AMC Global Media Inc. (AMCX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hey, good morning everyone. I'm John Hodulik, the media and telecom analyst here at UBS, and very pleased to announce our next speaker is interim CEO, Matt Blank. Matt, thanks for being here this morning.

Thanks, John. It's nice to be here.

So again, we've got about 40 to 45 minutes for Q&A. I've got a bunch of questions that I've put together. But Matt, why don't we start with a sort of a larger question. You've been in the position for a few months now. What would you say is sort of your key learnings are from taking the home at AMC? And maybe what are your priorities as you just look out into '22?

Sure. I think first of all, just from 30,000 square feet, the challenges I see are the same as every executive in this business. There's been a massive democratization of the process of distributing and consuming media. And in the democracy, you got to get elected. And so we have to get elected every night, every week, every month, every year by our consumers. We are experiencing this blisteringly fast refresh cycle for content. So that's for the overlay here. First of all, I've been very impressed with AMC Networks with the people, with the content, with the assets we have to bring into market. Our targeted streaming services give us unique advantages. Our IP gives us a unique advantage. My first week on the job, everybody would say, but you don't have any IP. And that's just not true. We can talk about that a little bit more. And in terms of the key priorities, it's not hard. We're going to grow streaming and put our resources behind that. We're going to increase the IP and content ownership. We're going to take advantage of the franchises that we control and hopefully build new franchises. We'll grow our digital and advanced ad businesses. And we have a great linear business. We had a great year in our linear business. So that's something we still remain very, very focused on. And all of that is about one thing, and that's about building shareholder value.

Great. you recently outlined that 2020 would be the biggest year in the company's history in terms of content spending. Maybe talk about the great IP that AMC has. Can you just give us a sense of what that pipeline looks like and maybe some of the content you're most excited about?

Sure. '22 is going to be a great year. It's sort of interesting. We had a terrific year in '21 and a year where that pipeline was challenged by production issues coming out of COVID. So when we look at '22, we really got 3 stakes in the ground. One is some tremendous season finales, some great shows coming back and some new shows coming. First of all, talk about iconic series. The Walking Dead; Killing Eve, Better Call Saul. We are going to make a big deal of those season finales next year. We've had some terrific shows coming back from 2021. And I got here, I didn't know a lot of this content. I had to learn about a lot of the content and watch. So I've been watching a lot. So Kevin Can F Himself, Gangs of London, Discovery of Witches, a bunch on the targeted services. And then as we look to '22, we got a bunch of new shows. Interview with the Vampire, a show called Moonhaven, Dark Winds based on the Tony Hillerman novels. And goes on and on. And we can talk some more about that later too. But if you look at our schedule going into '22, it's probably the strongest schedule we've had in several years.

And are the -- the production delays, have they all been rectified? I mean is everything sort of back to where it was pre-COVID in terms of content production?

I think definitely. I think it's an indication of the resilience of the production community. The way they have overcome a lot of these challenges. Certainly, our shows, we're not seeing any concerns on production at this point. I think like others, every time I read something or I watch the news and I say, "Oh, no, how is this going to affect us going forward? But I think one of the great advantages going forward is the industry learned a lot and we'll be much better protected from whatever happens going forward and I certainly include AMC in that.

Got you. With the final season of sort of flagship Walking Dead wrapping up next year, what are the plans for their franchise going forward?

Well, I've become a Walking Dead fan. I had -- I had to watch so much stuff. I watched the first season really liked it a lot. I have to admit, I missed a lot of the subsequent seasons, so I've been catching up. We've already had an expansion of that franchise with Fear the Walking Dead. We have an 8 season going into production in on that. A show called Tales of the Walking Dead will premiere next year, which we think is terrific and it's different because it's an anthology series. What do we mean by that? Well, one thing very important. If you haven't watched 11 seasons of the Walking Dead, you're going to be able to watch Tales of the Walking Dead, the episodes and the series stand-alone And hopefully, that's not just strong programming for next year, but it's programming that can bring a whole new generation, I guess, I'll call it, of Walking Dead fans, into the universe. We're working on a spin-off of the Daryl and Carol characters who are big characters in the show that should be coming in 2023. And we're looking just for different ways to tell these stories. And I think the franchise approach there, we hope to apply to the Anne Rice franchise, which we're now developing. So there's a lot of opportunity there. And I'm big on franchises. I just watched the Bond movie. I have seen all -- what is it, 25, 27 bond films? I'm old enough to say over the 59 years of that franchise. And to me, I look forward to that. When I finished 1 bond movie, I said to myself, what is it another 3 years before I'm going to see one. So I think that's what we have with the Walking Dead. And this is a franchise going to live for a long time.

