Cinedigm Corp

Thank you for your patience, everyone. The Synodymes fourth quarter and full year physical 2022 results will begin shortly. If you would like to ask a question at the end of the presentation, please press start, followed by the number one on your telephone keypads.

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Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Today we are hosting a conference call to discuss Cinedigm's fourth quarter and four-year physical 2022 results. My name is Nadia and I'll be your conference operator. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will have a question and answer session at the end of the call, at which time all participants wishing to ask a question will be instructed to press star, followed by the number one. If anyone needs operator assistance, please press star zero on the telephone keypad. You may re-enter the queue. Please note that this call has been recorded. Your host for today is Ms. Laura Kiernan, Head of Investor Relations of Synodyme. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Nadia. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Synodyme's fiscal 22 fourth quarter and four-year results conference call. Before we begin, I would like to point out that certain statements made on today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to risk uncertainties, and assumptions. The company's periodic reports that are filed with the SEC describe potential risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's business and financial results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. All of the information discussed on this call as of today, June 28th, Cinnabon undertakes no duty to update it. In addition, certain financial information presented on this call represents non-GAAP financial measures. We encourage you to read our disclosures and the reconciliation tables applicable to GAAP measures in our earnings release as you carefully consider these metrics. With us today, we have Chris McBurke, Chairman and CEO, John Canning, Chief Financial Officer, Yolanda Macias, Chief Content Officer, Gary Lucredo, Chief Operating Officer, General Counsel and President, Eric Opica, Chief Strategy Officer and President of Cenedine Network, and Tony Guidora, Chief Technology and Product Officer, all of whom will be available for questions following the prepared remarks. I will now turn the call over to Chris McGurk to begin.

