decided

Mexico has decided to register all telephone lines in the country. The teleoperators have decided to challenge him

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The national mobile telephone registry has just started in Mexico and is already facing its first big test. And just a few days after it came into force mandatory registration of linesthe country’s main operators have met with the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (CRT) to request a postponement. For operators, deadlines are practically impossible to meet and to this we must add the fact that the technical systems have shown failures from day one. The challenge in figures. Mexico has more than 158 million active telephone lines that must be registered before June 30, 2026. This means that operators such as Telcel, AT&T, Telefónica and Virtual Mobile Operators (OMV) would have to jointly register 923,977 lines each day for 172 days to meet the established deadline. A complicated goal to achieve. Meeting. According to inform the media Expansión, representatives of Telefónica, the OMVs, Televisa and Canieti, which groups companies such as AT&T, attended a meeting with the CRT last Friday to insist on the extension. The main argument was that the industry only had 30 calendar days to develop, test and implement platforms capable of developing a process of such magnitude. According to account According to the media, Canieti had formally requested a postponement since December 30, but did not receive a response from the regulator. The technical problems are already visible. Telcel reported intermittencies on its platforms derived from the high demand of users trying to complete the procedure simultaneously. In addition, complaints arose about a possible security vulnerability on its portal that would have exposed personal data of clients, although the company claimed to have corrected the failure immediately. The CRT limited itself to acknowledging that there were “intermittencies on various platforms” without going into details. The economic cost. Beyond the technical challenges, the registry represents a considerable financial burden. An entrepreneur of an MVNO explained to the Expansión medium that each link has a cost of 3.45 pesos (about 17 euro cents), an amount that only includes the verification of the user with their data, without including taxes. The problem is aggravated because, according to accounts, registration is not always completed on the first attempt and can require up to three or five attempts per line. The CRT estimates point to a total investment of more than 4,053 million pesos (about 194.5 million euros), of which only 22 million pesos would be allocated to the development of the platform and identity verification would correspond to the largest weight of the amount with 4,031 million. Worry. The Mexican Association of Virtual Mobile Operators (AMOMVAC) has also joined the request for a postponement, according to they count from Mobile Time. Although they recognize the security objective of the registry, which is to combat telephone extortion, which according to the Executive Secretariat left 6,880 victims between January and July, they warn about operational, economic and social risks. The association’s main concern is associated with rural communities and populations with low digital literacy, where mobile telephony is an essential service and there is a risk that thousands of lines will be suspended if their owners fail to complete the procedure. And now what. For the moment, the CRT has not officially responded to the extension requests and the calendar remains unchanged: the deadline expires on June 30, 2026. As of July 1, unregistered lines will be suspended, both prepaid and postpaid. Cover image | Chantel and Pepu Rica In Xataka | The “B side” of the United States landing in Venezuela: a subsoil full of hypothetical rare earths

Spotify has had to remove 75 million songs made with AI. Bandcamp has decided not to have that problem