And you touched on the Anne Rice series. Is this -- I mean, how would you characterize that? I mean, is -- Is this what you hope to be sort of the next big thing on AMC? I mean, obviously...

Hopefully. I mean, the range of content in her world is tremendous. I actually had the opportunity over 20 years ago to make a movie based on one of her franchises and where we spend time with her, we spend a lot of time down in New Orleans and, it's an amazing franchise, vampires and witches we think can play a big part in our future as well as character-driven dramas. So...

Yes. Makes sense. Seems to sell. Okay. You mentioned that you still have strong linear business, you've got the AMC last sort of flagship the BBC brand and as well as sort of the niche SVOD service. I mean, how do you guys think about allocating with a pretty wide swath of content across each of these sort of points of distribution and services?

Well, first of all, I think I would say we're always thinking about it. We may think different about it tomorrow than we think today. Flexibility is a key word for us as we develop content, new content comes to the network. We're always in a position to make game time decisions about how we want to extract value from a piece of contact. One of the beauty of it is that it is a portfolio, a valuable portfolio, and we can do a lot with that. And it's just a couple of maybe small examples of escape greater view, but WE tv, female-targeted network of ours. WE tv has incredible performance on Thursday nights and now Friday nights with black women. We have this streaming service called, All Black. So those 2 networks will work very closely together to make sure that we grow not only the linear viewing, but also the value of All Black in the streaming environment. Next year, we have a show coming called 61st Street, starting Courtney B. Vance. Terrific show talking a -- really showing a very culturally relevant about the challenges facing a young black man stuck in the criminal justice system in Chicago. Again, tremendously culturally relevant. That's a show that we will play both on All Black and on AMC+. So it's both a value of the parts and a sum of the parts strategy there. Discovery of Witches, Sundance hit, Shudder hit, AMC+ hit. So these are things that we can do. And at the end of the day, when I say a portfolio approach, what are we trying to do? We're trying to build viewing across all the platforms. We're trying to build the value of those brands. We're trying to drive the revenue coming from each of these pieces of it. And I think that's where you really get the value of the sum of the parts. And that flexibility we take very, very seriously and particularly, as we think about how we allocate resources against the existing linear networks and the growth opportunities that are in streaming. And all these brands work together to build revenue at the end of the day.

It seems there's a bit of an art to it, right? Because I guess, to a certain extent, you want to get the most bang on your content box, and you're spending. At the same time, you can't really put all the content on all the platforms. Otherwise, people would just really need one.

Exactly. And no, we are very conscious of that. That is a fluid -- I don't know what you want to call it, a fluid or a dynamic process. It's something we talk about all the time here. But at the end of the day, we have a lot of options. And those types of decisions, it's easy to change course. And it's easy to drive your best content opportunities towards your best revenue opportunities. And we're extremely focused on that internally. And I think every executive in this company knows that that's how we are thinking. We've got to think in terms of the whole and how we create value for the whole.

Makes sense. So maybe let's dive into the various D2C properties and maybe first by starting, how would you characterize the overall D2C strategy of AMC?