Thank you, Laura. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining us on the call today. First, I'm going to briefly review our extremely strong results. And then I'm going to speak to the reasons our content and streaming business strategy is clearly working so very well. At the same time, when many players in the industry are struggling to find their footing in this turbulent macroeconomic and business environment. So we had tremendous success once again this fourth fiscal quarter. More than doubling our total revenues, which were up 104% to $16.9 million, driven by a 109% increase in ad-supported streaming revenues, which were also up an incredible 793% on a two-year basis. Our streaming revenues in total were our highest ever for a quarter, and our revenues also far exceeded analysts' estimates. Our full-year revenues of $56 million were up 78%, driven by a 108% increase in our streaming channel revenues, again led by ad-supported revenue growth of 147%, strongly outperforming the rest of the industry. On a two-year basis, full-year streaming channel and ad-supported revenues rocketed up as well, higher by 290% and 514%, respectively. Combined with the long-planned and successful monetization of our legacy cinema equipment business, our rapid revenue growth helped generate $7.1 million in adjusted EBITDA for the full year. That helped eliminate all our debt, fund the bulk of the important digital media rights for DMR acquisition, and generate positive net income for the full year. Now let me talk about the reasons we are generating these strong results. Six straight quarters of triple-digit streaming growth despite the tumult in our industry and the overall business environment. The most important factor driving our growth is that we developed a winning strategy for the streaming content business years ago and have completely stuck to that vision. Our vision has always been to approach the streaming content business, which is the highest growth sector of the entertainment business, with a diversified, risk-advantaged portfolio approach to content channels and revenue streams while controlling and leveraging our own technology. In that way, we plan to take the fullest advantage of every facet of the massive ongoing sea change as consumers switch their viewing habits to streaming. So while many players in the streaming business have only a single streaming channel or a single revenue source, we built organically and through acquisitions a portfolio of 30 enthusiast streaming channels targeted directly at specific high-interest audiences. These channels are complementary too and not competitive with the big general entertainment subscription services like Disney Plus and Netflix. We fully own 15 of our 30 channels, including Fandor, Dove, and ScreenBox, and have distribution deals for the other 15 with branded entities such as Bob Ross, Real Madrid, and the Elvis Presley Channel announced just yesterday. This deal mix creates yet another portfolio effect. When years ago, most players in the business focused on staking the position in the highly competitive and extremely expensive general entertainment subscription channel business, we pivoted to building a position in the ad-supportive and fast channel businesses when we recognized the huge oncoming flow of advertising dollars into streaming. You just saw the result of Synodyne being an early mover, with our ad numbers up 147% this year. So while all the headlines blast news about subscription streaming companies flaming out like Quibi or CNN Plus because of massive spending and losses, or others like Netflix are scrambling to enter the advertising business, While at the same time they all continue to spend billions of dollars to pummel and outspend each other in the general entertainment subscription wars, Synonite is already established in advertising and has been there for a long time. We know what we are doing in the fast-growing advertising space and are growing that business like wildfire. And we customize the best effective approach, subscription, AVOD, fast or hybrid, with every one of our channels. And that creates another diversified portfolio effect in our revenue streams. And over the years, we forged deals with every major streaming platform as well as every major television and device manufacturer in the business, including Samsung, LG, PCL, Vizio, Amazon Fire, Roku, and pretty much everyone else, with a total reach into over 1 billion streaming devices worldwide. This broad and robust platform distribution again demonstrates the diversification approach to our strategy. And another huge factor in our success, which separates us from much of the industry and much of the cost spiral affecting competing streaming companies, is that we built and control one of the largest modern content libraries in the world, now at 46,000 independent films and TV episodes and growing. We are not overly reliant on the expensive risky original development and production business like others in this industry. Instead, we predominantly acquire and distribute completed films and television shows in multiple year deals for either small upfront advances or no advance revenue sharing agreements. With this approach, not only do we incur much less risk than our competitors, but we also possess a much better understanding of the content's market potential than if we were creating content from scratch. And we have strong branded content partners like Hallmark and the NFL that add to our success in this area. This strategy gives us the content rocket fuel to build and refresh our streaming channel portfolio while giving us yet another diversified revenue stream because we also license this content to every player in the streaming ecosystem, including Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, to name just a few. The last element of our long-term business vision was to control our own streaming technology. We spent the last eight years co-developing with our partners at Foundation TV our MatchPoint platform, a full-stack, industry-leading streaming and content distribution platform. And we acquired Foundation TV last year and now fully own all intellectual property pertaining to MatchPoint. Today, We have a growing and talented engineering team in India building MatchPoint 2.0, as well as the upcoming Cineverse, keeping us at the cutting edge of industry innovation. Not only does MatchPoint provide us with a state-of-the-art streaming platform, but it also saves us millions of dollars annually in technology and content distribution costs, as well as attracting top-tier brands and partners that want an effective, high-quality streaming channel. MatchPoint will also help establish yet another diversified revenue stream in the SaaS arena and in the lucrative third-party content aggregation business. So, in summary, we have successfully implemented every element of our strategic vision. First, our targeted enthusiast streaming channel approach. Second, our diversified 30-channel portfolio, distribution footprint, and revenue streams. our low-risk, high-return control of a massive amount of independent content, and fourth, owning our own state-of-the-art technology. These factors are why we continue to show such tremendous growth when business conditions and the lack of a diversified portfolio strategy combined with high content and technology costs has sent many of the other players in this industry scrambling. Closing the year with the DMR acquisitions, which we successfully converted into a potential all-cash deal spread over multiple years, we have made seven roll-up acquisitions over the last 16 months that brought in 15 new streaming channels and 15,000 new films and TV episodes. This helps scale Cinedigm up to the 30-channel streaming portfolio and 46,000 title library I just spoke about. Given this vastly increased scale, we are now expanding our strategy to implement four new high-return growth initiatives that fully leverage our asset base, capabilities, and industry-leading MatchPoint technology. As I announced in my shareholder letter a few months ago, these four initiatives are, first, the rollout of Cineverse, which will provide consolidated access and cross-promotion for all of our streaming properties. Second, the aggressive expansion of Cine9's podcast network, already with a portfolio of 25 podcasts, 50 million downloads, and a goal to get to 100 high-margin podcasts in the next 24 months. Third, the rapid launch of our comprehensive in-house advertising solution to capture even more revenue upside in that business. And finally, the imminent rollout of Matchpoint 2.0, which will provide additional revenue opportunities via content aggregation and SaaS services. All of these initiatives have minimal working capital and overhead requirements. And combined with our nascent international expansion, particularly in South Asia and Latin America, we expect these initiatives will generate over $50 million in new revenues annually once they reach steady state. Finally, I want to talk about the markets in our stock price. Obviously, geopolitical factors and market sentiments have made it a tough start to the year for most in the capital markets and certainly percentage on shareholders. It is especially frustrating for our employees and investors that this has occurred while we are performing so very well. We remain by every measure in the strongest position we have ever been in. The strategy that I just outlined is unique and it is clearly winning in the marketplace. With our newfound scale, we now have several new high-return initiatives launching that will further accelerate our growth. Given all that, we clearly believe that the market is severely undervaluing our equity, and we will continue to work to outperform quarter after quarter, which we believe will ultimately address the issue. However, we continue to evaluate options to take advantage of the situation from an equity standpoint, such as a potential stock buyback program. With that, let me turn it over to John for a more detailed review of our results in Outlook.

