AMC Global Media Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the AMC Network second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this point, I would like now to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Nick Siebert. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the AMC Network second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining us this morning are Josh Sapang, 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'll 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 like to turn the call over to Josh.

Well, good morning, and thank you for joining us. On today's call, I'll discuss our continued business transformation and strong performance before I turn the call over to Ed and Chris, who will provide additional operational and financial details before we open the call to questions. We're pleased to report a second quarter with very strong financial results and continued streaming subscriber growth supported by our popular and acclaimed content. We continue to maintain a strong financial profile with a healthy balance sheet and solid cash position. These results reflect the significant progress we are making against our four key financial and strategic priorities, which I will restate if I may. They are, one, growing subscribers for our targeted streaming services and significantly expanding distribution of those services. Increasing our content ownership with a focus on new franchise opportunities. Three, growing our digital and advanced ad revenue business. And four, doing all this while maintaining the high value of our linear networks. Our successful execution in these areas is enabling us to continue to meaningfully reconstitute the revenue mix of our company, most notably with increasing revenue from our targeted streaming services and our digital and advanced advertising efforts. We are very pleased today to reaffirm the full year 2021 guidance for our streaming subscriber targets, which we shared with you at the beginning of the year. We remain on track to end 2021 with at least 9 million paid streaming subs in aggregate across our services. And we're well on our way to our earlier stated goal of having between 20 and 25 million paid subs by the year 2025, a subscriber range that is very meaningful to AMC networks. As we advance our position as the worldwide leader in targeted streaming, I will say that we are nothing short of thrilled with our momentum. Subscriber satisfaction with our services continues to be very high, and streaming consumption is strong. Our unique approach to streaming is to target audiences who are highly interested and often passionate about very specific content areas and to offer those audiences a depth of content that they really just can't get anywhere else. This is obviously in stark contrast to the general entertainment services which offer everything from kids programming to reality TV to news and sports. For our subscribers, our targeted services represent reliable destinations for the kind of content that they identify with, whether that's character-driven dramas that define the AMC brand on AMC+, black TV and film on All Black, or British and internationally focused mysteries on Acorn TV. Very importantly... Across all these, we are not competing with the big something-for-everyone offerings. Rather, we are complements to them. Unlike those, if I might call them, mainstream services, we don't need to spend tens of billions of dollars creating content across multiple categories in order to satisfy every member of a household and grow to enormous scale. This is in turn providing us with a very attractive economic model that is enabling us to significantly reorient our company toward a unique streaming future. Our AMC Plus offering, which bundles, if you'll recall, our high-quality character-driven AMC dramas, along with our Shudder and Sundance Now services, continues to perform very well and is resonating with subscribers, creating high engagement and retention. We launched AMC Plus last fall, and in less than a year, it's quickly become our fastest-growing service, driven by increasing availability and distribution and the power of our strong dramatic content, which often has outsized cultural impact despite the wide availability of dramatic material and a competitive environment. One recent example of this is our new original and own series called Kevin Can F Himself that debuted in June on AMC+, as well as our linear channels. It stars Emmy Award winner Annie Murphy, who some of you may know from Schitt's Creek. The show has been one of the more talked about dramas during the last quarter, receiving wide critical praise and much acclaim for its innovative format that mixes a multi-camera sitcom with a single camera drama. It's quickly become one of the top three most streamed series on AMC+, and it's also performed well on our AMC Linear channels. Demonstrating how we are able to use our various platforms synergistically, serving audiences and creating value with our high-quality content across multiple platforms, in this case, streaming and linear. In terms of distribution, we are very well positioned. We've made our incumbent distributors key partners in our streaming transition while maintaining the most cost-effective wholesale rate for our cable channels. This is an approach that has been highly successful for us in the marketplace. We are allied with conventional MVPDs in an ongoing and consistent way with the breadth and depth of our partnerships ranging from working with Comcast on the very creation of AMC+, where it was essentially incubated, to co-producing what we think is a wonderful new dramatic series with Charter Spectrum titled Beacon 23, It stars Lena Headey, who you may know from Game of Thrones. We believe this activity, when coupled with the successful renewals we've had with major MVPDs over the last 12 to 18 months in the U.S. and abroad, is a demonstration of our longstanding, mutually beneficial, and now newly enhanced partnerships with those MVPDs. As we continue to expand distribution of our streaming offerings, We're pleased to have recently completed an agreement for a promotional partnership with Verizon for AMC Plus that will significantly expand the reach of our premium streaming bundle. We'll have more specifics when the partnership launches, but this is a very meaningful deal across Verizon Fios and wireless that demonstrates the growth and momentum of AMC Plus, the strength of our content, and the depth of our brand resonance. in a very competitive marketplace. In addition, we are expanding our digital distribution by launching AMC Plus in Canada later this month on both Apple TV channels and Amazon Prime channels. This expansion joins the overseas opportunities we're just beginning to tap into with our targeted services, particularly Acorn and Shutter, which are expanding into markets in Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand New Zealand, excuse me, and more countries to come. Moving to advertising, we had a very strong quarter with double-digit growth of 13% driven primarily by higher pricing. In addition, our ad sales group just completed one of the most successful upfronts in our company's history. This performance speaks to the continued strength of our world-class content and underscores our positions as one of the few offerings on basic cable with the kind of high-quality scripted content that advertisers and audiences find very desirable and particularly valuable. Our strong advertising results in the quarter were also driven by increasing digital revenue coming from our expanding ad-supported streaming efforts, an area which we've been particularly active in. By deploying our own library content increasingly across free ad-supported video on demand and free ad-supported streaming platforms like Pluto TV, Amazon's IMDb TV, and Samsung TV+, among others, we're reaching new viewers and passionate superfans and tapping into what is an entirely new and growing revenue stream for us that is reflected in our results. And importantly, we are utilizing the strong marketplace to advantage AMC Network's ad revenue mix, including shifting more dollars into our digital and advanced products, thereby ensuring our momentum continues and is sustained well beyond this immediate time and into the future when there may well be market fluctuations that, of course, occur over time. I'll touch just a bit more on international, if I may. Our global business performed exceptionally well in the quarter. We saw a surge in ad revenues driven by higher pricing, as well as ratings increases, an indication of the continued appeal and demand for our strong portfolio of channels across Europe and Latin America. As I mentioned earlier in these remarks, we're very focused on the opportunities we see overseas for our streaming services and we see high growth potential before us to broaden our streaming subscriber base internationally as well as domestically. I'll close out my comments by saying that AMC Networks continues to stand out due to the strength and quality of our content, our ability to forge strong relationships with subscribers, viewers, distribution partners, and advertisers, and the spectacular team of people who work here. The progress we are making against our strategic priorities that I outlined, our momentum, particularly in streaming, and our clear and differentiated approach that has not only given us momentum, but has sustainable cost benefits, reaffirms our confidence in the strength of our business and in our position to continue to deliver value over the short, mid, and long term. Before I turn the call over to add Carol, we do want to acknowledge a recent event related to someone who's very close to us in our company. We have been lucky enough to know and work with Bob Odenkirk for a long time through Better Call Saul and before that Breaking Bad. It's close to impossible to spend any time around Bob without developing great affection and appreciation for his talents, his spirit, and who he is as a person. We are so glad he's on the mend and just wanted to pause and wish him all the best in his recovery, which is now underway. Now, if I may, I'll turn the call over to Ed to review our operational highlights. Thank you.