The world's most influential media, entertainment & technology show
RAI Amsterdam | 13 – 17 SEPTEMBER 2019
Over the five days of the conference over 1,400 delegates and guests from across the globe will hear from our outstanding line-up of 400+ speakers, enjoy fantastic networking opportunities and be inspired to embrace the changes in our industry.
Combining a world-class exhibition with free-to-attend feature areas and events, the IBC Exhibition provides the perfect platform for you to network and build relationships with suppliers and customers, discover the latest trends and technologies and drive your innovations and strategy.
5 Days
1,700+ Delegates
400+ Speakers
100+ Sessions
Netflix is set to sign a deal that will see it use Pinewood Studios to produce more content in the UK.
A report in the Sunday Telegraph claims that the streaming giant is on the verge of taking 150,000 square foot of space at Pinewood as part of a ten-year agreement.
The deal will cost Netflix around £6 million per year.
The UK has been a significant market for the streaming giant, with the company’s London office having grown from 15 staff to over 100 in the last few years.
It has over 150 million global subscribers and an estimated 10 million-strong audience in the UK.
Netflix made around 40 productions and co-productions in the UK last year, with some, such as The Crown, seeing significant success.
It’s footprint of British shows is set to top 50 this year, including the Cambridge Analytica docudrama The Great Hack.
The company’s expansion in the UK could also see it acquire a British production company, according to chief content officer Ted Sarandos.
In an interview with London’s Evening Standard, Sarandos said Netflix is looking to “physically” embed itself in the UK, existing alongside the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 by producing more content.
It comes as the BBC and ITV confirmed rumours that they will launch a new streaming service in the UK aimed at rivalling Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Sarandos added: “It supports and strengthens their legacy: they can produce on a larger scale.
“Watching British programming has mostly been niche in the US. Now it’s mainstream, with co-productions like Bodyguard or After Life.”
Calls to break up and dissolve the influence and power Google and other technology giants have “no basis in law” says Google’s Eric Schmidt.
According to former Google chairman and chief executive Eric Schmidt, enforced regulation over the tech giant would cause damage to its relationship with consumers, price rises and have widespread impact on transparency.
Schmidt said: “I don’t see a basis in law for a breakup. The various proposals for breaking up would [mean] prices increase, which would be a negative consumer harm for sure.”
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Schmidt said that regulators should consider the benefits offered to society by the likes of Google.
The European Union (EU) and US regulators have increasingly pushed to limit the power big technology companies have over consumers and information management.
Earlier this year, the French watchdog CNIL found Google was in violation of “transparency, information and consent”. The regulator fined the company £44 million in the first major fine under Europe’s strict global data protection regulation (GDPR), which was introduced in 2018.
In March, the European Union’s antitrust commission fined Google for its “abusive practices” in online advertising and its “illegal misuse” of its dominant market position. In total this year alone Google has been fined over £7 billion by the EU.
Schmidt added: “These platforms are enormously powerful, and they are free to consumers… I would be very careful about directly affecting the structure of the industry because the benefit of broad access to these platforms has brought innumerable benefits.”
He expressed concerns the “regulatory bias” European and US bodies were overhauling was damaging the competitiveness of the Western technology firms in favour of China.
He pointed to Chinese technology companies exploiting strict rules in the West to gain a big competitive advantage in the rollout of cutting-edge payment and financial services.
Schmidt served as CEO at Google from 2001 to 2011 and has been Alphabet’s (Google’s parent company) longest serving executive. He stepped down from his position as chairman last year and decided not to be re-elected to the board once his tenure ends this June. He will continue to work as technical advisor, the company announced.
Google’s market value is currently in excess of $820 billion, according to the Telegraph.
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg echoed Schmidt’s concerns in an interview last week with CNBC.
Sandberg pushed back on the calls for breaking up the social media company.
She said: “You could break us up, you could break other tech companies up, but you actually don’t address the underlying issues people are concerned about.”
Facebook and Google have been under the spotlight, however Sandberg said Chinese technology companies are also powerful and will not be broken up.
She added: “While people are concerned with the size and power of tech companies, there’s also a concern in the United States with the size and power of Chinese companies and the realisation that those companies are not going to be broken up.”
There are growing concerns around the security of the upcoming US election as well as content privacy and data portability.
Sandberg said: “We know at Facebook we have a real possibility to do better and earn back people’s trust.”
Facebook’s engineering and product teams now have their own safety and security functions focused on people’s privacy.
Sandberg noted that although Facebook’s pivot to privacy will impact its ability to target ads, the company does not expect a long-term impact on revenue.
She said: “We believe deeply that doing the right thing for people on our service is the only way to protect our long-term business, and it’s the right thing to do.”
The TM Forum held its Digital Transformation World event in Nice last week. It is typically billed as a key event for telcos, solution and network providers to collaborate and foster innovation based upon the TM Forum’s framework for best practices and standards. Similar to Mobile World Congress, the event focussed on intelligent operations for a 5G world.