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The Bandcamp music streaming and sales platform has announced that will completely ban music generated “in whole or in substantial part” by artificial intelligence, becoming the first major music distribution service to establish such a restrictive barrier against synthetic content. Bandcamp thus draws a very clear red line in the debate about where the use of creative tools ends and where total automation that dispenses with human authorship begins. What does the statement say? Bandcamp’s statement presents two fundamental prohibitions. On the one hand, any musical content generated entirely or substantially through artificial intelligence, a formulation that avoids defining exact percentages but establishes that there is a threshold regarding the weight of AI in the creative process. On the other hand, it extends the prohibition to the use of algorithmic tools to replicate styles or voices of real artists, connecting this restriction with the platform’s pre-existing policies against identity theft and intellectual property infringement. Citizen collaboration. The advertisement includes a complaint mechanism For users: users can report suspicious material using the platform’s reporting tools, which will be reviewed by a moderation team. The company explicitly reserves the right to remove music suspected of having synthetic origin, without the need for conclusive evidence, a clause that gives wide freedom to moderators but could also generate false positives. The company acknowledged that the policy may require updates as the generative AI landscape evolves, referring to how quickly these technologies are being developed. The conceptual debate. This decision is part of the debate about AI and creativity that is going through the world of culture: using algorithms as instruments as opposed to delegating the creative act to them. The United States Copyright Office established in January 2025 that work generated by AI can be registered when it “incorporates significant human authorship,” but that content produced solely through promptswithout additional creative intervention, falls into the public domain for lack of a recognizable author. Nuances and tools. And it is difficult to determine the limits. The spectrum ranges from musicians who use AI to clean up audio or get inspired by melodies to those who simply write text instructions and let the model generate entire tracks. There are conceptual artists who go to the opposite extreme of artificial intervention: composer Holly Herndon turned her voice into the project Holly+ into a “digital instrument” that is publicly accessible and that other musicians can play. The debate is endless: MIT Technology Review raised in April that tools like Suno and Udio produce “creators” who are not conventional musicians but “prompters“. The result is works that cannot be attributed to a composer or singer, dissolving the usual definitions of authorship. The flood. The figures reveal an exponential escalation in the appearance of music created with AI on platforms. Deezer spoke in November 2025 of more than 50,000 tracks completely generated by AI each day, 34% of its daily volume, and an increase of 400% compared to January, when the figure was 10,000 songs per day. A study by Deezer itself said that 97% of listeners do not know how to distinguish between human and synthetic music after a blind test for the participants in the study in which they were shown two tracks, one with AI and one real. The Spotify drama. While, Spotify revealed in September 2025 which had removed 75 million “spam tracks” in the previous twelve months, an amount that rivals the platform’s entire catalog of 100 million songs. The emblematic case of the fictional indie band The Velvet Sundown illustrates the dimension of the phenomenon: this group completely generated by AI It reached 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify during the summer of 2025 before its creators admitted its synthetic nature, under pressure from listeners. Follow the money. The case of Xania Monet is another side of the problem. This fully synthetic R&B artist generated over $42,800 in less than two months with over 17 million streams totals, which led to the signing of a multimillion-dollar record contract after a bidding war where a record company allegedly offered $3 million. At the same time, country was the first genre to be marked as a big loser in this war between real and synthetic artists: in December 2025, the number of country songs generated by AI outsold completely human jobs. There is a clear motive for these maneuvers: money. Tools like Suno and Udio produce for free and a user can generate hundreds of short tracks that can generate profits. Let’s multiply it exponentially: massive uploads to platforms, bot farms that generate songs and upload songs without rest, automation of payments… We are not looking for isolated successes, but to add millions of reproductions, against which a real artist cannot compete. Percentages. And that’s why Bandcamp and Spotify are so different. Bandcamp is a marketplace straight where artists charge an average of 82% of each sale, with the platform keeping 15% on digital items and 10% on physical items, with additional payment processing commissions of 4-7%. bandcamp has paid more than 1,640,000 million dollars directly to artists and labels since its founding in 2008, with 19 million transferred in 2025 alone thanks to “Bandcamp Fridays”, days in which the company completely waives its commission. This structure makes AI-generated music counterproductive for the platform: no one buys synthetic albums produced by AI. prompts. Spotify, meanwhile, operates on a subscription basis, distributing roughly two-thirds of its total revenue in royalties. The platform paid 10 billion dollars to the music industry in 2024but the average payment for stream ranges between 0.003 and 0.005 dollars. Besides,Spotify implemented a threshold of 1,000 annual streams in 2024 for a track to generate royalties. This structure creates perverse incentives to “cheat”: virtually free AI production, mass uploading of tracks, use of bot farms to inflate the number of views… The pay-per-play system stream It allows tiny fractions of a cent to turn into million-dollar amounts if there is enough volume. The reaction. The Bandcamp movement has some protection of its image, … Read more

When a town found a dead whale on its beaches, it decided to dynamite it. 55 years later they still celebrate it

