AMC Global Media Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to AMC Network's first quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participant lines are in listen only mode. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then one on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star then zero to reach an operator. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Mr. Nick Siebert, Head of Investor Relations.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the AMC Network's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining us this morning are Josh Stapak, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ed Carroll, Chief Operating Officer, and Chris Spade, Chief Financial Officer. Today we will begin with prepared remarks and then we will open the call for questions. If you do not have a copy of today's release, it is available on our website at amcnetworks.com. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this call may include certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance or results and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. Please refer to AMC Network's SEC filings for a discussion of risks and uncertainties. The company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements made on this call. On today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. The required definitions and reconciliations can be found at the end of the earnings press release issued today. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Josh.

Good morning and thank you for joining us. Today you'll hear prepared remarks from me, from our COO Ed Carroll, and our CFO Chris Spade before we open up the call to questions. I'll spend a few minutes talking about the pivot we continue to make in our fundamental business. Ed will discuss several of our operational highlights and Chris will review our financial performance. including discussion of our new operating segments which we noted in the earnings press release we issued earlier this morning. With regard to our new operating segments, I'll briefly say that we've made this change in order to best reflect our ongoing business transformation. This includes taking a multi-platform distribution approach to maximizing the value of our compelling content, particularly as we retain more ownership rights to that content. This multi-platform approach today includes monetizing our content across our vibrant and growing streaming platforms, our linear and international channels, as well as through selective content licensing. And we think this new segmentation best represents our operational approach. Our earnings release noted revenue impacts for the first quarter related to content licensing, primarily due to timing of Fear the Walking Dead and one less episode, The Walking Dead. Excluding this impact, total revenue grew low to mid-single digits for the first quarter, largely driven by streaming revenue growth. Chris will discuss this in greater detail in her remarks. In the first quarter overall, AMC Networks had solid performance, driven by continued momentum from our streaming services, supported by our strong content. We continue to maintain a strong financial profile with a solid balance sheet with a billion dollars in cash and net leverage of 2.4 times. We have returned to shareholders almost $1.4 billion over the past several years. Our buyback program has retired almost 46% of the shares outstanding since inception. And even with our streaming investments, we expect continued healthy levels of free cash flow. As we indicated on our last call, we doubled the number of our paid streaming subs in 2020 to end the year with more than 6 million paid subscribers in aggregate across our services. I'm very pleased to say that we remain on track to meet the targets we outlined in our prior call, in which we forecast that we'll end 2021 with more than 9 million subscribers. The momentum in our streaming business continues to surpass our original expectations and streaming is now the most significant growth area of our company. We had a strong quarter across all of our streaming services with particularly healthy demand for our AMC Plus premium bundled streaming offering as well as for our Sundance Now and All Black targeted services. By having multiple services, we are able to take advantage of content and marketing opportunities order to quarter and service by service. As a result, comparatively, we are less impacted by the availability of tentpole events in any one month or quarter as we grow subscribers interested in the depth of content we offer in each area that we operate in. As we indicated in our last call, we are on a clear path to more than triple our aggregate subscribers by 2025, at which point we anticipate having between 20 and 25 million paid subscribers, a range which will make streaming the company's largest revenue segment and which will be very meaningful for AMC Networks. Each of our offerings serve people's very specific interests and passions, with a clear proposition, whether it's British mysteries and dramas with Acorn TV or horror and suspense with Shudder. This reflects a quite differentiated approach to streaming as compared to the larger something for everyone offerings that aim to appeal to every member of the household. And it is why our services are being purchased in addition to, and as an absolute compliment to, the large general entertainment offerings. Our streaming business model provides us with several critical benefits. First, by targeting specific content areas, we are developing loyal and devoted audiences who have specific enthusiasm for our material and seek out our services for the depth of content we offer, which they can't get anywhere else. A targeted approach also enables passionate fan communities to form around our content. These very attractive and unique subscriber dynamics result in high engagement, which in turn contribute to generally lower subscriber acquisition costs and lower churn. In fact, we believe Acorn has among the lowest churn of any U.S. streaming service. In addition, because we offer discrete areas of editorial interest that our subscribers seek out with absolute intention, We believe our services have sustainable long-term stickiness as well as pricing power. And by enabling our deep libraries of content and expanding our deep libraries of content, we are building loyal and vibrant content communities, which we can continue to grow in multiple ways. Another benefit of our model relates to the efficiency of our content costs. Because we are only focused on the shows that we know our subscribers want, identify with, and have affinity for, we don't need massive content pipelines that require billions and in some cases tens of billions of dollars in content spend. Rather, by carefully curating and focusing the content offerings on our platforms, the bigger shows work in concert with our thematic libraries to offer a familiar destination to our subscribers in a world where the content that makes headlines is often shifting from one service to the next week by week and month by month. This provides us with a very attractive economic model that has inherent deficiencies that continue to hold and build even as we continue to grow these services. This results in high subscriber lifetime value and very strong margin potential for us. Regarding our AMC Plus ad-free premium bundle service I mentioned earlier, it is the newest service in our portfolio that we launched late last year, and we are seeing high engagement and strong growth for it. AMC Plus is a rich offering that combines the strength and curation of our targeted streaming platforms by including Shutter and Sundance Now, in addition to the high-quality content users know from our linear channels, AMC, BBC America, IFC, and Sundance TV, with a focus on two distinct content areas from them, character-led prestige dramas, including shows like Better Call Saul, Killing Eve, and Gangs of London, and epic world shows with series like A Discovery of Witches and shows in The Walking Dead University. It's worth noting that we created AMC Plus with the active participation of our MVPD partners, and it is an offering that very much aligns our interests with theirs as we work together to provide multiple options for their customers. We continue to inhabit the MVPD's basic cable video world with our high-value, low-cost linear channels while now also providing them with high quality streaming offerings to sell to their broadband only subscribers. And importantly, through AMC+, we are able to expand the reach of the AMC brand from the roughly 85 million or so US cable video subscribers to a universe in the US that includes every broadband home available now in the future. Distributor interest in our streaming offerings is evident in the wide distribution we have to date. It includes Comcast, AT&T, Dish and Sling, digital platforms such as Amazon Channels, Apple TV Channels, and Roku. And most recently, the addition of YouTube TV, which began offering our streaming services just last month. So this relationship with our MVPDs, in which we inhabit two shelves, if you will, of their stores, represents a significant change and puts us in greater harmony with them. Turning briefly to advertising, if I may. While we had lower inventory due to content shift and continued macro ratings pressures in the quarter, we are seeing a strong scatter marketplace with very healthy demand for high quality content. Additionally, we are seeing accelerating growth from the evolving AVOD and fast channel space and we are focused on reaching new audiences with our content. We also continue to focus on making advances in new ad-related technologies and applications, which Ed will speak to in more detail in his remarks. So I'll close my portion by noting that the transition of the company to be the worldwide leader in targeted streaming on the strength of our focused, strong content continues on track. The support of our distribution partners for our streaming efforts and our advanced advertising strides are providing us with both stability and momentum. We are very confident about our strong programming portfolio, led by our seasoned operating team that has a proven ability to identify, engage, and retain targeted audiences. We believe the high viewer engagement, efficient economic model and pricing power of our streaming offerings provide us with really important strategic advantages, which, when coupled with our valuable linear channel offerings, will fuel our growth and will position us extremely well over the near, mid, and long term. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Ed Carroll to review operational highlights.