CuriosityStream Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to the CuriosityStream fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Thank you. Denise Garcia. With investor relations, you may begin your conference.

Thanks, Josh. Welcome to CuriosityStream's discussion of its fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results. Leading the discussion today are Clint Stinchcomb, CuriosityStream's Chief Executive Officer, and Jason Eustace, CuriosityStream's Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will be happy to take your questions. But first, I'll review the Safe Harbor Statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. Please be aware that any forward-looking statements reflect management's current views only and the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update these statements nor to make additional forward-looking statements in the future. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our Investor Relations website, as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in today's press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, when filed. In addition, reference will be made to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures can be found on our website at investors.curiositystream.com. Now I'll turn the call over to Clint.

Thank you, Denise. And I'd like to thank everyone for joining our fourth quarter call and full 2021 earnings call. I'm delighted to have with us today our COO and General Counsel, Tia Cudahy. our CFO, Jason Eustace, and our Chief Product Officer and EVP of Content Strategy, Devin Emery. After my comments, I'll turn the call over to Jason to review the financials. At the close of Jason's remarks, we will open up the call for questions. First, I'm pleased to report another strong quarter with year-over-year revenue growth of 140% and approximately 23 million global subscribers. International revenues grew at their highest rate on record as our investments paid off with wider audience reach, Revenues also grew rapidly across every layer of our revenue stack, from streaming to licensing to sponsorship. In our core DTC streaming business, we continued to grow our subscriber base while maintaining an industry-leading low churn rate. I'm also thrilled to announce that we delivered 71.3 million of revenue for the full year, up 80% year-over-year and ahead of our $71 million target. To put our full 2021 performance in perspective, Our year-over-year revenue increase of $32 million exceeded our combined revenues for the first five years of our company's existence. An extraordinary team effort. I'm often asked by other industry participants and observers how we've been able to grow our business so successfully. I'd point to three primary factors. First and foremost, we've assembled the leading factual content library in the industry. Compelling titles across the science, history, technology, nature, society, and lifestyle categories. No other streaming service offers the breadth and depth of factual content available on CuriosityStream, including our wide array of kid-friendly titles. Second, we've grown as a result of innovative leadership and execution. For example, we were the first streaming service of consequence to eliminate free trials, and our recently introduced Smart Bundle has gained significant traction as we leverage bundle economics in an audience-first approach. Third, We've built a unique, multifaceted revenue stack with streaming at its core, which has served us well over the past three years, including in 2021. And 2021 underscores what makes us unique. Curiosity is the entertainment brand for people who want to know more. Our flagship subscription video-on-demand service, available in more than 175 countries, is the premier factual streaming destination worldwide. We continue to bring additional value to all our subscribers through award-winning content, We're thrilled to be introducing more originals in 2022 than in any previous year. Let me dive a bit deeper into the quarter. Revenue growth in the fourth quarter was broad-based, with each of our major revenue lines growing rapidly year over year. We had another better quarter in our licensing business, which is a testament to the global appeal of Curiosity Studios Productions and the factual entertainment category more broadly. As a result, international revenues grew at a record pace during the quarter. In our direct consumer streaming business, net subscriber additions accelerated year over year with strong gross additions complemented by continued low single-digit churn. Fourth quarter ARPU benefited from the continued uptake of our smart bundle, which offers six streaming services for the incredibly low price of $69.99 per year. Subscriber retention remains a great story for us, and we continue to lead the streaming industry on this important metric. In an effort to build on the best quarter we've had in sponsorship sales, we announced last week the launch of our first fast channel, Curiosity Now, which will help enhance our advertising and brand partnership monetization and will also serve to promote to our DTC S5 tiers. While legacy linear TV channels and other streaming services chase the next big hit to retain their subscribers, we focus on delivering the unique content proposition and engaging user experience that makes our subscribers never want to leave. With all the noise in the market and the media about the streaming wars, we continue to believe our unique factual streaming service is complementary to, not competitive with, general entertainment streaming services. To be clear, we are playing on a different field. During this year's planning process, we spent a great deal of time reviewing the current state of the streaming industry. While this further review increased our confidence in the uniqueness of our value proposition, it also underlined how significantly our pricing has diverged from the rest of the industry. As such, we believe we are nearing the right time to better align the value we bring to our subscribers with the price of our subscription plans, including enhanced promotion of our six-service premium tier, which enables us to offer even more quality content on our platforms. Simply put, even if our most popular annual pricing plan were to increase to $30 per year, it would still represent tremendous value. While we have yet to finalize the exact magnitude or timing of any subscription