Paramount Skydance Corporation

Good afternoon. My name is Felicia and I'll be the conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Paramount Global's Q2 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all lines have been muted to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by one on the telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by two. In order to get to as many questions as possible, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Jamie Morris, Paramount Global's EVP Investor Relations. You may now begin your conference call.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us for our second quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining me for today's discussion are Paramount's co-CEOs, Brian Robbins, Chris McCarthy, and George Cheeks, and our CFO, Naveen Chopra. Please note that in addition to the earnings release, we have trending schedules containing supplemental information available on our website. Before we start this afternoon, I want to remind you that certain statements made on this call are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in more detail on our filings with the SEC. Some of today's financial remarks will focus on adjusted results. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release or in our trending schedule, which contains supplemental information, and in each case can be found in the investor relations section of our website. Now I will turn the call over to Brian.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call. I'm Brian Robbins, and I'm here with my fellow CEOs, Chris McCarthy and George Cheeks. Today, we look forward to updating you on the results of the quarter and the progress we have made on our strategic plan. That includes streamlining the organization, transforming D2C, and optimizing our asset mix. We have been aggressively advancing this plan since we laid it out at our annual meeting of stockholders in early June. But before we jump in, we'd like to spend a few moments on the transaction with Skydance Media. As you know, on July 7th, Paramount Global announced the signing of a definitive merger agreement with Skydance, which includes a 45-day go-shop period. We expect to deal the close in the first half of next year. In the meantime, the Skydance and Redbird teams support our strategic plan, and we are continuing to operate business as usual. With that, let's get into our second quarter results and share more details of our progress. Then Naveen will take us through the financials in depth. In the quarter, we saw strong results, both in terms of our financials and our content. A few highlights include 43% growth in total company adjusted orbiter, largely driven by improvement in D2C. Paramount Plus increased revenue 46% year over year. Our content continues to show strength across TV, streaming, and theatrical. And we renewed and expanded our longstanding partnership with one of our largest affiliates, Charter. As we've said before, we've been very focused on modernizing our relationships with distributors, and this innovative multi-year partnership with Charter is a prime example of how we're doing that. The renewal includes the continued carriage of our portfolio of linear cable networks and CBS-owned and operated broadcast stations. Also around Labor Day, our Paramount Plus essential ad-supported tier will be available to Charter's linear customers. Together, we're enhancing the value we're delivering for our consumers, providing them even more ways to watch our big, broad hits across linear and streaming. And for us, it has the potential to expand reach and engagement, lower our customer acquisition costs, and yield much lower churn. And we view this as one potential partnership roadmap for future distributor renewals. In addition to Charter, just last week we announced a multi-year agreement with Nexstar to renew CBS Television Network affiliations in 40 markets across the country. So, we continue to have good momentum with our partners. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris to take you through the upfront and the highlights of our plan.