WideOpenWest, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Desiree and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Wide Open West second part of 2024 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, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Posen, Vice President, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter of 2024 earnings call. With me today is Teresa Elder, WOW's Chief Executive Officer, and John Rego, WOW's Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to remind everyone that during our call, we will make some forward-looking statements about our expected operating results our business strategy and other matters relating to our business. These forward-looking statements are made in reliance on the safe harbor provisions of the federal securities laws and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual operating results, financial position or performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. We disclaim any obligation to update such forward-looking statements. For additional information concerning factors that could affect our financial results or cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including the risk factor section of our Form 10-K filed with the SEC, as well as the forward-looking statement section of our press release. In addition, please note that on today's call, And in the press release we issued this afternoon, we may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. While the company believes these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for historical reported results can be found in our earnings releases and our trending schedules, which can be found on our website. We have also included a presentation this afternoon to complement our prepared remarks. Now, I'll turn the call over to WOW's Chief Executive Officer, Theresa Elder.

Thanks, Andrew. Welcome to WOW's second quarter earnings call. Before we start, here is a brief update on the unsolicited non-binding acquisition proposal from DigitalBridge and Crestview Partners. A special committee of independent directors has been formed to evaluate the proposal, and the work of the committee is ongoing. WOW stockholders do not need to take any action related to the proposal at this time, and we do not have any updates to share today. We will take questions at the end of our remarks, however. We will not be taking any questions related to the unsolicited bid. Now I would like to turn to our second quarter results. Our results this quarter were in line with our expectations and reflect momentum in our greenfield fiber expansion and improvements in our legacy markets, which were offset by the loss of subscribers due to the ending of the ACP program. As we have emphasized over the past several quarters, we are focused on growing our fiber footprint in our expansion markets, including both greenfield and edge-outs, and stabilizing the losses in our legacy footprint. This quarter, we made substantial progress on both fronts. Excluding the impact of losses related to ACP, we would have reported a net gain of more than 300 high-speed data customers. Our second quarter results include high-speed data revenue of $105 million, down 1.6% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA of $70 million increased 2.8% year-over-year and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 44.1% was up 4.6 percentage points from the same period last year and 2.4 percentage points from last quarter. We have now fully realized the target of 35.5 million savings, more than a year ahead of schedule. I am pleased with the progress that we continue to make, both in terms of growing our fiber business in new markets, while also reducing our cost base and managing expenses to drive adjusted EBITDA growth. During the second quarter, our fiber expansion proceeded well. We passed an additional 7,000 new homes in our greenfield markets, bringing our total number of homes passed in greenfield markets to 52,500. We also added 1,900 new homes through edge-outs. Our expansion efforts are further driving our growth and continue to lay the foundation for our exciting future. Providing exceptional quality fiber-to-the-home broadband service with what we believe is the best value in the market. The consistent improvement in our penetration rates across edge-outs and greenfields reinforces my conviction in our strategy. The penetration rates in our greenfield markets increased nearly three percentage points to 15.4%, up from 12.5% at the end of the first quarter. Our edge outs are also performing extremely well, especially the 2024 vintage, which increased to 38.6%, growing over six percentage points from the end of last quarter. Our 2023 edge out vintage increased to a penetration rate of 28.6%, which is also a great improvement from last quarter. The 2022 vintage remains strong at 31%. I am pleased with further progress we made during the quarter with respect to our subscriber numbers. The ending of the ACP program resulted in a churn of 5,000 high-speed data subscribers, resulting in a total net loss of 4,700 high-speed data subscribers. Excluding the ACP impact, HSD, NetEv, increased by 300 subscribers i would like to break this down a little bit further to emphasize the progress we are making in our legacy footprint specifically in the second quarter our greenfield markets added 2 400 new hsd subscribers excluding the 5 000 subs from acp the losses in our legacy markets accounted for a loss of 2100 hsd subs which is 1,000 fewer losses than the first quarter and a significant improvement from the fourth quarter of last year. While there will be further impact from ACP in the third quarter, our efforts to keep those customers on our platform are mitigating some of these losses. Overall, we continue to see very low churn across our base, and the strategic steps we introduced during the first quarter are continuing to show extremely positive results. Specifically, we introduced speed upgrades and our simplified pricing plan, which includes an optional price lock, modem included, no data caps, and no contracts. The continued success of these strategies has given us additional confidence in the progress we are making to strengthen our subscriber numbers and our legacy footprint. The chart on the lower left quadrant of the slide shows customers buying in the lower tiers was consistent with last quarter as we worked to lower the impact from the ending of the ACP program. This resulted in a slight decrease in HSD ARPU relative to last quarter, although compared to the same period last year, ARPU increased 2.6%. The year-over-year increase was largely driven by last year's rate increase, as well as the impact of new customers buying higher speed tiers, especially in greenfield markets. As of the second quarter, we now have 485,000 HSD subscribers. As expected, our traditional video business declined further during the quarter, which will continue as we transition to YouTube TV. The success of this partnership is another factor that is contributing to the consistent load churn across our customer base we are seeing a nice increase in customers buying an hsd youtube tv bundle a trend we expect to continue especially in our expansion markets our partnership provides a fantastic opportunity to offer more content at a much better value and to capitalize on the shift to video streaming which we believe will also contribute to great results this year. To conclude before handing the call to John, I want to reiterate the key points that I made at the outset of the call. First, we continue to make great progress with our fiber build and expansion markets, both in terms of passing new homes and increasing our penetration rate. And we are seeing ongoing progress with regard to stabilizing our numbers in our legacy footprint. I'll now turn the call over to John, who will go over our financial results in more detail.