pricing changes, we expect them to result in a substantial increase to pro forma revenue, EBITDA, and cash flow over time. Turning to content, we continue to grow the number of titles under ownership and license on our platform. As a factual streaming service, we were able to commission and acquire the visually stunning, globally appealing, and emotionally compelling series our subscribers love without the multi-billion dollar content spending of general entertainment streaming services. We're able to do this while delivering high-quality productions as evidenced by the 2022 slate of originals we announced last month. Our 2022 original slate is the largest in our history and includes new brand-defining titles showcasing compelling stories about everything from biomimicry, asteroids, true crime, and exotic wildlife rescue to great escapes in history, accidental inventions, tycoons that shaped the world, and much more. Our big year of originals kicked off in January when we showcased an electric new talent in natural history filmmaking, the biologist and adventurer Patrick Eyrie. In the six-part series Evolve, Eyrie takes viewers on a high-octane global adventure to reveal the emerging world of biomimicry and how the genius of evolution could hold the key to some of our biggest problems. We also premiered our eight-part landmark original series Titans the rise of Wall Street, a thrilling deep dive into the power, the opulence, and the rivalries of American finance that fueled the growth of entire industries and certainly shaped the course of global events. Other groundbreaking premieres included the feature doc Red Elvis, the Cold War cowboy, that probes the forgotten story of American pop icon Dean Reed, who defected from the US and rose to superstardom in the Soviet bloc before his mysterious death in East Berlin. And the six-part series, Inside the Mind of a Con Artist, an unprecedented production that literally attempts to psychoanalyze six of the most successful con artists of all time, leaving you wondering who you can really trust. We're also excited to be bringing back several fan favorites for second seasons this year, including Doug to the Rescue, which features drone pilot Doug Theron as he explores new ways to use next-gen drone technology, not only for animal rescues after natural disasters, but also for conservation as he travels to Africa on a tracking mission. Engineering the Future, narrated by award-winning actor David Ayala, which explores the cutting-edge technologies that could revolutionize life as we know it. And Rescue Chimpanzees of the Congo with Jane Goodall, which takes viewers behind the scenes of a groundbreaking effort to attempt the most ambitious chimpanzee releases in history. And returning for its fourth season, the acclaimed Curiosity original docuseries, Fourth and Forever, which returns to the heartland of high school football and the iconic birthplace of Friday Night Lights. Most recently, we began premiering Secrets of the Universe, a brand-new eight-part series which serves as the ultimate guide to the universe, as told by the individuals behind the biggest missions in space exploration, including the James Webb Telescope and NASA's Artemis Megarocket, Following Curiosity's Emmy-nominated hit, Secrets of the Solar System, this landmark series tells powerful tales of discovery, illustrated with stunning space imagery and unseen archives, from the race to image a black hole for the first time to searching for life on Mars. In the original series, Tycoons unpacks the stories of the world's richest entrepreneurs, names like Bezos, Gates, and, yes, Kardashian, who in some ways yield just as much power as any elected leader. Shifting gears, I'd like to provide an update on the exciting agreement we announced last year with Nebula, the world's largest creator-owned streaming and technology platform, whose creators collectively reached more than 130 million YouTube subscribers. Since we announced the agreement, which included a significant minority equity investment in the company, the disruptive nature of the creator economy has been on center stage. Tech giants like Facebook and TikTok compete to be the platform of choice for this highly prized segment. Nebula continues to add high-profile content creators and subscribers at a rapid clip and recently broke into the top 50 global streaming services by number of subscribers, currently over 450,000 paying subscribers, reinforcing its position as the go-to platform for creators in the edutainment space. Due to our shared values and the complementary nature of our streaming services, we were uniquely capable of making what we believe to have been an incredible, well-timed investment in Nebula last year. Further, we've built our relationship with Nebula into a marketing and retention engine powered by parasocial creator relationships that is unique in the streaming industry. We couldn't be more excited to build on our partnership with Nebula in the years ahead and to offer our shareholders the opportunity to capitalize on the growth of the creator economy. In summary, we delivered a strong quarter and exceeded our ambitious full-year revenue target for the second year in a row. Content Slate we are premiering this year, the biggest and the best in history, advances our mission to satisfy the curiosity of those who want to know more. And we plan to evolve our pricing to better reflect the value we bring to our loyal subscribers. Over the past 18 months, we have more than doubled the size of our content library through acquisitions, original content creation, Kentucky and M&A. We believe our content war chest today, with well over 10,000 title choices that includes over 5,000 premium video selections, represents a robust, critical mass for our streaming service. So with this heavy lifting in library content expenditures largely behind us, we now look forward to increasing our focus on the achievement of positive cash flow in the future. We plan to provide updates on this objective as our visibility into revenues for the second half of 2022 and beyond becomes clearer. I now want to personally thank each and every member of our incredibly talented team for keeping their shoulder to the wheel, for their dedication, their creativity, and for the focus they bring to work each and every day. I'd now like to turn the presentation over to our CFO, Jason Eustace, for some financial highlights and 2022 guidance.