Liberty Broadband Corporation

Welcome to the Liberty Broadband 2023 Q2 earnings call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you have a question, please press star 1 on your telephone. As a reminder, this conference will be recorded August 4th. I would now like to turn the call over to Shane Kleinstein, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that this call includes certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in the most recent forms 10-K and 10-Q filed by Liberty Broadband and Liberty TripAdvisor with the SEC. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this call, and Liberty Broadband and Liberty Trip Advisor expressly disclaim any obligation or undertaking to disseminate any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statement contained herein to reflect any change in Liberty Broadband or Liberty Trip Advisor's expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based. On today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures for Liberty Broadband, including adjusted OIBDA. Information regarding the comparable gap metrics, along with required definitions and reconciliations, including preliminary note and Schedules 1 and 2, can be found in the earnings press release issued today, as well as earnings releases for prior periods, which are available on Liberty Broadband's website. Now I'd like to introduce Greg Maffei, Liberty's President and CEO.

Thank you, Shane. Good morning. Today, speaking on the call, we will have Liberty Broadband's Chief Accounting Officer and Principal Financial Officer, Brian Wendling. Ron Duncan. CEO of GCI, and Pete Pound, CFO of GCI, will also be available to answer questions. Also, during the Q&A, we will be available to answer questions related to Liberty Trip Advisor. So starting with Liberty Broadband, we remain under the 26% fully diluted ownership cap due to lighter buybacks and their annual issuance of equity awards at charter. We have not sold into the buyback since January. We do plan to resume LBRDA and K buybacks using substantially all of our after-tax proceeds from charter sales once they resume their buyback. Charter, looking at it, strong operating results, 77,000 broadband net ads and 648,000 wireless net ads benefiting from the conversion strategy of Spectrum One. Charter is now about 30% of all the postpaid industry wireless net ads, and cable in total is about 47%. The rural expansion is going well at Charter, pacing with 26,000 subsidized rural subscribers added. That was one-third of our total broadband net ads coming from these subsidized rural bills. We do expect progress on the investments we've made and easing cost pressures. in the back half of 2023 to really reaccelerate growth. 2023 is an investment year, and we did see modest financial growth in the quarter as expected due to that. There remains pressure in the video income system, which is impacting our top line, but not impacting EBITDA as much. Charter management is executing well on all pillars of its strategy, and we are pleased with their progress. The employee retention initiatives they've undertaken have proved successful with better sales yields, retention, and customer service. We're on track for 300,000 rural passings constructed in 2023. And the network evolution and physical upgrade plans are on track as well. Forty-five percent of our customers are now receiving our advanced Wi-Fi product. Turning TripAdvisor. We believe the long-term trends in travel experiences will benefit the business and will continue. Recent growth has continued to be led by strength of experiences. Viator revenue is up 59% year over year. We are focused on growing the brand awareness for Viator and building a cost-efficient customer acquisition channel, which we believe is entirely doable, and will continue to increase profitability over time. And we continue to evaluate ways to better highlight the value of Viator. We are working through the challenges in meta-search while carefully managing costs. TripAdvisor announced cost reductions recently, most recently targeted at the TripAdvisor core and corporate functions. We are investing in strategic initiatives to build deeper engagement with travelers and diversify our monetization schemes. We are leveraging AI. We have upgraded our trip planning tools built on Trip's proprietary data using AI. And we are augmenting our content offering with both user-generated plus editorial content, leveraging that AI as well. And we have other initiatives underway to drive increased engagement and membership sign-ins. And with that, I'll turn it over to Brian for the details.