Well, I've been using a term that we have certain advantages out there. Again, early on, my first days here, all I heard about you don't have scale, you can't afford to have scale. And it will be hard to survive in markets like that. I've never been particularly interested in doing anything in my career that led to an outcome of surviving. For me, it's all about how do you prevail. Nobody wants to go to work every day and say, "Gee, we survived. They want to prevail. So one of the things that I've been focused on, and I think this management team is very focused on is how does AMC Networks prevail as a company and how do we prevail with the targeted consumers that we talk to every day. And it's no secret. The equity markets right now, they're consumed with the amount of money being spent on content, numbers that are just crazy. There was this Disney number last [ Friday], it's to spend $30 billion. Now in fairness, that wasn't a streaming number per se. It wasn't a Disney+ number per se. It was content investment across the Disney atmosphere around the world. But still, we can't spend those numbers. We don't want to spend those numbers. We're not going to spend those types of numbers. There's a term I've been using beauty of smaller numbers. We don't have to have 100 million subscribers for AMC to be successful. We've put some aggressive goals out there for us in a smaller universe, in a more targeted universe that we think we can absolutely accomplish. And if we accomplish them, our business looks very good in the future. As it looks good this year as we're on our way to accomplishing the numbers we put out for 2021. We're going to create value not by being what Netflix is, but being what AMC is. And AMC is these great targeted networks. We focus on passion and engagement. It's interesting. And these are tiny things that we love. They're just sort of brand indicators. We're not Game of Thrones with Acorn, but people are taking vacation to sites of Acorn series over in the U.K. We have a wide number for Shudder at Halloween for people to call in and talk live to somebody about horror movie choices at Halloween. You can't talk to a lot of people in the course of a day or a week or a month on that line. So it's more what I say, a brand indicator about how the people here think about what they do. And again, passion and engagement. That's what we look for in these services and is one huge benefit. And that's -- forget about the $15 billion that Netflix spends or more annually on a mass basis, let's just drill down to the cost of putting a series on the air and the cost of producing episode after episode and the cost of owning that content, it's de minimis compared to the other guys because we are picking targeted audiences, targeted subject matter, producers, creators that want to work with us and can work very effectively at the types of dollars we're talking. So we are not going to play other people's games. We cannot win at those games, but we can win at these games. And we're winning so far.

Great. Maybe can you just talk a little bit -- and we've heard this in the past, but can you talk a little bit about how the economics of these sort of smaller or passion-driven D2C services differ maybe both from what you're seeing at AMC and AMC+, and sort of what we're seeing in certain sort of the bigger, broader genre [ under ] team at D2C companies like Netflix.

Well, I think the economics bear no resemblance to the economics of some of the big guys. And by the way, I think there's a greater chance if we are talking, you and I, 3 years from now at the same conference of my saying the same thing about our economics than some of the others saying the same thing. The whole sector from -- in terms of the equity market seems to be depressed based on concerns over the cost side and what that means to margin. Unfortunately, I think we're getting dragged down a little bit by that because that's not our business plan at all. But a couple of things are happening out there that you really have to be aware of. These are subscriber and membership businesses. And I've spent basically the past 50 years of my career in subscribers and membership businesses, even before I was at Showtime before I was at HBO. And everybody talks about the lifetime value of subscribers. We're certainly very focused on it. And we think because of our targeted and again, these passion plays we have, that lifetime value for us over the long term is -- that's going to be a good metric compared to others. But there are certain classic dynamics of subscription business. You can go back 50 years when subscription business for magazines, book clubs, record clubs, one -- you may be old enough to remember some of this. I remember all but you joined a record club and they sent you 10 free CDs. So you remember that, but then you had to subscribe for the next year. There's a tremendous amount of 10 free CDs being given away right now or the equivalent of that in our business. Everybody has a lot of free subs, offers, deals. So it's going to be -- take a while to see -- really see what the subscriber, I guess, cadence of this business is in terms of pacing, the relationship between install rate, when new users and attrition rates within the base. And all of this has been magnified by a technology environment where you don't have to write to a magazine or call a cable operator to disconnect your service. So transactions are going to drive the business going forward. And again, when we look at what we're doing, we like our model. We think it gives us an advantage. I keep coming back, the law of smaller numbers. One thing I think we're seeing in the universe because of this massive compression of time of these services being in the market by -- because of COVID. Look at the number of businesses that launched in a very short period of time. It's unbelievable. So that's a massive amount of marketing and a massive amount of additional content expenditures coming into the market in a short period of time. So it's going to be very difficult to evaluate what's happening with all those guys. It's going to be easy to evaluate in our case because this is as steady as can be a strategy for us. We're going to invest more money in content. We're going to own more money in content. We don't need to put 10 million, 15 million subs on a year for people to get on CNBC and say, you didn't grow enough. It's interesting John Malone was interviewed by David Faber, his annual interview a couple of weeks ago. And John, I always love talking to -- to hearing Malone speak. And he talked about his targeted type audiences. And in fairness, I think he just possibly was talking about the value of those audiences for Discovery and all the great scripts targeted networks that Discovery owns. But I'd like to think he was talking about AMC Networks. He probably might disagree with that. But he's a pretty smart guy, and he says some really interesting things about the value of attracting these targeted audiences. So I felt great. Everybody here felt great when they saw that quote and saw it as a real endorsement of what we do every day.

