As Ligue 1 seeks yet another broadcast arrangement for next season, the French league’s value is expected to erode further.
Outside the UK, the value of major leagues’ live rights are trending downwards. The Champions League—now sold by Relevent—is the silver lining, seeking to sign up a streamer.
Global streaming platforms have a growing appetite for sports rights—but European leagues need patience.
Industrial scale theft of video services, especially live sport, is in the ascendance. Combating piracy is a formidable challenge, providing a direct threat to profitability for broadcasters and streamers.
Big tech is both friend and foe in solving the piracy problem. Conflicting incentives harm consumer safety by providing easy discovery of illegal pirated services, and reduced friction through low-cost hardware such as the Amazon Firestick.
Over twenty years since launch, the DRM solutions provided by Google and Microsoft are in steep decline. A complete overhaul of the technology architecture, licensing, and support model is needed. Lack of engagement with content owners indicates this a low priority.
US tariffs and regulations are sparing no one in 2025—Microsoft, the ‘winner’ of the earnings quarter, is still making plans to protect its European business in a doomsday scenario.
Hyperscalers who have piled their eggs into cloud cannot afford a misstep—this is driving record capex to satisfy cloud demand. We expect to see lumpiness in Q2-Q3, feeding investors’ worries.
Revenue impacts have been felt first at US retail, softening ad demand, with the UK relatively protected for now. Despite relief at the 90-day ‘reset’ with China, economic and political uncertainty remains the story of the year.
The slowdown in telecoms traffic volume growth post-pandemic has persisted for far longer than a simple hangover effect would imply, and has spread from fixed broadband to mobile in many markets
The eventual emergence of the metaverse and/or AI-generated traffic may mitigate this trend, but it is hard to see growth ever returning to a sustained 30%+ per annum level, with around 10-15% likely to prove the new normal
While far from disastrous for telcos, it does have important implications, such as the need to structure pricing more carefully, focus on network quality over capacity, and be more wary of the threat (or opportunity) from MVNOs, FWA and satellite
The French league and DAZN have come to an agreement to end their media rights contract after one season, with the league now having had four main broadcast partners in five years.
DAZN claims the league failed to protect its ‘exclusivity’, resulting in high piracy. Ligue 1 blames poor execution.
Without a main broadcast partner for next season, Ligue 1 is exploring the idea of creating its own direct-to-consumer service.
Service revenue growth remained firmly negative at -1.0% in spite of inflation of +2.1%, as competition remains intense and pricing power weak.
Operators are guiding to a 2025 EBITDA performance that is broadly in-line with, or weaker than, their 2024 performance, with SFR choosing to abstain from guidance this year.
In-market consolidation cries are getting louder, with France, Italy and Germany the most obvious candidates.
UEFA and Relevent, a newly appointed media rights sales partner, are already surveying the rights market for the next cycle starting in 2027.
With minimal competitive tension in major European markets, incumbent broadcasters are unlikely to increase their bids.
Relevent will, however, try to leverage increased US appetite for soccer to lure a streamer into a global deal.
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Trump II is already proving to be a more serious threat to an independent, robust news media than Trump I.
Trump’s direct power around news media is limited, but the threat comes from an unprecedented politicisation of federal regulators, enforcement and procurement—to favour friends and punish enemies.
Opposition to Trump II is weaker and more divided than the broad ‘resistance’ to Trump I. Big tech companies are going for a close embrace, hoping to steer policy to their advantage—while others bend the knee to avoid punishment.
Geopolitical clashes between the US and Europe were a barely concealed undercurrent at this year’s MWC, with European tech regulation at odds with US moves, and telcos pitching for regulatory favours on firmer ground than they have had for years.
Perhaps the largest impact is on the satellite industry, with Eutelsat OneWeb having been given a new lease of life as the EU champion versus a now disfavoured SpaceX/Starlink.
AI was of course the talk of the town, but largely in ways that are tangential at best to traditional telcos, with the necessary building blocks for telcos to play a big role (i.e. network APIs) still needing much work.
US big tech companies are deploying hundreds of billions of dollars to remake the global economy in their image, as enviable growth contrasts with layoffs and low morale.
The cost of using AI models will fall in 2025 and make more AI applications possible. Regulation is caught between pressure from Trump and investigations that must go on, such as digital markets.
Microsoft and Google have tied their fortunes to AI. Amazon and Meta stand to realise business gains from AI, while Apple is the outlier: capex declined in 2024 as it focuses on iPhone and services.