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One of the most excessive and gory stories you have ever heard in your life is also one of the funniest, because for a change it does not involve the suffering of any living being, but rather a series of unfortunate decisions and systematic ignorance of the laws of physics. It is the story of the whale Oregon explosion, a crazy event that just turned 55 years old… and is still being celebrated. The problem. On November 12, 1970, engineers from the Oregon Highway Division, which is in charge of road traffic on a day-to-day basis, encountered an unusual dilemma on the beach in the small coastal town of Florence: getting rid of a dead eight-ton sperm whale that had been decomposing in the sun for three days. After consulting with the Navy about demolition techniques, the team decided to apply a solution as direct as it was disastrous to the corpse: half a ton of dynamite (twenty boxes), in the hope of pulverizing the cetacean. The seagulls would be in charge of cleaning up the remains. Good marines, bad advisors. The consultation turned out to be counterproductive. The marines advised on demolition with explosives, their specialty, but no one consulted marine biologists or coastal wildlife experts. Walter Umenhofer, a local businessman with military experience, warned Thornton that twenty boxes of dynamite was excessive: he recommended twenty individual cartridges or, if not, a much larger amount to completely pulverize organic tissue. His advice was ignored. Boom. The detonation, at 3:45 PM, caused a 30 meter high sand and grease apocalypsethrowing whale fragments in all directions. Blocks of tissue and muscle the size of coffee tables fell on spectators located at a safe distance of more than 400 meters from the explosion point. The screams of excitement from the hundred or so spectators turned into screams of horror as fragments of tissue fell from the sky. Some of the pieces of fat, almost a meter long, crushed the roof of a vehicle. The smell of burning flesh lingered for days and the seagulls never appeared. The decision of George Thornton, responsible for the action, lacked technical basis from the beginning. In one previous interviewadmitted: “I’m sure it will work. The only thing we’re not sure about is exactly how much dynamite we’ll need to break this… thing up, so the seagulls and crabs and other scavengers can clean it up.” Thornton decided to treat the cetacean like a rock on a road: half a ton of explosives strategically placed under the animal, in the hope that the force would propel the remains into the Pacific. What to do with a whale. Cetacean strandings have posed logistical dilemmas for coastal authorities for decades. Prior to the development of unified scientific protocols (that prioritize scientific necropsy on rapid elimination), methods for dealing with dead whales often relied on improvisation. The most common options They included burial on the beach, towing out to sea for sinking, or simply allowing the animal to decompose naturally. Today, disposal methods have evolved: countries such as South Africa, Iceland and Australia continue to use controlled explosives after towing cetaceans out to seabut the United States ended up abandoning this practice. When 41 sperm whales stranded near Florence in 1979, authorities They buried them without hesitation. Hunting In 1970, Oregon lacked specific guidelines for these cases. The Oregon Highway Division had jurisdiction over state beaches (an administrative quirk arising from the legal consideration of coastlines as part of the public highway system) but no expertise in marine biology. When the sperm whale arrived in Florence, George Thornton publicly admitted that he had been assigned to the case.”because his supervisor had gone hunting“. The closest precedent had been successful because of its modesty: two years earlier, in 1968, authorities in Long Beach, Washington, had managed a similar stranding through a conventional burial without incident. The unforgettable video. All was immortalized by KATU journalist Paul Linnman, who arrived on the scene initially frustrated by what he considered a menial assignment. Until he found out the amount of dynamite involved. With cameraman Doug Brazil documented the event on 16mm film with live magnetically recorded audio, a format that, unlike video, would retain its visual quality for decades. On. After the disaster, most of the sperm whale remained intact on the beach. Highway Division workers spent the afternoon manually burying the remains, including huge sections of the animal that were not moved from the explosion point. Thornton declared to Bacon that same afternoon that everything had gone “well…except that the explosion dug a hole in the sand beneath the whale,” directing the force upward rather than toward the ocean. decades laterThornton continued to defend the operation as a technical success distorted by hostile media coverage. It goes viral. For two decades, the incident remained a regional anecdote until comedian Dave Barry resurrected history in his Miami Herald column on May 20, 1990. Titled “The Far Side Comes to Life in Oregon,” in reference to the immortal series by gary larson. His description of the event introduced the American public to the concept of “epic fail” before the digital age popularized the term. The Oregon Department of Transportation received calls from angry people, convinced the incident had occurred recently. Which makes the exploding whale one of the first stories to go viral on the internet. Beyond the meme. The phenomenon transcended the purely digital. In 2015, Oregon indie musician Sufjan Stevens released the song ‘Exploding Whale‘, where it said “Embrace the epic failure of my exploiting whale”. Of course, the event appeared on ‘The Simpsons’, in the 2010 episode ‘The Squirt and the Whale’. In 2020, the Oregon Historical Society commissioned a 4K restoration of the original 16mm footage of the news story. The laughs. 55 years later, that fiasco in public management has been transformed into folklore and local heritage. In 2024, Florence declared November as “Exploding Whale Month”and the city celebrates the anniversary with a festival that culminates with the “Superlative … Read more