Thank you, Chris. And hi, everybody. I'll touch on a few fourth quarter and full year highlights since Chris has provided a lot of color already on the top line results. Then I'll give a brief look into our plans for the next two to four years. We generated $56 million in revenue this past year. Let me break it down from a segment perspective, which will help give perspective about analysis of next year. Our streaming and content business generated total revenues in fiscal year 22 of $38 million, with the remainder of our revenues coming from digital cinema virtual print fees, cinema VPFs, and the long planned sales of legacy cinema equipment, particularly our agreement with AMC. As the VPF program winds down, and although we still have 770 digital projection systems available for sale, We're expecting only minimal contribution from our legacy business next year, as we have been signaling for quite a while. Our adjusted EBITDA numbers improved both this past quarter and past year. We reported adjusted EBITDA of a negative 0.4 million in the current year quarter, which was an improvement of 2.1 million versus the prior year period. For the year, adjusted EBITDA was 7.1 million, which was an increase of 10 million versus last year. Similarly, our net loss of $3.1 million or $0.02 per share in the fourth quarter improved $3.8 million or $0.03 per share versus the prior year quarter. And we generated net income of $1.2 million or $0.01 per share versus a net loss in the prior year. As a result of this strong performance, we ended the year with over $13 million in cash and no debt. During the past year, we paid down approximately $10 million in notes and eliminated approximately $4 million in interest expense. We completed the DMR acquisition at the end of the fiscal year after restructuring the deal, as Chris mentioned, lowering the price to $16.4 million, adding a three-year installment payment schedule, and building in the potential for an all-cash deal. We're pleased that DMR's post-merger integration is proceeding ahead of plans. DMR was the seventh acquisition of the company's roll-up strategy, which included Fan Door, Screen Box, Bloody Disgusting, Film Detective, and Foundation TV. The DMR transaction is the latest example of how key players in the media and technology space continue to be attracted by Cinedigm's Matchpoint technology, distribution capabilities, content and scale, and seek to be a part of the company's rapid and strengthening growth narrative. We are continuing our cross-streaming efforts post-acquisition help affect our goal of becoming cash flow positive by year end. Additionally, our scale and tech are helping to garner huge operational savings on a continuous basis. As Chris mentioned, we remain committed to considering all options to support our aggressive growth trajectory and will continue to make smart cost-to-capital decisions. In the near term, given the historical growth, all the additional activity over the past year, plus the sale essentially of the digital cinema business, fiscal 23 should have significant growth in what's now the core business of streaming and entertainment while digital cinema sunsets. For fiscal 23, our core business revenue base is $38 million, and this is the base we believe our investors should be tracking against for 2023. Also notable is that we are laughing extremely high growth of our base business on both a one- and two-year basis, as Chris just noted. Despite that, As we have scaled up our business dramatically and continue to expand our streaming initiatives across multiple fronts, we remain comfortable with our long-range target of sustained 50% plus annual streaming revenue growth. Revisiting our long-term goals for the next two to four years, we've already achieved two of them. To recap, these goals include at least 50% annual revenue growth in streaming, growing revenue to $150 million by fiscal 2025 through organic and acquired revenue, increasing monthly viewers to over 40 million, which we just achieved following the acquisition of DMR, growing engagement to 1 billion connected TV minutes from 0.5 billion per month, which we also achieved, and growing our content library to 75,000 titles. As Chris mentioned, we're currently at 46,000. Now I'd like to hand it over to Eric.