Well, a couple of thoughts to those comments. First, you said it could take some time to sort of see the true cadence of D2C growth, both, I guess, in the U.S. and globally. And we definitely agree with that. I mean what you're seeing now is a lot of flank, you said, free DVDs. It might have been free 8-track or cassette back then...

Yes, exactly. In my case, vinyl.

Right. Exactly. So do you have a sense for when do you expect to see that shake out and to see what the true demand is. Is that a '22 thing in your mind? Or is it something that happens to be...

It's sort of interesting. I remember going on CNBC 2 years ago, this fall, they seem to have during a lot of the launches, Apple+, Disney+. And I remember saying I wouldn't bet against Disney because of the breadth and the depth of their franchises. And that's turned out to be true. They put on a massive, massive number of subscribers in a relatively short period of time. But for all of those big players, one of the questions you have to ask is how close are they to a more mature environment? And how much faster do they get to that point because of this compression of time that took place during COVID? So we may get to that point much quicker. A couple of years ago, I remember saying I was speaking somewhere, and I said, the interesting thing to look at as these services launch is going to be how these businesses compare to the embedded legacy businesses that they're all in. With all due respect to how wrong I was because of COVID and the compression, that's -- I think that's -- it may be relevant to talk about, but it's -- I don't think it's relevant from an investor standpoint anymore because that's past. So now I think relatively soon, we're going to be -- what happened quarter-over-quarter, what happened year-over-year. And I do think that's where I keep coming back to this law of smaller numbers. We operate in a different place -- And we think about our business differently. And you can't get up in the morning and worry about things that you can impact. So I spend a lot of time worrying about what we can impact here every day in terms of the strength of our brands, the strength of our content, the value of our IP and the various public we serve.

Makes sense. I mean, I do -- I wanted to talk about some of the things you guys can control. But one last follow-up. In terms of the niche services versus these general entertainment services. I mean, as you've mentioned, the big trend right now is the ever-increasing sort of content budgets really at the larger ones, Netflix goes up every year, Disney goes up every year. We'll have to see what David Zaslav says once he gets his hand on the HBO Max. I have a feeling which direction that's going. At Viacom, we see that same thing. Is there a risk that the big genre entertainment platform spend so much money and go deep in so many genres and after so many -- they after so many segment that it sort of squeeze out the niche guys. I mean is there ever a point where there's enough content on Netflix that -- first of all, you don't need the number of 5, 6 or 7 service. You might not even need the Shudder because it touches so much [ floor ] content on it.

First of all, so much content on Netflix that you can't find anything.

That's true.