Google has decided to touch the heart of Gmail. Gemini aims to transform the inbox into something completely new

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Email has been there for decades, functioning almost silently, as a basic piece of digital life that we rarely question. We use it for studies, work, registering for services, coordinating our personal life and resolving procedures that continue to pass, to a large extent, through the inbox. Precisely for this reason, the changes in this section are usually minimal and prudent. Gmail has been a good example of that stability for years. Now, Google has decided intervene in a more profound way and do so relying on artificial intelligence. From the Mountain View company, the argument is clear: the problem is no longer just receiving emails, but managing the volume and context that accumulate in the inbox. Gmail was born in 2004 in a very different scenario, and today it coexists with endless threads, cross conversations and an information load that never stops growing. In this framework, the company presents the so-called “Gemini era” as a logical step, a way to turn the inbox into something more than a chronological file and begin to treat it as an active system to understand, prioritize and act on information. Google links a good part of these changes to Gemini 3the model that claims to be behind the new capabilities. Search less, ask more. The traditional logic of email has always been the same: search, filter and read. AI Overviews breaks that sequence by introducing a layer of automatic synthesis. When a thread gets longer, Gmail can generate a summary with the important points, avoiding having to go through message by message. And when what is needed is specific information, the proposal is even more direct: ask the inbox. Gemini interprets the query, reviews the relevant emails and returns a summarized response. Google separates the scope of these features: automatic thread summaries gradually roll out to everyone, while the option to ask inbox questions with AI Overviews is tied to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions. Write with help and understand what goes into each plan. Beyond reading email better, Google also wants to make writing it take less effort. Help me write is free and allows you to both polish existing messages and write them from scratch based on a brief indication. Added to that are the new Suggested Replies, which evolve the classic quick replies by taking into account the full context of the thread and the user’s own style. The most advanced layer, Proofread, adds grammar, tone, and style checking, but is reserved for those who subscribe to Google AI Pro and Ultra. According to Google, the rollout begins today in the United States and starts in English, with the promise of expanding languages ​​and regions in the coming months. The new inbox. AI Inbox is the most ambitious bet of this change. Gmail introduces an alternative view that transforms the inbox into a combination of task list and summary of active topics. Artificial intelligence promises to detect pending commitments, payments, appointments or responses and present them as suggested actions, while grouping long conversations together for easy catch-up. The idea is not to replace email, but to reinterpret it, making what is important emerge without the need to manually scroll through messages that, although relevant, are buried by the volume. At the moment, AI Inbox does not come as a function open to everyone. Google is testing it with “trusted testers” in the United States and only through the browser, with priority for personal Gmail accounts and not for Workspace accounts. Furthermore, the proposal still has visible shortcomings: there is no system to mark suggested actions as completed, which limits its usefulness as a task manager. Control in the hands of the user. New features powered by Gemini can be turned on or off, and the classic inbox is still available. However, that control is not completely granular: turning off AI also means you lose other smart features that many users already took for granted. Regarding privacy, Google states that it does not use Gmail emails to train its artificial intelligence models, a key guarantee so that this new layer does not generate distrust in such a sensitive space. This movement makes it clear that Google has decided not to stand still in a field that had been operating for years without profound changes. If this new way of understanding email proves to be useful on a daily basis, it is reasonable to think that other providers will end up following a similar path. In technological careers, not moving or reacting late usually has a cost. But email is also governed by a very different logic: if something works, touching it involves risks. Gmail now enters a real testing phase, where it will be necessary to see if this bet manages to simplify the experience or adds unnecessary complexity. Images | Google In Xataka | Alphabet has just overtaken Apple in the ranking of the most valuable companies in the world. The reason is in AI

China decided to privatize its daycare centers in the 1980s. Unknowingly, it was creating its enormous birth crisis.