Eric, take it away. Eric, you might have to unmute yourself. Eric, your line is open. Hello, can you hear me? Now we can hear you, Eric.

Thanks.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes. Yes.

All right. Before I talk about this quarter's results with Synodyne Networks and our strategic vision for the rest of the fiscal year, I want to reiterate just how far this business has come in a brief time. Just three years ago, we had four streaming channels that were predominantly subscription-based with a few hundred thousand viewers per month. and no material advertising business. We had none of the flywheel components in audience you need to sustain and engage an audience. We had small social app and podcast footprints. Our library, while still substantial, lacked critical AVOD and FAST rights, and we also did not own and control our technological destiny. Fast forward to today, and the story is a complete 180 degree turn from where we were those few short years ago. Through the hard work, focus and foresight of the Synodyme team. We've built a streaming platform that has the scale to compete with the largest players in the industry on a global basis. So let's talk some numbers that back that point up. Our business reached 87.1 million monthly viewers across our entire footprint of web, mobile, social, and connected TV viewers around the world. That's up over 236% over the prior year quarter. As we rapidly approach 100 million monthly viewers, which I believe we could achieve in this fiscal year, we're approaching a scale only achieved by the largest studios and streamers. As we focus on monetization, engagement, and ARPU on that user base, we'll continue to optimize our viewership. Our streaming minutes rose dramatically to 2.3 billion, up 118% of the prior year in 73% over the sequential quarter, and revenues were up 109% year over year in the quarter. These were the highest ever numbers for minutes viewed and revenue for AVOD in our operating history. The reason is simple. Our programming efforts are focused on retaining and engaging high-value visitors over low-value fly-by visitors who don't stick around and consume. This concerted effort and focus is clearly paying off with accelerating growth in minutes viewed, ad consumed, and most importantly, revenue growth. Our core focus has predominantly been on the ad-supported side of the business, but we continue to grow our overall subscriber business to approximately 970,000 subscribers, which is up over 336% from the prior year quarter. We expect a higher rate of growth out of this business beginning with the end of fiscal Q2 and with the heaviest growth in Q3 and Q4 as we put the finishing touches on our new Matchpoint Blueprint platform. All of our key streaming services will migrate to that platform in Q3, Q4, including Fandor, Screenbox, Dove, ConTV, and others. We have been internally testing the new platform, and it's clear the quality in design and engineering places the user experience and performance on par with Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, and other massive scale platforms. But beyond that, we've been innovating with new AI and machine learning features to help consumers more easily discover and find relevant content that they might otherwise miss on the other platforms that predominantly provide users more of the same content recommendations with each experience. Our research and study of the market indicates users are excited to find and discover amazing talent that's not served up by the usual suspects, but the current collaborative filtering content recommendation systems and algorithms are simply underwhelming, and in the worst case, a poor user experience. Cineverse will change all of that. As Chris mentioned earlier, while we've had considerable success combining an organic and inorganic growth strategy, completing seven acquisitions over the last 16 months, given the current share price and overall market conditions, we're leaning into our now considerable asset and audience base to drive new organic revenues with minimal CapEx requirements. So let me dive into some of the key updates on that front. First, on the podcasting business, our acquisition of Bloody Disgusting has truly paid off. And we've been successfully extending their leadership position in the horror and audio drama sectors to scale up the podcast network. The model is simple. While the major players focus on the top end of the market, Citadeline focuses on the middle market of the podcast segment. Quality, well-produced shows with faithful audiences by creators that are simply unhappy with their current monetization and distribution partners. Not only do we bring quality monetization and distribution to these creators, but our focus on a smaller base in podcasts and expertise in enthusiast marketing have attracted many smaller networks and larger individual podcasts to our network, often stealing them away from very large branded competitors. We expect to scale this to 150 plus podcast network within the next 12 to 18 months. and have a mid-range revenue target of $10 million plus for this business steady state within three to four years. Next, let's discuss our efforts in advertising. Building on the back of our 70-plus programmatic ad demand partner relationships and deep audience extension deals, we're now focused on building a world-class direct ad sales and operations team, and have made our first key hires who are, as of today, selling fiscal year Q3 inventory into the markets. So we should see an impact from that business soon. But beyond that, we plan on following the same model for third-party representation, as I noted for podcasts, basically providing a high caliber of direct ad sales services with strong marketing and support to help our partners grow their businesses. Heather Luttrell, who joined us via the Bloody Disgusting acquisition, is a 25-plus-year veteran of the ad space with a focus on this exact model to great success at IndieClick and later Demand Media. So we have the cornerstone of people in place with extremely complementary skills tied to our strategic vision. On Cineverse, as I noted earlier, our vision is simple. Rather than compete with established general entertainment, AVOD platforms, instead we're going to focus on a strategy that has worked so well for us as we've scaled other parts of our digital business, and that's partnering with major OEMs, platforms, ISPs, telcos, and other partners that have scale