How often -- is that the first time you ever heard anybody say that? Today, John, maybe today. So again, if we do our job and we attract these passionate audiences, and we work hard within the space that we're good at. That's what we do. We do and we do it well. I think in general, there is an end of curation with these big services. But we focus on curation. And we don't focus on curation in terms of the content that we produce and that we market, but also, I think, particularly going forward, I think that the -- our viewer interfaces, the way we promote to our users, and we haven't talked about data and data platforms, but everybody is that's just a fact of life in the business right now will help us embrace these audiences. And it's funny all the things I worry about, I don't really worry about that because, frankly, there's already a lot of that content out there. We're doing it. And when you look historically -- and go back in AMC's history, would you have expected at the time that Mad Men or Breaking bad would have come from AMC? Or particularly The Walking Dead or the biggest shows in the history of television. And where did it come from? It didn't come from HBO. It didn't come from Showtime, when I was CEO of Showtime, unfortunately. It came from AMC, fortunate now for me. And the world is obsessed with the show Squid Game. So Netflix went out and bought that. But where did it come from? Did it come from a $100 million development deal that Netflix threw at somebody or the stable of producers, creators, writer, controlled by Warner Media. No. It came from some obscure place on the other side of the world and people that none of us ever heard of. So that's the beauty of the business we work in creatively. And I should be so lucky that one of those things happens on my watch here, but we see it happen in this business all the time because you can't predict where the next great idea is going to come from. So we all have to put ourselves in a place to be lucky. AMC has been lucky before and God know who will be lucky in the future, and I have no concerns about others trying to do what we're doing.

Maybe be more focus on sort of the short-term and medium-term streaming targets for AMC are $9 million by year-end '21, $20 million to $25 million by year '25.Can you talk about sort of the components of getting to these numbers. Is it -- how important the international markets be as a driver of that versus sort of increased content spend?

Well, first of all, the numbers that are on the table, I feel very good sitting here in the first week of December. If I didn't feel good about it, it would be a really rough 3 weeks left or a week or 2 left before the world goes on vacation. But we feel very good about this year's numbers. We feel very good about those numbers looking out in another 3, 4 years now. It's funny how those years, all of a sudden come up at you pretty quickly, we're going into 2022. Within our current universe, we think we have the plans in place that are going to get us there. Frankly, I come in first day and I say that's all, but we want to be realistic. We take a very carefully planned approach to how we invest dollars across the board against these goals. We haven't touched more about Acorn, but I think that is an undervalued asset, an asset that could grow a lot more than even we think internally over the next years if we're aggressive with it. So I think we'll get there. I would say on the international front, I wouldn't expect in the short term that you're going to see a lot of that come from international, maybe a little bit later in the game. We've launched streaming services in the U.K., in Canada, Australia. Acorn has a launch or 2 around the world. I think the AMC Networks international footprint around the world will help us. It's certainly one of the areas where we probably have been under resourced, and our current performance doesn't reflect our international activities on a higher level. But you can take a glass if half empty, glass if half full view of that. I take the glass is half empty, full is as we really get more aggressive on the streaming side, it's certainly going to be our priority to get more aggressive in the international markets, work where we have relationships around the world. And to the extent that we could be a lot more successful there, that's going to have a tremendous impact on the company.

Talking about some of the distribution opportunities. You reached an agreement with Verizon to distribute AMC+ back in August. Do you expect to enter a similar agreements going forward, maybe in the U.S. or internationally? And I think -- can you give us an update on how that's performing for you?

It's probably too early in the Verizon front.That's a company I've known pretty well over the years. Verizon, first of all, it's a massive company with massive reach fantastically. They're unbelievable marketers, promoters. They live in a business that requires daily promotion and a huge number of daily transactions, hundreds of millions of devices out there that they serve. So this is a biggie for us, and it's a great relationship. And there are also aggressive in promoting along with Disney+ and Discovery. So we like being involved there. I think it makes a good statement about AMC+ that they chose to work with us here. And that's a relationship that goes well into next year and hopefully much longer. And we think they could really have tremendous impact in helping us grow AMC+. Having said that, it's really early in the game. It's certainly too early for us to talk about any of the results, and I wouldn't do that with how Verizon talking about their results. But what a great brand for us to be associated with. If the appropriate other partners emerged, sure. We don't want to dance with everybody, but certainly, the -- we'll dance with the other best-looking players at the ball, if we have that opportunity.

Makes sense. Maybe last on D2C. Just where do you think margins trend for these businesses over time or just -- or maybe as a segment? I mean you've talked about the benefits of being more sort of niche focused. I mean do you think that provides you sort of longer-term leverage from a margin perspective?

