Sinclair, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Sinclair Broadcast Group's second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and we will open for questions following the presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your phone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Chris King, Vice President of Investor Relations. Chris, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining Sinclair's second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today are Chris Ripley, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Lucy Rudishauser, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Rob Weisbord, our Chief Operating Officer and President of Local Media. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that slides for today's earnings call are available on our website, sbgi.net, on the events and presentation page of the investor relations portion of the site. A webcast replay will remain available on our website until our next quarterly earnings release. Certain matters discussed on this call may include forward-looking statements regarding, among other things, future operating results. Such statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results in the future could differ from those described in the forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors. Such factors have been set forth in the Company's most recent reports as filed with the SEC and included in our second quarter earnings release. The Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Included on the call will be discussion of non-GAAP financial measures, specifically adjusted EBITDA. These measures are not formulated in accordance with GAAP, are not meant to replace GAAP measurements, and may differ from other companies' uses or formulations. Further discussions and reconciliations of the company's non-GAAP financial measures to comparable GAAP financial measures can be found on our website. Finally, we note the presentation of certain information in our second quarter earnings release and slides may have changed from prior quarters due to the completion of a routine common process with the SEC that we believe other publicly traded broadcasters were recently engaged in as well. For example, we have changed the definition of adjusted EBITDA to be based on programming amortization rather than programming payments, which had a positive $2 million impact to adjusted EBITDA during the second quarter. And we have also eliminated adjusted free cash flow from our financial presentations. If you have any questions regarding these changes, please feel free to contact me directly. Let me now turn the call over to Chris Ripley.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'll start on slide three by highlighting our second quarter financial results on a consolidated basis. We delivered strong second quarter results that met our revenue expectations across all major line items. Total distribution and advertising revenue were both in line with our guidance ranges, which contributed to an inline performance in total media revenues during the second quarter. while favorable expenses resulted in adjusted EBITDA exceeding our high end of our guidance range. Lucy will go into more details in a moment. On slide four, our ventures portfolio received 109 million total distributions during the quarter, including 105 million of exits. Net of 26 million in contributions, we received 83 million of cash from our minority investment portfolio in the quarter. At quarter end, Ventures held 326 million in cash, which reflects the 98 million Ventures contributed to our diamond settlement payment in April. Turning to slide five, I wanted to take a minute to provide an overview of our local media broadcast assets and their value proposition, which tends to get overlooked in the broader media landscape. Sinclair is one of the largest and most diversified television broadcasters with national reach. As you can see, We have a well-diversified portfolio of assets by network affiliate mix, geographic location, and by asset type, with 183 owned and operated stations covering over 38% of the U.S. television households today, or 24% based on the UHF discount. We're in 86 markets across the country with no single market representing more than 5% of our total advertising revenues. More than 50% of our news operations rank number one or number two in their markets for local news. Moreover, we broadcast more than 2,400 hours of local news per week with more than 74 million unique visitors to our websites and mobile apps on an average monthly basis. This diversity, both from a geographic and network perspective, as well as strong news operations, are not only important in the election year, but de-risk us more broadly. Let me now turn the call over to Rob Weisbord to go into some additional details on our local broadcast assets, as well as an update on our political expectations for the year.