audience, but today no presence in the AVOD universe. Synodyne is one of the few companies in the world with the technology to design, integrate, program, host, and deploy and monetize a scale AVOD service, given the fact that we have tens of thousands of titles in the market today. With the completion of Matchpoint 2.0, combined with one of the largest content libraries in the market, Our goal is launching this initiative and scale partners this fiscal year, and our direct-to-consumer version will also be released to market within the next quarter or so. But we won't be starting from a standstill. Cineverse will take over the footprint of a similarly named DMR, General Entertainment Service, called CineHouse, which some of you may have seen the early desktop version we launched for testing, SEO optimization, legal and trademark purposes. The forthcoming MatchPoint-powered Cineverse apps and websites have not yet launched, but are coming soon. Finally, on the SaaS front, as we've reiterated frequently, we're not trying to compete with SaaS providers like Vimeo, Brightcove, and others. We look at our approach as a smaller scale version of what Major League Baseball Advanced Media did with Disney+. Namely, focus on providing a highly scalable streaming platform for Cineverse, our own properties, and then select key scale partners. However, we think that like MLBAM did with WWE and MLS, will offer our platform to these high-quality scare partners where we estimate there will be material revenue consideration. We are exploring several exciting partnerships on that front, and we hope to talk more about it in the coming quarters. Let's talk content briefly. Our acquisitions effort to build our library of premium content and drive the streaming business included growing our feature films in the library over 6,000 assets, an increase of 131% over the prior year. And beyond that, our television episodes, which we consider one of the most important parts of the library, grew by more than 8,200 titles, up 52% over the prior year. On the original content side, we acquired exclusive rights to two action thrillers starring Neal McDonough of Yellowstone, Resident Evil, and Captain America fame that were released in theaters and at home. We acquired exclusive North American rights to Seven Days, a new romantic comedy starring Karen Soni, known for Deadpool, and Geraldine Biswanathan, known for Blockers, and executive produced by the Duplass Brothers. And the film won an Independent Spear Award as Best New Feature. We also acquired Boston George, a docuseries about George Jump, one of the most notorious traffickers and inspiration for the film Blow, starring Johnny Depp. which will be released as a Fan Door exclusive. We also entered in license agreements with Warner Brothers for multiple seasons of Freddy's Nightmares, which is now exclusive on ScreenBox as of February this year, which has led to an extremely material subscriber lift. And lastly, we extended our long-term relationship with the NFL and released the latest Super Bowl championship program to a broad audience. On the technology front, we launched several new initiatives, including NFP initiatives with Fandor Selects and Bloody Disgusting Blood Packs as a means to access and evaluate this emerging technology, and we hope to do more there. On the AR side, we announced a deal with Enreal, one of the largest manufacturers worldwide of light AR glasses. For the North American launch, we included ConTV, our flagship sports network, Real Madrid, and Bloody Disgusting, as well as the entire ComTV content library on an on-demand basis as sort of an initial foray into the metaverse. And then finally, we positioned the company for long-term technology leadership with the launch of Matchpoint Debut, a new service that gives filmmakers, distributors, and content owners the ability to use our industry-leading digital distribution platform, Matchpoint, to self-distribute their content. And beyond that, we expanded the engineering and R&D resources within Synonym India to focus on emerging tech such as metaverse, AI, machine learning, and so forth. To sum it all up, as we approach 100 million consumers around the globe, our focus will remain on driving high margin direct ad revenues across that distribution footprint and extending those users into other parts of our flywheel like podcasting, and eventually other areas like theatrical releasing, live events, e-commerce, and so forth. This newfound base of scale assets truly provides us with the ability to drive new revenues and businesses at a lower cost than our competitors, and we look forward to sharing more with you on this front as we execute this strategy in the coming quarters. With that, let me turn things over to the operator to take your questions.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question today, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you choose to withdraw your question, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your phone is unmuted locally. And our first question today comes from Dan O'Connor of Benchmark Co. Dan, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks. Good afternoon. It's a strong finish to the year for you guys. Either Eric or Chris, you know, we're kind of in uncharted territory from an inflation perspective, but it sounds like from what we've heard, it sounds like the upfronts are probably going to end up somewhere in the plus eight to 10 range. That's going to be mostly on price. And I'm just curious, you know, in, and we can kind of link these questions together and what looks like it's going to be a supply heavy market. in the next couple quarters, obviously, you know, Warner Brothers, you know, relaunch, and who knows, if Netflix gets their act together, it might take them a little while, and whatever Disney does. But just how are you thinking about, you know, now that you have the scale that you've been sort of seeking to build here, how are you thinking about CPMs as we move into either, A, you know, political driving up rates, against this sort of odd inflation backdrop that we haven't seen in CTV in general before. And then B, just given the supply out there, I know you guys always talk about being complementary to the other services, given the niche focus, you know, the competition for eyeballs and the way that you guys, you know, think, you know, how the most recent upfronts or new fronts, I guess, will play out in impacting the business.

