EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: “Operators are our most important partners and we love them, they pay us a lot of money,” Turner Broadcasting CEO John Martin (pictured) told Mobile World Live.

He explained the company wants its content to be available on as many platforms as possible, and wants to be “on as many [operator] packages as possible as consumers are going to be given more and more choice about how they want to consume content”.

This is because “the biggest growth is all happening in mobile”. Outside the US, Turner’s biggest businesses are kids and CNN “and each of those two lend themselves to huge mobile consumption,” Martin said.

AT&T struck a $85.4 billion deal to acquire Time Warner (of which Turner is a division) in October 2016, and the deal is currently going through a rigorous approval process in the US and internationally.

In a Mobile World Congress keynote, Martin said “we are looking forward to working with AT&T when the deal closes” and though it is “very unlikely” any of Turner’s content will be exclusive to AT&T, he believes the operator is so huge it will “super charge our ability to innovate and grow.”

Martin also thinks augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) “are going to be huge” for Turner because it is relevant to all the categories it is involved in, from entertainment and sports to news and children’s programming.

Click here for the full interview.