Well, I certainly like our position from a margin standpoint, better than I like a lot of the big players in terms of what we've talked about before and the amount of cost floating out there, what people are -- and this is a big discussion in the equity markets these days is what are the margins going to look like for these giant streamers. Again, for some of my early comments, we're really early in the ballgame here. So it's going to take a long time for these businesses to settle out and see what those look like in the longer term. But everything I've talked about in terms of targeted, passionate audiences, our ability to spend lower on the cost side, leaves us very comfortable that the margins a few years out in our direct-to-consumer business, we will be comfortable and happy with. It's hard to say more about others and what the market is going to look like. But it's a work in progress. And I think it's certainly a work in progress on the investor side. You see a lot of concerns about some of the big players. And one of our jobs here is to convince the world that we're different. We are different, and we are very disciplined, and we think about that every day when we make decisions about what we're going to buy, what we're going to produce, how we're going to promote it. We do not take that lightly.

Maybe turning to licensing really quickly. A number of titles that are coming back off of licensing deals over the next few years, how are you thinking about balancing those revenues with moving content exclusively to streaming services and trying to grow that business?

Look, that's a complicated question. It's a question that we're answering over time. Any number of things in the market could change our point of view of that. And fortunately, we have a good deal of flexibility there. But I will say our primary goal is to build on the revenue, profitability and long-term value of our distributed services. Whether that's streaming services, whether there's still a very strong traditional network business, we still intend to look at that first. And that's something maybe we haven't done in recent years, but the markets have changed a lot in recent years. And I'm not being a Monday morning quarterback, but hopefully, a quarterback looking at what the competition looks like down the road. And we've got to put our best foot forward every day to our user base and the users we work hard to acquire. We've got some great stuff coming back the next few years, some of them shortly, Rectify, Portlandia, a bunch of other titles. And we're going to use those titles within our universe. Does that mean there will be no licensing of our titles in the future? Probably not. But we have the opportunity to make a decision as those titles become available and as we look at where we are promoting and doing well around the world. So there'll be more to come on that. And again, flexibility is key.

Great. Makes sense. With the remaining time, let me talk about sort of focus more on the sort of core business, D2C is not the core business, but maybe advertising and affiliate. So first with the advertising. Just can you give us an update in terms of what you're seeing in the ad market, any headwinds in terms of scatter or CPMs from supply chain issues?

Well, looking at the third quarter, first, we had continued pricing strength, great pricing strength scatter, direct response. Scatter is a little soft going forward, but nothing that is not manageable or -- and it's really not a factor in terms of how we're looking at next year because we've got great pricing going into the year. I think there's a little concern out there about supply chain issues on the advertiser side and reading, hearing some of the stuff this week that we may be seeing a little bit of relief there. So we're not terribly worried about that. Overall, I think the market is extremely healthy. It's solid. Again, I mentioned that the pricing remains very strong. We are well positioned, very focused on maximizing inventory and monetization. And we've been aggressive in some of the advanced digital initiatives. So we feel pretty good about it. And upfront, it's been very strong for us. So the other thing that I'm hearing a little bit about, which I think is sort of interesting. And it's one thing that I don't think anybody really thought about as all of a sudden, there's this massive impact of streaming, massive streaming numbers out there is there's a shortage of strong availability for advertisers in more traditional environments or using some of these advanced digital technologies, and we benefited from that. One of the things I've been impressed with here in a very short time is we have a very strong commercial revenue group with a very strong commercial revenue presence and these guys are really getting ahead of the game, and we're looking at strong performance next year.

And you mentioned some of the digital services and FAST services that include for instance, can you give us a sense of the benefit that you may be seeing in terms of advertising trends from including some of your content on these platforms? It's going to be a nice tailwind for you.