This is Chris. I'll let Eric take care of it. But overall, we're really positive on both fronts, and he'll give you the details why.

Sure.

Can you hear me? Can you hear me okay?

Yes. Yeah, you're good.

Okay, good. So, you know, look, as I kind of look at the market bifurcation, you know, one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, I look at – You know, the entrance of Netflix, you know, I personally don't see them having a massive material impact on, you know, the market overall. In this year, there'll be some impact next year. I think you really don't start to see a huge impact on the market overall until maybe, you know, I would assume, you know, late 23 to 24. But where I think that battle is going to be playing out is with, you know, a battle for market share between Peacock, if HBO Max has an ad tier, and Hulu predominantly. You know, everyone's gunning for Hulu. And, you know, that premium sector of the AVOD market is where Netflix is going to be playing, in my opinion. Where I don't see them playing is in the value to mid-market space where we're, you know, where we're a great competitor. I think that's where we live. And I think even in that space, we have a lot of headroom from where we are today, from the low to mid teens, depending on the time of year, to with the direct focus into the mid to high 20s or more. That still puts us at an incredible value versus what advertisers have to pay for the largest services. And the demand at the mid-market general entertainment is significant. We don't have today even enough inventory to meet that growing demand on the sales side. My sales team is telling me that they anticipate very rapidly depleting inventory. So we need to grow inventory faster, which is always a great, a great thing to hear from your sales team. But, you know, so I just don't see, you know, and then in terms of headwinds, you know, I think, you know, there's, you know, once again, at the highest end of the market, you know, there hasn't been a lot of impact on sort of opportunistic and scatter for broadcasters been impact. On digital, we've seen no impact so far on revenue. It continues to grow and scale. We've seen in the current quarter no change from the trends that we've been on to date, and I don't anticipate seeing that, especially as we get into the heavy political ad season where things are already queuing up, I think, quite nicely for our segment.

Got it.

