Liberty Broadband Corporation (LBRDK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

November 9, 2023

NASDAQ US Communication Services Media investor_day 362 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#1

Good morning. Welcome, everyone, to Liberty's 2023 Investor Day. I'm Shane Kleinstein, Vice President of Investor Relations for Liberty. So those online and in the room, we're happy to have you here. Quick note that the winner of the competition for the dinner theme at yesterday evening's investor dinner, we have Barton Crockett, it's a runner up from Christy Hobeger and Brandon Ross. So congrats, you'll have to follow up on your prize. Looking quickly at the agenda for today. We have presentations from all of our companies. We'll start with Liberty Media and Atlanta Braves, then Formula One, SiriusXM, Live Nation, Qurate Retail. We're doing something a little bit different today. So we will have a panel discussion on Generative AI with Greg and guests Brad Gerstner, the Founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital; and Joe Inzerillo, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at SiriusXM. We think it will be a great discussion. So hopefully, you will join us for that. We do have lunch downstairs from 12 to 1. Hopefully, many of you saw we have F1 simulators downstairs as well. They are the official simulator of the F1 sim racing Pro series that launches in Sweden in 2 weeks. There is a sign up. We hope it will be slightly less competitive, certainly less expensive than joining an actual F1 seat. So go test or drive. And then in the afternoon, we have Liberty TripAdvisor with TripAdvisor, Liberty Broadband, Charter GCI, and we'll end the day with our Q&A with John Malone and Greg Maffei. A few other administrative notes, please take note of our WiFi network, so you have this for the day. Same hashtag, different platform, whatever your platform of choice is. We hope you will tag Liberty Investor Day. And we will have slides to post and a replay available on our website. But as the slide says, we ask that you please hold your horses. It does take some time for them to get up onto the website. Yes, those are, in fact, John's horses, if you were curious. We appreciate your patience with us. And finally, we had some signs downstairs that noted, we are not allowing any video recording in the auditorium today, which means you will have to fight temptation not to capture this, I invite you to turn your attention to our forward-looking statement. [Presentation]

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#2

Don't worry, there will be more of them to come throughout the day. A big thank you to the team at Liberty, including the IR team that makes all of this happen. Thank you for all of your work. And as always, we try to prepare some brief entertainment. We aim to be timely, somewhat creative, decently humorous, which is very difficult in this audience at 9:00 a.m., that being said we attempted. For those on the webcast, I apologize the comedy is only available to those here in person. This year, we debated having ChatGPT write the comedy for us for those who always ask if we hire outside professionals, we do not. In the end, courtesy of Liberty's in-house team and in tribute to our friends at Warner Bros Discovery, we hope you enjoy. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#3