It's sort of new to me. I wasn't that close to a lot of it, the FAST, AVOD, connected TVs. I think I had to spend the first couple of weeks just learning the vocabulary. But I think I've learned it and look, it's a great way, again, to monetize our library of product. We're out there with a lot of players, Pluto, Amazon has its My tv, Samsung TV, VIZIO. There's a bunch more coming. There will be a bunch more. I'm sure there'll be consolidations. I'm sure there'll be more coming in there. But these -- more platforms means more monetization. And we'll see. I've actually take it upon myself to start using some of these stream platforms myself just to understand how they work. And it's interesting, my son just moved into a new house over in Brooklyn and he said, Dad, I got Pluto or something or Pluto or whatever and he's really proud of it that he called me up. I can't get the Knicks game tonight. I'm dying. I can't get the Knicks game. So a lot of this is settling in. We got to figure out what type of content moves through these platforms, what it really costs consumers. And again, I keep saying this, I don't want to be boring. We are in the early innings here. Very, very early innings, and we have to see how consumers start using these products. But in the meantime, these are monetization platforms. And when monetization platforms come along, we're going to take advantage of them.

Got it. Makes sense. Maybe lastly on the affiliate side, you went through a heavy period of renewals in '20 but '21 has, in fact, been a lighter year. What sort of -- may be within that and what you're seeing from a [ cutting ] standpoint, what's your outlook for affiliate revenues maybe in pricing over the next few years?

Look, we don't -- we don't talk about individual negotiations. It's a fact of life. This happens year in, year out. I have an entire other career where part of almost every day of my life was the renewals. We have a couple of advantages, I think, going back to the table with our clients, one of those advantages is the other -- we're at the other end of the spectrum from ESPN, I thought we should be going back in with $8 a month fees. When you're out there selling ESPN+ and all these other things going there, we are a relatively inexpensive play for our major customers, probably over the years, less expensive than we should have been. So we're not looking at -- we've done a few in the past. We'll do a few more. The business is changing. And our #1 objective when we sit down with any of our important clients is to say how can we both benefit from the changes in the business? And how can we generate additional revenue streams for both of us rather than be obsessed with how do you get an extra $0.03 out of the room on either side. And that's what the world has been like for all these. How do you get an extra $0.03 on either side of that table. And this is a much better position to be in to talk about how our clients can benefit from the different types of revenue growth, and we've talked about some that are occurring here.

And lastly, how should we think about your capital allocation priorities over the next couple of...

No, wait, just one last point.

Sure.

When I say revenue growth, we're looking for substantial AMC business coming from our existing client, AMC+ business coming from our existing clients. We think they're in a great position. Some of the deals we've done recently reflected how great the position they are to sell these, and particularly the players who have a large or hopefully a larger broadband-only strategy in terms of selling video content. So this is a way of overcoming the constant complaint from the other side of the table that we don't make money in video. I've been hearing that for 30 years. We don't make money from video. Yet you keep adding more video, you keep raising the prices of the video and people watch a lot of video on your -- in your universe. So that's important to us. Like I was talking about monetization platforms. There's no better monetization platform than the people that have been paying this company for our service for decades. And then we're going to see more of that in the future. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you but actually...

No, no, it was fine. That was great. So just lastly, just how do you think of sort of capital allocation priorities going forward as we look into '22 both from share repurchases, M&A, debt pay down, content investments? Is there a framework you can tell us about sort of how do you guys sort of...

I [ moved ] a lot of shares back into the company in the past year, took advantage of what we thought was some favorable pricing out there. Look, if we can grow these -- if we can do things organically to expand our offerings, that's going to be great. If there is M&A out there, we are disciplined about it. We're not looking to go out and acquire companies which are billions of dollars. We're looking to acquire companies that fit into our targeted streaming strategy. And we're not out looking to buy things left and right. We're just being cautious, careful and smart. And at the end of the day, opportunistic. We think we're in the ability to take advantage of opportunities that come our way, that expand this strength, we have this targeted streaming strength we have in the marketplace. At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves every day. When we do something, we think about to do something, does this bear -- build shareholder value. And I'd say the answer will be yes, in anything that we do. And I'm not saying you won't hear from us shortly or you won't hear from us for a long time about these things, but it's something we look at and talk about every day.

Got it. Well, Matt, I think that's all we have time for. I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for being with us.

Great. Nice to see you. I appreciate the opportunity. And hopefully, we can talk again soon.

That sounds great. Thank you all for joining.