That's

helpful. I actually even wondered, Eric, if you might not get a tailwind from rates coming up a little bit, just as inventory gets squeezed further there. But, you know, the other question I just wanted to ask is something that's kind of, you know, you guys have built a unique portfolio, your point more on mid-market, and I know you talked a lot in the prepared remarks around partnerships. By the way, congratulations on getting Elvis launched. I do wonder, you know, just how much of an accelerant is that to you? And it provides maybe a unique opportunity for you to have more interplay with the Cineverse, with maybe even some of the plus guys just as a feeder or some other kind of unique partnerships that we may not be thinking about. So I'm just curious if You alluded to Mordecai, but if there's any more breadcrumbs you want to lay for us just on the partner strategy, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Yeah, so I'll say this. Despite Netflix entering into the market, I think a lot of people look at that as a market share game. But what everyone forgets is that this business is is in and of itself cannibalizing broadcast and cable television. So I think these forces are accelerating the $70 billion shift. I think it's outpacing what people had expected. So I actually think there's room for many more scale partners to get into the game in the same way that there's hundreds and hundreds of cable channels there are not as many scale plays. So if you think about all of the different players that touch audiences at scale, where you could easily deploy a scale ad supported or a commercial streaming service with minimal fuss, there's a lot of players, particularly the broadcast groups. I think besides... Sinclair, most have not done much, and there's a lot of revenue at risk for them. There are several very, very large OEMs in the market that are incredibly late to the game in terms of launching a competitor to be Pluto, the Roku channel. That is, frankly, money on the table in their low margin businesses. There's dozens and dozens of ISPs that have tens of millions of captive people flowing through their services every month that could dramatically increase ARPU on top of, you know, incrementally on top of their subscription fees, so on and so forth, right? And then that's not even including players like theatrical exhibitors, retailers, and others. And then if you expand that sort of pool globally, There's a very large array of people, of companies rather, that are touching millions to tens of millions of viewers a month that they could very easily monetize in the ad support space. But it's heavy lifting. It's very hard to do. So the way we look at it is we can be that solution for them in a pretty turnkey way. So that's where I think the opportunity lies. Hope that gives you a little more color.

Thank you. And our next question today comes from Brian Kingslinger of Alliance Global Partners. Brian, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions and really great progress over the last year or two that you guys have made. I want to touch first on distribution for Elvis. In the press release, I saw a list of platforms that the Elvis content is going to be streamed on. I'm wondering if you expect some of the other major platforms that were named to eventually take this content, or are they not as interested, such as Samsung and Roku and other platforms? And then the opening weekend of Elvis, tough to tell what is good and bad these days with attendance at the theater, but it seemed pretty disappointing. Does that change your internal expectations for what the Elvis content can generate for you over the next year or two?

This is Chris. I'll answer the second part, and then Eric can answer the first part. Your take on Elvis box office is completely opposite everyone else's take.

I just want to tell you, Brian, because everyone was thrilled with that opening. $30 million in the opening weekend, I thought. I don't care what the budget is. The budget doesn't matter to us.

It's the highest opening adult skewing movie in the last couple of years. It outperformed Rocketman very, very significantly, which was the comp. And it had a two hour and 39 minute running time. So Warner Brothers is thrilled with the opening. The industry is thrilled with the opening. We think it's going to be a huge player in home entertainment. And it's viewed as a real success for Warner Brothers and for the industry attracting, you know, adults back to the theater. And we think it's going to be huge in home entertainment. So, we're really happy with the opening as is Warner's and everybody else in the industry. So I'll let Eric answer the first question.

Yeah, so I think, you know, in any carriage distribution conversation, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. The marathon is, you know, just run very quickly and fast versus, say, the old cable days. But, you know, we got some very good partners out of the gate, and we're, you know, incredibly pleased with the results with those partners, which I think, you know, anybody who's taking maybe a little longer than we would have liked to get it up and going out of the gate are probably going to be looking at the numbers that they missed out on last week. And just given the long, long legs of everything happening, Elvis, not just the movie, But, you know, Authentic Brands has so many new initiatives, films, docs, projects, birthdays. And then, you know, Elvis, you know, there's a great article at Forbes about, you know, billion dollar plus value to the IP now with its resurgence. Between that performance, the value of the ongoing legs, I think there'll be no problem getting distribution on all the places that you would expect to see it.

Great. Okay. And then something we haven't heard about, because you have so many different things going on, obviously, is as we're still a bit away from the Real Madrid season coming up, but where are you with picture on picture to better monetize that content as games are being streamed down the road?

So we are working with a technology partner to solve for that for the new season. So I fully expect us to have the in-game portion of the ad part solved by the time the next season rolls around. Okay.

And then ad-supported streaming revenue is up 140%, 147% year-over-year. Can you kind of rank the growth drivers between increased viewership, strong render rates, because I don't think a year ago you had the partnership that you have in the installation of Emagi, and then CPMs as well, and then maybe break out M&A.

