BBTV Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for attending today's BBTV Holdings to Host First Quarter 2022 Conference Call. My name is Tia, and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I will now pass the conference over to your host, Nancy Glacier, General Counsel and Legal Officer with BBTV Holdings. You may proceed.

Welcome to BBTV's fiscal first quarter 2022 conference call. I'm Nancy Glaister, Chief Legal Officer for BBTV. During the course of this conference call, we may provide forward-looking information and make forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These are statements regarding the company's current expectations, goals, and beliefs about future events. Forward-looking statements are statements about the future and are inherently uncertain. Any financial or other goals discussed are goals only and are not meant to be taken as future-oriented financial information or guarantees of future results or performance. All of our forward-looking statements are necessarily based on a number of assumptions and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in our forward-looking statements. These include the risk that our assumptions may not be accurate, as well as the risk factors contained in our press release and MDNA issued yesterday, as well as in our latest annual information forum filed on CDAR.com. We undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. You can read more about these assumptions, risks, and uncertainties in our press release and MDNA issued yesterday, as well as in our AIF, dated March 29, 2022, filed with Canadian securities regulators at CDAR.com. Also, our commentary today will include adjusted financial measures and ratios, which are non-GAAP measures. Although the company believes these non-GAAP financial measures and ratios are useful in evaluating the company, these should be considered as a supplement to and not as a substitute for financial information prepared and presented in accordance with IFRS. Reconciliations between the two can be found in our earnings press release and our MD&A, which are available on our website and on CDER.com. Lastly, we also report on certain metrics, such as views and RPMs. A further description of these metrics, which are also non-GAAP measures, can also be found in our earnings press release and our MD&A. I now turn the call over to BBTV's Chief Executive Officer, Sharzad Rosati.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to BBTV's first quarter 2022 analyst call. We press released some of our financial information earlier and posted our financial statements and MD&A to CDAR. As a reminder to everyone on the call today, we are a creator monetization company with a mission to help creators succeed by increasing their viewership and making them more money. From individual content creators to global media companies, BBTV provides comprehensive end-to-end solutions powered by our innovative Visa platform, which helps creators make more money while allowing them to focus on their core competency, which is content creation. BBTV has more than 600 million monthly unique viewers globally, and in Q1, we generated 105 billion views of video content. Over the past month, we press released a couple of updates highlighting the strength of the quarter for our plus solutions. Our continued investment into plus solutions has led to a promising 69% increase in revenues for the segment year over year in Q1 2022, which drove a record 13% plus solutions contribution to total revenues this quarter, nearly doubling from 7% in Q1 of 2021. Importantly, revenue growth is unanimous across content management, direct advertising, and mobile gaming apps, with each respectively exceeding 40% revenue growth year over year in Q1. We now expect Plus Solutions revenue growth to exceed 40% on an annual basis, nearly doubling our previously guided annual growth rates of 23%. From a gross profit perspective, Plus Solutions represents a record growth 30 to 40% of total gross profit contribution in Q1, up from 15 to 25% last year. This performance across the board is the result of the decision we made to focus on our higher margin plus solutions, which makes us a lot less sensitive to the short-term volatility of views. This has given us further confidence to continue investing in our plus solutions to drive further growth for this important segment of our business. For content management, BBTV has recently expanded and deepened key relationships with its leading portfolio of new and existing clients, including the NBA, Fox, Sony Pictures, Paramount Global, Univision, Riot Games, CMF, and Technum. It's important to highlight that BBTV has maintained a strong retention rate of 96% this quarter for media company clients within its content management division. in line with historical performance, illustrating the strength of BBTV solutions for some of the most recognized brands in the world. Not only is content management a reliable and highly recurring revenue stream, the continued success for the business unit also opens up wider partnerships. Several of BBTV's longstanding content management clients have expanded beyond content management to more integrated partnerships, such as the NBA Playmakers Basketball Culture Network formed in 2016. and the company's recent collaboration with Paramount on the launch of the Jackass Human Slingshot mobile gaming app. Regarding direct advertising sales in Q1, we were focused on enhancing our existing relationship and expanding relationships into broader market segments, including auto, entertainment, finance, beverage, health, ready-to-drink, and media streaming segments. Average order size increased by 63% year over year and continued momentum in the first quarter along a number of fronts is positioning us well for further growth in 2022. In February, we launched our first mobile gaming app in partnership with major media company Paramount for the launch of Jackass Human Slingshot, which has set new monetization records for the division with a lifetime value more than 200% higher than any previous game. As we mentioned in our last earnings call, our focus has been on increasing overall monetization of our mobile gaming apps, and we are very pleased that our efforts have paid off. As of the end of Q1, we have now published a total of 15 mobile gaming apps with a combined 42 million downloads and an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 with negligible marketing expense. In Q1, BBTV continued to progress on a number of fronts for our Web3 strategy, including key partnerships with both creators and major media companies, most of which are existing customers, which we'll be able to highlight more in the coming months. And we are encouraged by the response we've been receiving and excited about the growth opportunities moving forward. On the technology front, we made strong progress in the development of our Web3 solutions in collaboration with Consensus, a partnership which we announced just prior to our Q4 and fiscal earnings call. We're excited to roll out a number of solutions in the coming months. For example, we activated a proof-of-concept marketplace, and we are working with it to further enhance our solutions to meet the needs of our content creators. In Q1 2022, views declined by 9% in comparison to Q1 2021, consistent with the declines seen in H2 2021. There are two main factors to this. The first was the end of COVID-related lockdowns in many parts of the world, which resulted in less viewership on most forms of digital video. During the COVID-related lockdowns, viewership was amplified. Further, if we compare the sequential change in views from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022, the seasonal change in views is in line with the sequential growth rates seen in the past years. As the seasonal trends remain comparable, we still believe that we're in the more normalized period of viewership consumption entering 2022. The second factor was that there is growing demand for market content like YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels. Marker content views are not currently monetized. We're in early stages of signing these creators, and the main focus for our content acquisition team is to onboard monetizable content creators. We expect this format will be monetized in several quarters from now, and should the RPMs for marker content be similar to our short-form content, it could represent $90 million of annual revenue upon its activation based on our current viewership. While RPMs were down by 5% from $0.86 in Q1 2021 to $0.82 in Q1 2022, excluding YouTube Shorts viewership, RPMs increased by 16%. The monetization of YouTube Shorts, as I mentioned earlier, will counteract the RPM decline once enabled in the coming quarters. In the meantime, our emphasis on plus solutions has made us less sensitive to viewership fluctuations as we focus on generating incremental and higher margin revenue streams. Our churn rate continues to be low amongst creators on the BBTV platform. In Q1, our views retention was exceptional at 98%. We believe the inherent value of our service is clearly reflected in our retention performance. We have been able to retain more audiences in comparison to the industry as viewership normalizes post-COVID. Again, we're convinced that this is due to the quality of our solutions and our effectiveness in monetizing content on behalf of our content creators. Overall, we're pleased with the market response towards our plus solutions, in particular the growth in content management, which is a highly predictable reoccurring revenue stream. and continue to garner a lot of interest from enterprise partners, including Fortune 500 companies. We are equally excited about the developments in direct advertising sales, mobile gaming apps, as well as our strategic move into Web3. I'm going to hand the call over to our CFO, Ben Groot, to review our financial performance and details. And then after that, I will highlight our outlook for the business. Ben, please take it away.