AMC Global Media Inc.

Welcome to the AMC Network's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today. Nick Siebert, Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the AMC Network's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Joining us this morning are Matt Blank, Interim Chief Executive Officer, and Chris Spade, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer. Today's press release is available on our website at amcnetworks.com. We will begin with prepared remarks, and then we'll open the call for questions. I would like to remind everyone that today's 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 discussion of risks and uncertainties. The company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements made on this call. Today, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Required definitions and reconciliations can be found at the end of today's press release. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Matt. Matt?

Thanks, Nick, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. AMC Network's first quarter marked a solid start to 2022, highlighted by total company revenue growth, strong gains in streaming revenue and subscribers, and continued momentum for a strong content slate across our portfolio of superfan brands. In the last few weeks and months have shown anything, it's that anyone trying to build a streaming business can't forget about the business part. These practical considerations have always been our focus as we have moved into this space, and we continue to make significant headway on our differentiated strategy of offering streaming services that appeal to target audiences with specific affinities and passions. Our approach is considered, curated, and cost-efficient, and is a distinctly different strategy than others aiming to offer something for everyone. In contrast, our goal is to offer, as we've said before, everything to someone. And the strategy is working. I'm pleased to report that we've achieved the Q1 streaming subscriber target we laid out on our last call, adding more than 430,000 new subscribers in the first quarter in aggregate across our portfolio and ending the quarter with 9.5 million total paying subscribers. Coming off our strong first quarter, we're reaffirming our full year 2022 financial outlook. And with our content cost advantages, our continued ability to super serve audiences and fans with deep content offerings, and our clear focus on profitability by virtue of our unique strategy, we feel better than ever about reiterating our previously communicated target of achieving between 20 and 25 million streaming subscribers in 2025. And as we discussed in our last call, we expect we'll be halfway towards that target by the end of 2022. We continue to excel at what we do best, creating excellent premium content and building strong, powerful brands while simultaneously maximizing our existing linear and ad-supported digital businesses. And those fall apart due to our pioneering efforts in advanced advertising. The most recent example of how our strong content is driving success across all of our platforms is Better Call Saul, which returned last month for the start of its sixth and final season. The debut was a record for us, driving the most new subscribers of any premiere in the history of AMC+, along with remarkable social buzz and engagement, which we see continuing through the run of final episodes that extends across the next several months. We also saw solid linear ratings, and our strength in linear continues to be a powerful promotional platform enhancing our ability to grow streaming subscribers and optimize results across our business. Since the start of the year, we've made real progress in several areas of our streaming business. First, our unique targeted approach continues to provide us with several key advantages when it comes to attracting and to retaining subscribers. Subscribers come to our services because of the depth of content, a shared community of like-minded fans, and our tailored and curated approach to programming. All Black, for example, is programmed by a team that's plugged into the black creative community and is immersed in this content. Our curators at ACORN know the particular types of mysteries and dramas that will resonate most with our subscribers. And as for Shudder, it's firmly established itself as the premier streaming destination for horror and continues to be a terrific success story. Shudder had a particularly strong first quarter of growth, fueled in part by an expanding slate of Shudder originals, as well as a deep library ranging from crowd-pleasers to hidden gems, a content offering that horror fans can't get enough of. We continue to see strong consumer loyalty to our services and churn improvements across our streaming portfolio. Our focus on offering a targeted experience to our respective subscriber bases provides us with the opportunity to create high viewer engagement around the shows and the movies we deliver. Two recent examples from Acorn TV, a new series called Chelsea Detective that premiered in February and has garnered our biggest total audience of any Acorn series in 2022. And last month, a new series called Harry Wild starring Jane Seymour generated the most streams in the first 30 days of any premiere so far this year. We've talked before about our comparative level of content spend across our targeted streaming services. And obviously, this is an area that's gotten some recent