Good morning. Just want to know the tie, [indiscernible] our friends Barbie. Since we were last year, we'd like to think we at Liberty have been busy. Done a bunch of things starting with LSXM, simplifying our tracking stock and delevering the balance sheet. The tracking stock is pretty simple today. Just 84% stake in series, some cash and some debt. We settled our converts, our 1 in 3/8 and our 2 in 1/8 exchangeables. We settled the intergroup interest, the batter debt for exchangeable has been done this week. And so it's a very simple story at Liberty SiriusXM. And with that in mind, we recently made a proposal to merge SiriusXM and Liberty Siri. As I said, we're not going to comment any more on that. But the rationale for the proposal is to obviously clean up the dual stock structure provide a more flexible and attractive currency in new series, improve the trading dynamics, better liquidity, potential for index inclusion, allow management to focus on the business, and tell a better IR story with less distractions. SiriusXM had a great brand reveal yesterday, an app relaunch with exciting new content and lots of opportunities. And one thing is clear, Kevin Hart knows how to steal a show, if any of you were there. Turning to F1. We expect to close our deal on Quint by year-end. LVGP is up for next week. It's amazing how much Renee and her team have done in a year, started up an entire commercial organization for inaugural race, built a 300,000 square foot pit building. It's a massive undertaking and will be an enormous spectacle. We're very excited. We've also done some other things to improve the business. We refinanced our term loan B and the spread was reduced by 100 bps, that's about a $17 million annual interest savings. And the strength of the F1 business continues. We have multiple new deals and renewals, a new global partnership with Qatar Airways, AmEx has joined us as a new regional partner in the Americas, and we've done upsells with Heineken, MSC and Paramount+. Turning now to the new Liberty Live tracker. We think it clearly highlights the power of live, and I'll talk a little bit more about it in a second. But we issued a new 2 and 3/8 exchangeable there and repurchase the vast majority of our old exchangeables. And Live Nation continues to experience record demand. For a while, we've talked about the shift to the spend on live events. COVID was a little dip, we'll fully acknowledge, but that trend continues and no one has tapped that perhaps better than Live Nation, and they continue to see growth not only in concerts, but -- domestically, but particularly overseas. So looking at Liberty Live. Why do we do it? Obviously, to simplify the tracking stock structure. It's been trading a little over 3 months. And out of the gates, it's a very discounted attractive play on the Live itself. I'd note that since we initially invested in Live, it's up about 600%, and we still remain very bullish on its prospects. The composition of this tracker is likely to evolve, and we've talked about it a little in the past, you can see us add more live events, more venues and other assets that could naturally fit well with Live Nation over time. If you look at the part on the right side of the slide, you'll note we have a history of creating these trackers, which may look uncertain and may be evolving entities. But over time, they tend to gain focus and clarity. Liberty Ventures Group acquired a stake in Live Liberty Broadband Charter. It acquired GCI. It spun into GCI Liberty and the merged with Liberty Broadband, Liberty Media Group, one time the largest asset, was a stake in Live and if you use that tracker to acquire F1 So we have a history of doing this, and we think with pretty good results. This last year, we spun off -- since the last Investor Day, we spun off the Braves. Why do we do that? We think it will allow us to reduce the discount to private market value, will now enable us to have future flexibility. So far, the market has been pretty supportive. Currently, the batter Ks are up about 18% and they've been up as much as 38% since our announcement. I'd also note that this had a positive trend on trading liquidity with the average daily float up about 130% post split versus the comparable pre-split period and the batter float itself is up about 22%, partially due to our settlement of the intergroup interest that we had. So we tend to stick our neck out at Liberty on some of these and make pronouncements about where things are going in the industry, partly to educate ourselves and hopefully tell you where things are going in our minds because it may tell you what we are likely to do. And you've seen some of the things we've talked about, how much video, the excess of video created a circular firing squad among those participants. One of the reasons we exited STARZ, that audio perhaps had more upside than the eye. And most recently, we talked about how the [indiscernible] system, those connections with customers allow you to build super attractive binding business models. So as I said, One of the reasons we talk about some of these things is not only to educate, but to give you a foreshadowing of where we are likely to go. And you've seen that over time. Our actions have matched our words, and this doesn't include assets that are outside of Liberty Media like Charter, but we've tended to exit vulnerable spaces like DIRECTV and STARZ because we saw that video was less attractive with content costs increasing and the saturation in video and a questionable profitability model. We also exited smaller stakes in Viacom, AT&T, iHeart, Clear Channel and LendingTree. But as the media landscape is evolved, we've looked for different ways to play it. We still love subscription businesses. But in many cases, those have gotten very expensive and harder to find and been bid up. Today, we really are concentrated and focused another attractive place, which we call the premium IP ecosystem. Those assets are popular, exclusive and leverageable. What does it mean to be, in our minds, a premium IP owner. All IP has some level of moat and some level of protection. But we think these are particularly