Yeah, so I would say, so, you know, a lot of the M&A deals that we did, so keep in mind these numbers don't really reflect the DMR acquisition. I think it was one day in the quarter, you know, in terms of revenue. You know, from that perspective, I think, you know, we, you know, the numbers and most of the assets that we bought previously, you know, Fandor, Film Detective, Screenbox and others were more subscription oriented. So this is really, you know, this is really mostly reflecting organic growth coming from, both the partnership side and the expansion of of our own streaming properties. I would say that the probably the single biggest driver and impact has been on increasing viewership in the minutes consumed, as you can see, has been up pretty substantially. But it's also I would be remiss if I didn't say that I feel like some of them and probably is one of the best ad ops teams around and they've been fantastic at just driving greater and greater optimization of our ad stack. So it's really a technology play that's also allowed us to just generate more revenue. So those render rates have been fantastic. And then our ability to fill on those has been fantastic. And by the way, I think we've identified You know, at DMR, a significant opportunity to do that to their existing base as well, which will be, I think, a big driver of growth as that asset is integrated into our AdOps team. So, you know, if I had to say what was the single biggest contributor, you know, I would say it was probably, you know, distribution expansion, but second to that, optimization of the waterfall.

Thank you. And our final question today comes from Scott Buck of HC Wainwright. Scott, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. I just have one. I was hoping to get a little more color on the in-house advertising effort. How many hires are you looking to make there? And you mentioned you already have a few people selling. What's the initial feedback been?

Eric, you want to take that? Sure. Thanks for joining us all today.

Yeah, sure. So, you know, I would say, yep. Can you hear me OK? Yep.

Yeah, absolutely.

I would. OK, good. So I would say that, you know, today we we have a team of, you know, on the ad to the dedicated ad team. It's on the smaller side of about five. We're, you know, going to incrementally increase that team as, you know, in tandem with the inventory availability. So, but my take is, you know, as I mentioned during the call, we're going to be expanding the third-party business. In other words, there's a lot of parties out there that we're in dialogue with who don't have direct sales that like our approach to the business. They like the business terms. And that will help us increase the inventory that we can sell above and beyond what we currently generate. So to me, I think that's where we probably start to incrementally add salespeople. So we'll probably add one or two more over the next two quarters. We think we've got good coverage selling into calendar Q4, which is the big focus. And then we're going to see how that goes. But I think we're also just discussing today, the podcast business is growing so rapidly that we really need to, you know, increase the sales team, direct team on that side too. So I would envision us probably, you know, you know, at least two more on the video side and another on the, on the podcasting side. So modest, you know, but you know, these are direct, you know, revenue driving heads. So we think we'll get a lot of value out of expanding that team.

Thanks, Eric. That's helpful. Just a bit of a follow-up. What generally is the hiring environment been like for these folks? I mean, is it, you know, super competitive at the moment or are you finding, you know, plenty of qualified people?

Yeah. So, you know, relative to, you know, relative to maybe other times, it was, you know, it was less competitive. I'd say it's probably very competitive now. However, you know, we've, you know, that we provide a pretty differentiated opportunity for people to, you know, sell a broad array of compelling properties as opposed to maybe just selling one property regionally. So I think it's, you know, and on top of that, you know, we're getting some very entrepreneurial people that like to build, build teams and build new things. So we're not having, there's no lack of, great qualified people for us. I think we've had some great hires already.

Yeah, if I could just add, Scott, we've had no problem across the organization as we're growing and attracting qualified people in every area, not just advertising. Because with so much consolidation going on in the industry, there are just a huge portfolio of qualified people available and they like our growth story, and they're coming our way. I mean, Warner Discovery just let go 1,000 people in their ad sales group last week. So there's absolutely no issue in terms of finding qualified people.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Chris McGurk for closing remarks.

Thank you. So thanks, everyone, for joining us today and for your interest in Synodyne. Please follow up with Laura Kiernan and the team at High Touch Investor Relations with questions you may have. You can reach her at synodyne at htir.net. We look forward to speaking with you again when we record our first quarter results for fiscal year 2023 in August. Thank you.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.