On 3 June 2025, Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Media and Telecoms 2025 & Beyond Conference with Deloitte, sponsored by Adobe, Barclays, Salesforce, Financial Times and SAS.

With over 700 attendees and more than 50 speakers from the TMT sector, including leading executives and industry experts, the conference focused on how new technologies, regulation, and infrastructure will impact the future of the industry.

This is the edited transcript of Session Two, covering: The Rt Hon Lisa Nandy MP; Meta’s AI strategy; Channel 4 on Gen Z and trust; news and media in the AI age; and diversity in the age of economic challenge. Videos of the presentations are available on the conference website.

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.

Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital is poised to take the reins of the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) after two years of unforeseen events that led to an unfortunate limbo at TMG.

We anticipate Gerry Cardinale will be vetted under the “public interest” regime for newspapers, which should be a smooth process and conclude by September 2025.

The saga of TMG provoked a new regime for foreign state-owned investors that is a new constraint on all media mergers.

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.

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.

This report is free to access

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.

Globally, subscriber growth remains the driver of topline streaming improvements—86% of Netflix’s 2024 global revenue growth came from subscriber additions, with 85% for WBD and 54% for Disney

However, in mature markets growth is underpinned by ARPU. Subs growth is becoming volatile with more customers churning in and out of services around key releases

Relevantly, the race to scale up SVOD ad-tiers will continue to have an ARPU-dilutive effect: CPMs are lower than expected and the growing price divide between premium and ad tiers will persuade more existing users to spin down 

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.

YouTube is now the UK's fifth most-used venue for finding news, and a key focus for UK broadcasters and publishers. They made up a quarter of UK trending news videos in 2023, competing with native YouTubers and US broadcasters

We find that YouTube’s algorithms tend to funnel users from news content towards non-news within a few videos. The reverse trend, of non-news to news content, is almost non-existent

We do not find evidence of widespread brand safety concerns impacting advertising on news videos, though publishers still note YouTube is better for exposure and consumption than it is for generating revenue. The ad load is largely in line with other genres