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Not long ago, China had an excess birth problem. For more than three decades, the one child policy stopped the rapid growth of the population, but now its problem is just the opposite. The demographic crisis has turned around and Chinese population is plummeting. The government has launched plans to encourage births and its latest idea is to improve critical infrastructure. Target: daycare centers. They tell it in South China Morning PostChina is reviewing what will be the first law regulating the child care services sector. The measures will focus on children under three years of age, with the aim of building a society “fertility-friendly”. Among its key measures are improving the quality of the service, ensuring that professionals have the necessary qualifications for the position and expanding the offer of more affordable childcare, which will reduce the cost of parenting. Who takes care of the children. China is encouraging couples to have children through different measures and daycare centers were one of the key aspects to improve. Since the 80s, The state stopped offering public daycares, shifting the burden of care to families. Society adapted in the most predictable way: that the grandparents were the ones to take care of the children (something that it doesn’t always turn out well) or that the woman reduced her hours to take care of the care. A question of money. The lack of regulation has caused the supply of affordable daycare centers to be scarce and with insufficiently qualified professionals. Quality daycare was a luxury available to a few, while for less well-off families it is a last resort. The new law seeks to promote the creation of new state centers at more affordable prices. and trust. The scandals over cases of abuse in Chinese daycares are well known inside and outside their borders, and have also been given cases of abuse by babysitters. If, in addition to the fact that it is an expensive service, we add the problem of lack of trust, it is not surprising that care in the early years ends up being a deterrent factor for many families. In 2021, only 5.5% of Chinese children under three years old were in daycarea figure that contrasts with the 88% of schooling from 3 to 6 years old. Other measures. Since the end of the one-child policy in 2015, the government has implemented several plans to correct the declining birth rate curve. Along with births, marriages also declined, so it was proposed teach marriage and love classes and even be a kind of matchmaker for help young people find a partner. His last measure is one of the most striking: put a special tax on condoms. Image | note thanun in Unsplash In Xataka | If the question is how to reactivate birth rates, China believes it has the answer: finance painless births

A Chinese tire company decided to take its factory to Serbia. And now it cannot export to the US

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USA ordered last thursday the immediate seizure of all shipments of tires manufactured by Linglong in Serbia. The decision by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) service affects all US ports and is based on ‘reasonable indications’ of forced labor at the Zrenjanin plant, in the north of the Balkan country. “The message is clear: the United States will not tolerate forced labor in supply chains,” said CBP Commissioner Rodney S. Scott. Linglong, a Chinese manufacturer specializing in tires, has been operating in Europe since 2022, when its first tires went into production from the Zrenjanin plant. Why Washington is acting now. The measure comes three years after the European Parliament ask for investigations about trafficking of Vietnamese workers in this same factory. The CBP says it has based its order on workers’ testimonies, documents, photographs, NGO reports, press articles and academic research. According to the agency, the evidence demonstrates nine indicators of forced labor established by the International Labor Organization: withholding of identity documents, intimidation and threats, isolation, excessive overtime, non-payment of wages, debt bondage, abusive working conditions, deception and abuse of vulnerability. Questionable track record. The Linglong plant was the subject of great controversy in 2021, when hundreds of Vietnamese workers went on strike during the construction phase. The complaints spoke of deceptive practices in recruiting employees. Just like account According to L’Automobile, in February 2024, Serbian civil society organizations reported the case of 14 additional Indian workers allegedly subjected to forced labor. Each time, Serbian authorities rejected the accusations. The Chinese company declined all responsibility, arguing that the workers had been hired by one of its subcontractors. The underlying problem in Serbia. The Balkan country, a candidate for accession to the European Union, has multiplied its contracts with large Chinese companies in recent years. The European Parliament express already in 2021 its “concern about China’s growing influence in Serbia and the Western Balkans”, calling on the country to strengthen “its rules on regulatory compliance for Chinese business activities”. The European resolution stated that Serbian labor legislation should also apply to Chinese companies operating in the country, something that everything indicates has not happened. Beijing and Belgrade. Serbia signed a free trade agreement with China in July 2024. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić called the Linglong factory “the largest foreign direct investment in the history of Serbia” during the opening ceremony in September 2024, noting that the plant employs more than 1,200 workers. However, the US State Department pointed out in its report on human trafficking that the Serbian government “has made little progress in the ongoing investigation into allegations of forced labor at this factory.” What happens to retained tires?. As can be read in the CBP noteimporters of seized shipments now have three options: destroy the merchandise, re-export it, or prove that the products were not manufactured using forced labor. The agency reiterates that it is the fifth detention order issued by CBP in 2025 and the second in fiscal year 2026. Cover image | Robert Laursoo In Xataka | The US bans Chinese drones and turns DJI into the new Huawei. It’s an absolutely crazy idea.

