lol Crawley BSC landed his first Academy Award for this haunting and raw epic. His initial discussions with writer-director Brady Corbet were about how to use a motion picture art form to capture another art form (architecture) that is essentially static. “We needed to find a visual language that could capture the monumental quality of moving through the spaces which László designs,” he explained.

That took them to VistaVision, a 8-perf 35mm format that had its heyday in the 1950s. “Brady wanted to use a camera system from the 1950s which seems to make perfect sense, but what liberates it from being a sort of an affectation are the two primary benefits of shooting on VistaVision; a higher resolution image and being able to capture incredible landscapes.”

The VistaVision vogue continues with multiple movies shooting in the format including P.T Anderson’s untitled Leonard DiCaprio drama; Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia starring Emma Stone, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest project starring Tom Cruise [due in 2026].

Best Production design: Wicked

Director Jon M Chu wanted the same tactile feeling of a lived in Munchkinland that he felt watching The Wizard of Oz and got Universal to write him a budget for physically building Wicked's huge sets at Sky Studios Elstree. British production designer Nathan Crowley finally landed an Oscar after six previous nominations, mainly for Christopher Nolan movies like Interstellar.

This included planting nine million tulips on a Norfolk farm and transplanting them to the Studio and the Italianate Shiz University.

“There were so many traps design-wise, like images of Hobbits and French Alpine villages,” Crowley explained. “The first thing was, ‘Well, what do they do apart from sing and dance?’ We gave them a business – they grow tulips and then they use the dye to make cloth, so every house is a different colour.”

Sound: Dune: Part Two

Director Denis Villeneuve wanted his epic sci-fi adaptation to feel like a “documentary” which the sound team interpreted as meaning “very tactile, very recognizably real” according to Supervising Sound Editor/Sound Designer Richard King. “Like in Star Wars movies, everything’s quite exaggerated and there’s a certain aesthetic that they adhere to that keeps you at arm’s length a little bit. It’s clearly a fable being told to you from a long time ago, far away.”

To that end, King sent sound recordists working for Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services in Burbank to capture field recordings of sand and wind in Death Valley and the Sahara Desert.

“We did everything that we could possibly do or imagine that we would need involving sand with different kinds of sand, and different textures of sand. We’re on Arrakis for almost the entire film in Dune: Part Two and in different parts of the planet, so we needed different qualities of sand with different textures.”

There was a lot of field recording too of the sounds of machinery that were then manipulated for the harvesters and the ornithopters. “We did a lot of R&D to see what sorts of sounds would be appropriate, and to have that kind of gritty feeling that we wanted.”

Best Visual Effects: Dune: Part 2

Following its Oscar-winning work on Dune: Part One, Villeneuve returned to Dneg to help bring his ambitious sequel to life. The London-based facility’s work included complex sand and pyro sims, large-scale CG environments and detailed creature animation – from the giant sandworms down to the tiny desert mice.

The final battle where the Fremen take on the Emperor’s military (the Sardaukar), became one of the most challenging VFX sequences in the film. It featured a 30-second one-take near-full-CG action shot that Dneg’s team dubbed the ‘Chani-oner’ and follows Chani (Zendayer) fighting through the Sardaukar ranks. DNEG VFX Supervisor Rhys Salcombe explained: “The choreography for this was performed on a massive mocap stage, mixing performances from Zendaya and stunt actors. This required extensive hand-animation to blend mocap actions, which were then adjusted with virtual camera work to create a handheld documentary feel.”

The action was then expanded by adding large crowd simulations, dust effects from flying Ornithopters and multiple sandworms animated to plough through structures, vehicles and armies.

Dune: Messiah starts production in Budapest and Iceland this summer with a likely 2026 release date.

Best Documentary Feature: No Other Land

The remarkable story of a Palestinian activist (Basil al-Adarra) who teams up with an Israeli investigative journalist (Yuval Abraham) to document the injustices faced daily by Palestinians in the West Bank, culminating in the harrowing attack of October 7, 2023 and its aftermath. Remarkably too, this story was filmed over five years by two Palestinian and two Israeli filmmakers and has a dual narrative which highlights the possibility of finding common ground amidst profound cultural and political divides. No Other Land was co-produced by Norwegian indie Antipode Films and Palestinian producers Yabayay Media.

Yuval received death threats after his acceptance speech for the best documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival last February in which he criticised a "situation of apartheid" and called for a ceasefire in Gaza.

"I don't have an illusion that films are going to change the world, but I know they can change individuals, and I know that they can be part of a bigger change, and we really need this now," Yuval told the BBC.