attention broadly across the industry. It's worth noting that the most popular titles across our four most established and targeted streaming services, Acorn TV, Shudder, Sundance Now, and All Black, typically cost less than a million dollars per episode, and sometimes substantially less than that. In fact, our annual content amortization last year across our targeted services combined is less than the cost of one season of some of the bold-faced and heavily promoted titles produced by the larger streamers. Just a remarkable and underappreciated level efficiency in our targeted content spend. In fact, since this time last year, across all of our streaming services, we've added over 1,500 hours of new content. and we ended the quarter with over 12,000 hours of content for our subscribers to enjoy. Global expansion of our streaming services is another area where we're steadily making progress, and we're just beginning to scale as we bring our services, including AMC Plus, to the international markets. In order to manage our growth overseas, we're initially working with strategic partners, whether that's traditional distributors of our own international channel portfolio or digital distributors such as Apple TV channels and Amazon. We've just begun to opportunistically roll out our services in key markets, including the UK, Australia, and India. We expect to add more overseas distribution in the coming months. There's a tremendous global potential out there for us, and we see rich opportunities in the months and years ahead. Last quarter, we talked about our acquisition of leading anime content distributor Sentai and its anime-focused target service called HiDive. Over the past few months, we've moved quickly to onboard the Sentai team and incorporate them into the company. We're now expanding this business on a number of fronts, including developing a new, free, ad-supported HiDive-branded streaming channel called HiDive by anime. It's still early days, but we like what we're seeing in terms of subscriber behavior in turn with HiDive and are more excited than ever about its future potential. So lots of momentum for us in streaming. Our measured yet aggressive pursuit of subscribers and our demonstrated ability to meet or exceed our growth targets gives us great confidence in our differentiated model, particularly as we continue to reconstitute our revenue mix as we remain focused on near-term profitability. The first quarter kicked off the biggest year of original programming in AMC Network's history. Our subscriber growth benefited from a string of key programming events, with two standouts being the final season of A Discovery of Witches in January, which streamed across AMC+, Shudder and Sundance Now, and then in February, AMC+, debuts the middle eight episodes and the expanded final season of The Walking Dead, which will complete a series run later this year. And we recently completed the fourth and final season of Killing Eve, which premiered in February and was the number two driver of engagement and acquisitions for AMC Plus over the course of the season, second only to The Walking Dead. The series saw steady week-over-week streaming growth across AMC Plus, with the finale delivering season-high viewership. Last month, we premiered a gritty new crime drama with huge cultural relevance called 61st Street, which has been a strong performer on both our AMC Plus and all-black streaming platforms. Among all first-season series launches on AMC Plus, to date, 61st Street ranks as the number two most-streamed series in its premiere week. Behind only Kevin Keneff himself, On all black, 61st Street has been the number one acquisition driver with the top three most streamed episodes of television on the platform since premiering last month. And the programming momentum continues here into the second quarter. I mentioned earlier that the final season of Better Call Saul, which consists of 13 episodes split into two parts, with the second half of the final season premiering in July... In June, we'll launch an exciting new crime drama from Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin called Dark Winds. Also on the way is the premiere of a new utopian drama, Moonhaven, starring Joe Manganiello and Dominic Monaghan. And we'll have the return of the dark comedy Kevin Keneff himself starring Annie Murphy of Schitt's Creek fame. Later this year, we'll bring fans the final eight episodes of The Walking Dead. And then we'll debut the first two series in our emerging Anne Rice universe, which will be our next big franchise, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches. By the way, I just did an early cut of the first episode of Interview with the Vampire and couldn't be more excited. We think it's going to blow people away with Mayfair Witches close behind. These are franchises we expect will pay off for years to come. And our pipeline is just as robust going forward into 2023, including a fantastic lineup of new shows and universe expansions. We have two new series set within the Walking Dead universe, focused on the popular and fan favorite Daryl, Negan, and Maggie characters. A new series bringing viewers into the widely popular, engrossing, and award-winning world of Orphan Black. as well as two new dramas, a psychological thriller called Invitation to a Bonfire and a dramatic comedy, Damascus. Also next year, we have two new series starring two names already beloved by AMC viewers, Bob Odenkirk and Giancarlo Esposito, who both established