In 1919 the Germans decided to sink their entire fleet in the North Sea. The steel from those ships ended up in space

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At 11:20 in the morning of June 21, 1919, Admiral von Reuter’s ship began to signal to the rest of the German ships in Scapa Flow Bay, England. The taps and water intakes were opened, the pipes were destroyed, the portholes were dismantled: no one noticed anything. Until around midday, the Friederich Der Grosse began to list to starboard. It was already late, the German flag was flying from the 74 masts. Scapa Flow. The image tells the story of Scapa Flowthe sinking of the German fleet immediately after World War I. While the Allies negotiated the terms of the Armistice with Germany, the fleet was held captive and stationed off the British coast. Von Reuter feared that the Allies would divide up the ships, so he decided to sink it completely, at any cost. The British naval ships that were on maneuvers arrived at 2:30 p.m. and were only able to save one ship. The last to sink was the battlecruiser Hindenburg. Nine Germans were killed, 16 were wounded, 1,774 were detained. 52 ships were sunk on June 21 at Scapa Flow. But they are no longer there: they are on the Moon, Jupiter and beyond the orbit of Pluto. steel is steel. A tough guy, with bad temper and few words. But in 1945 (or a little before), everything changed. We didn’t realize it at first, but we quickly discovered that although all steels are equal, there are some steels that are more equal than others. I’m not going around the bush: what happened in ’45 was the atomic bomb, the device of the Devil that made us change geological era. The problem. Since the first atomic bombs exploded on the Earth’s surface, the air contains traces of radioactive elements. They are there, dissolved in it, but the amount is so small that they are harmless. Unless for some strange reason you have to blow in enormous amounts of air in the manufacturing process of some material. It’s almost useless to us. That is, all steel manufactured after the explosion of the first atomic bomb is radioactive. Very little, almost nothing. But enough so that some medical, physical or astronomical instruments do not work correctly. For example, radioactivity monitoring systems used by spacecraft. He tells it David Bodanis in “E = mc². Biography of the most famous equation in the world“, a book that, although it has become somewhat outdated, is still a delight. You may have heard the story, but it is a good story. Steel = expensive. In the book, Bodanis explains that, faced with this problem, uncontaminated steel became very expensive. Above all, because before ’45 we did not make steel in quantities so industrial as now. I imagine dozens of NASA engineers rummaging through their family’s cutlery so they can send reliable machines into space. Until someone remembered Kaiser Wilhelm’s ships. The peculiarity of Scapa Flow. There are sunken ships in many places, but there are not many shallow inlets with 52 sunken ships in their waters. Not all of them were there, but a few were enough for us to manufacture the equipment that the Apollo mission left on the lunar surface, that which the Galileo probe took to Jupiter, and that which the Pioneer probe is taking even further. The evil, the sea. In Xataka | Quantum find in Cambridge points to solar ‘Holy Grail’: single-material solar panels In Xataka | The Atacama salt flat is the key on which the electric car industry pivots. And it’s starting to dry

Movistar Plus+ was making a comeback after four years of losing customers. Telefónica has decided to cut its workforce