This was perfectly timed given the race among many telcos to launch 5G. There’s rarely a day that passes, without an announcement on 5G. It is apparent that 2019 is the year of 5G launches, but telcos need to transform their operations in order to better serve customers and deliver on their own expectations.
One of the main highlights from the event was a keynote panel that put a group of telco CTIOs up against representatives from key verticals. The verticals highlighted the new use cases underpinned by 5G.
Founder of gaming company Hatch, Vesa Jutila said that the merits of 5G with low latency, quality and bandwidth will take gaming to the next level. But urged telcos to reduce fragmentation given the complexities and numerous legacy systems they have suggesting that if they don’t, then they will go to another provider.
While according to BT Sport COO Jamie Hindhaugh, 5G is an enabler that offers creative opportunities (such as live images from the team bus while heading to the ground). And network slicing (virtual fibre) leading to media production and distribution capabilities being transformed; all about delivering more content.
McLaren applied technologies chief technologist Paul Spence cautioned the role of 5G indicating that it needs to prove itself in order to be safe and reliable when it comes to autonomous driving.
Martin Brynskov who is the chairman of the Open and Agile Smart Cities organisation suggested that access to data is crucial and that telcos need to share the risk and play fair with both the cost of deployments and access to the data gathered.
The messages among telcos were broadly consistent. The business case remains unproven given the significant costs in deploying new networks. While at the same time asking consumers to spend more on faster connections and new services is becoming harder and harder. 5G represents a new way of working and collaborating with partners which is key to long term survival. However, some telcos feel extremely frustrated with the lack of speed by network vendors to deliver new pieces of kit. Furthermore, AI will be transformational but telcos first must transform their own processes and more importantly culture within the organisation.
With this in mind, all eyes were on Rakuten Mobile chief technology officer Tareq Amin, who is spearheading what the company claims is the world’s first cloud-native mobile network in partnership with business and operational support systems provider Netcracker. Announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress, Amin said that its OSS platform is built on open adaptors, plug and play, AI and machine learning capabilities at the core, with minimal fragmentation. Interestingly, he believes that “the level of automation that we have done is one that the industry has not seen.” This has helped reduce its 5G network spend by 60-80% compared to traditional providers. Being a greenfield operator means it doesn’t have to deal with legacy systems and processes that traditional telcos face. But it is unproven as the network is not live. The commercial launch is scheduled for October. However, it is a refreshing new approach to serving customers in a different way.
For sure, 5G opens up new use cases and allows businesses to transform their own operations to better serve users. This was best demonstrated through the catalyst programmes which are proof-of-concept projects bringing companies together. The objective is to create innovative solutions leveraging key TM Forum best practices and standards.
The TM Forum has been working closely with other verticals building upon its 30-year heritage showcasing collaboration in telecommunications. Its latest partnership with IBC led to the unveiling of three catalysts which represent great examples of driving open innovation between the telecoms and media industries:
This Catalyst explores ways of creating a pop-up network for delivery of high throughput broadcasting to distant points of fibre presence via mmWave connection. The project investigates how to deliver rich and engaging video-based experiences to users exploring an area of the Roman Baths in the UK and allows a mobile device to view a place as it would have been in the past. Champions: Aardman Entertainment, BBC R&D Participants: Bristol University, Cambridge Communications Systems Ltd., Zeetta Networks Ltd.;
AI remains a buzzword. This Catalyst explores ways to intelligently automate the identification of on-air content using AI in order to measure and report against compliance metrics set by external regulatory bodies. Furthermore, it can be used for internal editorial, creative and technical standards. Champions: Associated Press, Al Jazeera, RTE; Participants: Metaliquid, QCRI, Tech Mahindra, V-Nova;
This Catalyst uses AI with better intelligence for journalists on location and improve time-to-air for both live and pre-recorded content through advanced compression techniques. Champions: Associated Press, Al Jazeera, RTE; Participant: V-Nova.
In total, 32 catalysts were demonstrated during the event involving 140 companies. Many of these catalysts are still at an early phase of development. The road ahead is long, and success is not guaranteed.
Worryingly, security wasn’t widely debated at the event, with the rollout of new sophisticated networks that are more software based and considering the recent concerns with Huawei. But the entire industry should address this issue and forge closer ties to find a common ground that all must adhere to. The entire value chain will be vulnerable to cyberattacks.
The event serves as a welcome reminder that telcos are in a state of flux. They need to invest in 5G, but it is more than just a transformation in technology. It requires a radical shift in mindset and company culture. All of this means an increase in costs and the need to invest further with no guaranteed returns, while margins are still being squeezed. Being first to launch doesn’t necessarily lead to a turnaround in fortunes.
Messages such as the need to collaborate, be agile and transform have been heavily discussed for years. For this reason, it feels like telcos are still stuck at the same junction and inevitably need to move more quickly before missing out on any further opportunities that might lie ahead.
Overall, this year’s Digital Transformation World event has shown that 5G is creating new ways to connect and work together as underlined by the catalyst initiatives especially the convergence between media and telco industries.
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