Marbella 2025

The telemedia market is very much open for business worldwide – as the recent World Telemedia Marbella event clearly demonstrated. And these opportunities aren’t confined to ‘developing’ market either. As the conference sessions attested – and covered in all the video interviews on we produced  here – there are increasingly opportunities for content and other services across Europe as well as MENA, Africa and India. Even the UK market, under new regulation and free of the mire of constantly changing codes of practice, is ready for new business.

This thriving global telemedia market has exploded thanks to an insatiable consumer appetite for content. While it is easy to think of it just as the TikTok Generation, in reality 20 years of social media consumption has turned pretty much everyone into a content consumer. Shorts are of course very popular, but really the value-added world of mobile content covers everything from long-form to short-form, from life hacks to fictional love stories. It really is everything in every format.

This is also extended by well-known content brands also creating spin offs from their main inventory – with the likes of NBA not only offering behind the scenes footage, but also turning aspects of their brand into stream-able games.

This sees mixing and matching, constantly evolving pantheon of content is what has kept services providers and network operators coming back for more and more of what telemedia has to offer.

This is great news for the sector, but it is also making the market extremely competitive. As Julia Dimambro from Seriously Fresh Media and Keiran Clare from CFM separately pointed out, the market is booming, but staying competitive – both in terms of having the right content and keeping that constantly refreshed and at a price that is in line with the rest of the market – is a tall order.

Telemedia marketing shifts

With such consumer interest in content it would seem that trying to drive traffic shouldn’t be a problem. However this huge degree of competition in the market make traffic generation for telemedia services perhaps more important than ever. With most traffic now coming from Google it was good to hear from the search engine giant as to how to actually do that (and if you want to hear from Google you have to attend the show, they don’t let us record them), but, while the audience was very welcoming, there were questions around the rising cost of acquisition/clicks seen with Google traffic, which is making tight margins on some services even tighter – sometimes to the point of making them unviable.

There are also issues around Google shutting off traffic to some DCB services because MNO redirects demanded by these services in some markets are viewed by Google’s AI as potential fraud and services here are also being closed down.

Google accepted that these were issues with the system and is working to fix them as they occur – giving an overall feeling that these problems are being addressed and are short-term.

This was echoed by Chris Henseler from MeshAds who was very bullish not just about Google traffic generation going forward, but also about how YouTube and other video channels are also likely to drive traffic in the near future. He also touched on AI discovery – which while not yet a traffic generator, is likely to be one in the coming years. Definitely something to talk about at World Telemedia Dubai in April 2026.

Payment changes: from DCB to cards

While competition in content and issues around traffic generation were hot topics, the telemedia market is also seeing a shift in how consumers want to pay for things. While the market is still very much underpinned by DCB in all regions except India, there is a growing embrace of credit card, driven by the growing love of wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.

While the theory that the more payment tools you have the more likely people are to spend money with you is indeed true, there are challenges with how to integrate credit cards – not least because it involves working with banks (which some may argue are easier to work with than MNOs).

Sunil Jhamb from Celeris outlined a lot of the challenges and suggested some of the routes to fixing them. Hommam Hosseini went on to explain how adding credit card has opened up new channels and new markets, generated more data points and insights and, with the right partners, is easy to implement.

Of course, the ideal way to operate is to offer both card and DCB payments (and any other regional ones that are popular), but the orchestration needed to do this from a technical standpoint is challenging, while it can also throw up regulatory challenges.

So what have we learned?

World Telemedia Marbella, while often seen as more of a networking event, produced some fascinating conference sessions, with true audience involvement. It was a talking shop for moving the whole industry forward against this backdrop of increasing content competition and shifting payments and marketing tools.

It was also interesting to see that content brands are starting to view telemedia as a channel they need to be in. For them, streaming and mainstream content markets are also highly competitive and micro-billed ancillary content delivered over mobile is a money spinner for them. This marks, in my mind, a huge shift: these brands are now coming to us wanting to play in our market. All we need now is for MNOs the world over to get on board and push telemedia services harder and make those pay outs better – or risk losing this lucrative market to credit card. Either way, World Telemedia is here to stay.