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Telefónica has set 119 final departures in Movistar Plus+part of the ERE that will eliminate 4,554 positions in Spain. It is a reduction compared to the more than 200 losses initially planned, but it comes at the worst moment: when the platform was finally adding clients again. Why is it important. Movistar Plus+ has 3.75 million (the most recent data is from September 30) , the best data since 2018 after years of collapse. It lost almost 650,000 clients between 2019 and 2023, hit rock bottom, and was already beginning to recover. Now Telefónica is cutting muscle just when it needed to step on the accelerator. The paradox. The company bet a lot of money buying Canal+ and launching its own productions to compete with Netflix and Prime Video. When the numbers improve, he reduces the workforce. The inevitable question: how are you going to keep up with global giants with fewer people and a tighter budget? Yes, but. Subscriber growth does not guarantee profitability. Telefónica has reoriented Movistar Plus+ towards a more flexible and cheaper offer, unrelated to convergent packages. That adds customers but compresses margins. And competing in streaming without a global scale is very expensive. The unequal context. Netflix already has more than 300 million subscribers in the world. Prime Video exceeds 200 million. Disney+ around 120 million. Movistar Plus+ has 3.75 million in Spain, at the end of the third quarter of 2025. The difference in scale is brutal and translates directly into budget for content, technology and distribution. What works. Football continues to be the lifeline. LaLiga and the Champions League keep many subscribers hooked who, without that content, perhaps would not have stayed for so long. But a platform cannot be built only on sports rights that also increase in price every cycle, as we saw a few days ago. What deserves more luck. Movistar Plus+’s own series and documentaries have objective quality. ‘Poison‘, ‘The Messiah‘, ‘The Plague‘, ‘riot police‘, ‘The Pioneer‘ either ‘Rapa‘ demonstrate the ability to find powerful stories with local cultural sensitivity. Netflix and Prime also produce Spanish content, but Movistar Plus+ has built its own catalog that transcends obvious trends and connects with the public in another way. The problem is not the quality of the content. Quality is sometimes not enough when you compete against infinite budgets and recommendation algorithms fine-tuned with data from hundreds of millions of users. The big question. What will become of Movistar Plus+ if it continues to contract? It was beginning to regain ground, but doing so with 119 fewer people makes it difficult to maintain the pace. Without the investment capacity to match the Netflix-Amazon-Disney triumvirate, the room for maneuver narrows every quarter. The background. This ERE is not an isolated case. Telefónica has been thinning its workforce for years while it pivots towards infrastructure and gets rid of unprofitable Latin American subsidiaries. Marc Murtra, president for one year, has renovated its entire dome. The 2024 one cost 1,300 million and took 3,421 positions. This new adjustment will be more expensive and deeper. Between the lines. The unions have ended up accepting forced dismissals in minority companies such as Movistar Plus+, despite having set it as an initial red line. The pressure from the workforce to guarantee early retirements in other subsidiaries has weighed more than maintaining positions. UGT and CCOO have appealed to “common sense” and “responsibility”common euphemisms to justify a capitulation. In Xataka | Telefónica is preparing a tough ERE, but for many veterans it will be like a prize Featured image | Xataka with Mockuuups Studio

Netflix decided to kill sending content to the TV. Apple has taken advantage of the gap to score a great goal

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Netflix decided to start the month of December by eliminating one of the most basic and useful functions of its mobile application: the ability to send content (cast) from our smartphone to any television with Android TV either Google TV. An essential tool to find content quickly on your mobile and send it to your TV. What we did not expect is that, in less than two weeks, Apple has responded indirectly by bringing its Apple TV for Android the feature that Netflix has decided to kill. Better late. Goodbye to Netflix Cast. It was easy to realize this. At home I have a Google Chromecast with Google TV and a Google Nest. Every time I wanted to send content from my mobile to my television… only the Google Nest appeared. That’s when I read the confirmation of the disaster: Netflix had loaded the Cast without any explanation. The exceptions. In the Netflix support page An exception is specified to continue using the Cast function: having a third-generation or earlier Chromecast device. In other words, versions without remote control. The second, have a plan without ads. If you don’t pay, you can’t send content to TV. Cast icon on Apple TV, make a wish. Given the gap in the squad, great goal. Since yesterday, a couple of weeks after Netflix’s move, the Apple TV application for Android is compatible with Google Cast, a function that was missing since the launch of the app at the beginning of the year on the rival platform. It is necessary to have the app updated to version 2.2 to be able to send our content to the television on any Chromecast. Apple being less Apple. Apple has had to respond to Netflix in the face of an undeniable reality: its service is a minority within the ecosystem of streaming platforms. Netflix is ​​the absolute king, followed by Prime Video and Disney+. And one of the reasons was one that we know quite well: using Apple is using a product tied to its ecosystem. Despite this, Apple TV+ is dangerously close to HBO Max, about to take fourth place in the ranking, according to data from JustWatch. In this context, the introduction of Cast goes beyond a minor function: It is a surrender (more) from Apple towards a more open ecosystem. And this works in your favor Allows Apple TV+ to sneak into homes with Android phones and tablets Reduces friction of use Reduce dependence on Apple’s hardware ecosystem What are you doing to win in Spain. Apple’s strategy to continue growing in Spain is clear: swim against the current with a strategy that does not introduce advertising in the app, a small catalog but with a large presence of proposals (expensive) and own and, now, simplifying the use of its app to reduce friction that had been artificially introduced. It won’t be enough. We told it a year ago and the numbers reaffirm it: there is hardly any war in streamingsince most of the content is converging on Netflix. The post-pandemic stage forced platforms to fight to distinguish themselves, while Netflix went public at the end of December 2024 at pre-pandemic levels. Be that as it may, given the growth of Apple TV in 2025, fight head to head against an HBO focused on quality It is great news for the company. Image | Xataka In Xataka | The best streaming platforms 2025 | Comparison of Disney+, Netflix, HBO Max, Prime Video, Movistar Plus+, Filmin, Apple TV, SkyShowtime and Rakuten TV: catalog, functions and prices