their iconic characters in Breaking Bad and continued, of course, in Better Call Saul. We recently greenlit a new drama comedy from starring Bob Odenkirk called Straight Man, adapted from a Richard Rousseau novel. And Giancarlo Esposito will star in a new drama called The Driver. We couldn't be more thrilled to be keeping these two remarkable talents with AMC for their next big projects. We're also taking advantage of our film labels, IFC Films, IFC Midnight, RLJE Films, as well as Shudder, to reinvent the so-called pay-one window for our movie businesses and make new films exclusively available to AMC Plus subscribers each Friday, 52 weeks a year. This initiative kicks off tomorrow with the streaming premiere of a movie called Clean from IFC Films and starring Oscar winner Adrian Brody. We piloted this strategy late last year and saw notable results in both viewership and subscriber acquisitions. The combination of a weekly lineup of exclusive new films coupled with our biggest year of original programming provides an incredible array of entertainment. We continue to expand our AMC Plus offering with owned and controlled exclusive and carefully curated content as we serve and grow our audiences. Earlier, I touched on how we continue to optimize our streaming, digital, and linear platforms. I wanted to expand on that for a moment. Streaming and linear can and should strongly complement each other, and I'll point to our all-black streaming service and our WeTV linear network as examples. WeTV has long been the number one cable network with black women on Thursday nights, and we recently rebranded Thursday nights as all-black on WeTV. We'll increasingly share content across these two platforms, and we're seeing strengthening on both platforms as a result. For example, after airing three prior seasons of the hit All Black series, A House Divided, on WE TV, the fourth season premiered on All Black in January, and streaming viewership increased 84%, with much of the growth coming from WE TV viewers who are new to All Black. We saw similar growth with the most recent season of another All Black series called Double Cross, after prior seasons aired on WE TV. We've also seen churn decline to historic lows for All Black, while at the same time, WE TV on Thursdays and Fridays is delivering double-digit rating gains from the previous year. So overall, a demonstration of how we're leveraging incremental content monetization opportunities and driving audience engagement across our streaming as well as our linear platforms. This is also the time of year for some of our most important conversations with our advertising partners. And we've never before entered an upfront with such a mix of meaningful strengths across our lineup of original content, the ability to offer advanced technology solutions that matter most to advertisers, and an expanding reach across a variety of platforms. To supplement advertising opportunities on our own linear and digital platforms, we continue to take advantage of our deep library of targeted content by redeploying it across our FAST channels. When we first entered the AVOD and FAST space some two years ago, we did so with a very clear and a very deliberate platform agnostic strategy of making our content available in as many places as possible so we could meet viewers wherever they were. That strategy has opened up a world of monetization opportunities for us. We currently have eight fast channels carried on six leading third-party platforms and are developing six new channels, including the HiDive Animate channel I mentioned earlier. This has become an increasingly important element of our ad-supported content business, and we see tremendous potential for us going forward in a very hot and growing space. We've also made distinct progress growing our advanced advertising business. and demonstrated our continued advertising innovation through our commitment to selling addressable ad spots in every hour of original programming this year on our AMC and WeTV networks with an addressable footprint of nearly 40 million homes. This is the most significant national addressable deployment in the history of television, and we're thrilled Amazon was our first partner to jump on board with this opportunity. And this is just the beginning. as we work with our ad partners to usher in a new age of highly relevant and targeted advertising on television with brand safety, with control, with transparency, and with enhanced returns for our advertising partners and AMC networks. So across our company, AMC is operating from a position of great strength. Our strong execution of our strategy produced solid results in the first quarter, and it's expected to lead to another strong year of revenue and subscriber growth right through our 2022 targets and beyond. Our differentiated streaming approach continues to provide us with meaningful advantages. We're growing subscribers, we're expanding internationally, and most importantly, we continue to create and find premium content and monetize it on a level we never have before, which is fueling growth across our company. We remain laser-focused on profitability and the economics of our streaming businesses and are already beginning to see the positive differentiation of our targeted approach. We see so much opportunity ahead to win subscriptions, entertain viewers, and create meaningful long-term value. With that, I'll turn the call over to Chris for more detail on our financial results. Thank you.