For years, TV ads have been louder without violating any laws. Spain has decided that this is over

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A common experience among millions of viewers: you are watching your favorite series at a comfortable volume when an advertising block bursts in, forcing you to rush headlong towards the remote control. This calculated shock could have its days numbered in Spain thanks to quantifiable technical criteria to monitor the sound level of advertisements. The law. The National Markets and Competition Commission has established for the first time a series of criteria so that the sound level of the advertising blocks does not exceed that of the programs, according to the agreement INF/DTSA/083/25 published on November 20, 2025. The regulations extend the regulation that from summer 2025 DTT governs the entire audiovisual ecosystem: video streaming platforms such as YouTube and on-demand services, music applications such as Spotify, pay television and conventional and digital radio stations. The regulator warns that non-compliance constitutes a minor infraction with penalties that can reach 200,000 euros in serious cases. The technical deception: dB vs. LUFS. The advertising industry has for decades exploited a fissure in the traditional measurement of sound. Conventional decibels record the electrical amplitude of the signal, but ignore a crucial factor: how the human brain processes that sound information. Two recordings may register identical values ​​on a traditional peak meter, and yet one is perceived as noticeably louder than the other. The secret is in the frequency composition. Our auditory system responds unevenly depending on the pitch: mid frequencies (especially between 1 and 4 kHz, where the human voice is concentrated) are much more audible to us than deep bass or extreme treble. This physiological characteristic allows advertisers to create messages that sound louder without violating technical decibel limits. The birth of the LUFS. The solution came when the International Telecommunication Union published the ITU-R BS.1770 standardadopted in August 2010 by the European Broadcasting Union. This system introduces the LUFS (Loudness Units relative to Full Scale), which integrate a weighting filter K that mathematically replicates the sensitivity of the ear. The result: a measurement that reflects actual perception, not just electrical power. Spain aligns itself with Europe. He Royal Decree 250/2025approved in March, established for the first time an objective parameter for Spanish DTT: -23.0 LUFS with a tolerance of ±1.0 LU (Loudness Unit). This figure is not arbitrary, but coincides exactly with the normalized value that the European Broadcasting Union has been recommending since 2010. The CNMC has now taken the next step and has extended these criteria beyond traditional television. Implementation. The Spanish regulator has opted for a gradual approach. The CNMC does not require platforms to reencode millions of hours of historical content immediately. The document allows operators to adopt “technical criteria that offer an equivalent level of protection”, a flexible formula that recognizes the characteristics of each medium. But implementation faces complex obstacles. While traditional television networks control every second of broadcast from a production room, the streaming It works with distributed architectures where advertising is dynamically inserted through programmatic systems. YouTube, for example, hosts content generated by millions of users with disparate equipment, from professional studios to smartphones. Technically monitoring each ad inserted in real time in this tangle becomes a considerable logistical challenge. Photo of Vadim Babenko in Unsplash / Elyas Pasban in Unsplash

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