differentiated. It's where the customers are fans, first and foremost, whether it be an asset, a sport, a team or a brand and what's a better, stickier customer than a fan. In our thought piece last year, I talked a little about the [indiscernible] system on those connections. You can make a durable bond when you bond emotionally to the customer, and they bond emotionally the business. And in many cases, those companies that do that bring comfort or joy to their customers. Another element of this is that scarcity is driving demand. These premium assets in and of themselves are scarce, for example, sports assets. And that limited supply created with -- merged with the opportunity to have interaction with a fan or an artist and the high demand that entails creates great economics. That's something we all learned in economics 101. A third element perhaps of this premium IP model is opportunities for expansion. The ability to leverage and extend that valuable IP into new opportunities, create new touch points and again, grow the overall fan base. That flywheel has been very powerful, and we think it's very attractive. F1 is a great example. Our fan base is loyal and growing since 2008 -- 2018, excuse me, we have grown the overall fans by 40%, with 40% of the fans now female, and our fans continue to get younger. And looking at this flywheel of fan demand and stickiness, you can see while the number of fans is huge, these fans also become the best customers. We've had continued sellouts despite some capacity increases, and we've seen overall engagement rise dramatically. And this growth in the broader engagement among new and heritage fans is very interesting and powerful because many fans interact in new and different ways. Our linear viewership is still strong. But given the change in the marketplace, you can see that we've seen engagement growing across all sorts of new platforms, social media, f1.com, F1 TV, all part of the broader ecosystem. F1 TV, for example, is up 30% year-to-date. Now look at the 110 million fans that are on the slide that are visitors to f1.com. It's a stunningly large number. even perhaps more impressive is the growth and how many have gone -- become registered fans, 2.5 million up to 19 million over the same time period. We have been the fastest growing sport on social for multiple years. Perhaps most interesting is our growth in the U.S. market, a key area for focus and a key area with growth potential, we believe. We've seen huge crowds in some of the U.S. races and the vast majority have been sell-outs. We've seen 2 million people turn into this year's Miami Grand Prix. And what's interesting, you see look against the NASCAR numbers and others, if you look at our fan base, it's younger and growing compared to many other sports and that particularly stands out in the motorsport area. We have the largest audience for Formula One in the U.S. on YouTube and TikTok, and we've seen 60% growth in those platforms year-over-year. So it's still early in the U.S. This is the first year of our third race, but we're exciting to see new distributors enter the market and potentially be people who bid on this engagement, bid on this growth in new ways, even in the traditional linear and mobile space. One of the points about scarcity obviously, is there's only one F1. And that high demand, meeting the scarce supply we have has seen enormous growth in all parts of our revenue stream. Let's look at race promotion. We are limited in captive 24 races, and we've grown that. But one of the things that happens is because you only have the 24 cities and countries have bid against themselves make in many cases, 2 cities in the same country or across different geographies. And we've been able to leverage that competitive tension to grow our promotion revenue. Look at media rights. Typically, we tend to have one major carriage partner in each territory. But as additional players have entered the landscape with interest, whether they be linear or digital and with the growth of our overall engagement and the growth of F1 TV, we've seen massive opportunities in media rights. Turn now to sponsorship. We do maintain exclusivity and tightness of supply at various tiers, but we've been able to add new signage and new -- and different kinds of opportunities for sponsorship through digital signage and other product offerings. And we kept demand high in that space, and that's allowed us to access the premium brand value that we bring and tap this growing fan base. And we've also seen interest and success around our new sustainability initiatives because that's an important element for many sponsors. And finally, looking at the other revenue streams like hospitality, Again, the Paddock Club, the limited supply there, even though we've been able to increase that to a degree, prices have gone up faster. Demand has gone up faster, and we've been able to drive those revenue streams in an attractive fashion. One of the other things that we really love about this premium IP is the ability to expand it into new areas. We talked about the 12 commercial sponsorships partners we've added since '21. We look at the whole ecosystem. The team values as much as F1 itself is up and our F1 is up, the team values are up something like 5x since we became involved and we've been able to add new and star-studded investors like Rory and Patrick Mahomes and Anthony Joshua. But down below, you can see the way we continue to broaden the ecosystem with new series, new OEMs, F1 Arcade, F1 Exhibition. F1 Arcade had 300,000 visitors in its first year at its London venue, and they plan 219 permanent venues in the U.S. within 5 years. We also look to expand in other new medias. For example, as great and successful as we've done with drive to survive, you can't count it on it forever. We've expanded into new podcast, and we have plans for a great movie in conjunction with Apple, that will bring Brad Pitt to the screen and think -- bring our audiences to a whole new level. So continuing to find new ways to touch our fans is important. Part of that also is extending the reach out with the premium experiences, and that's why we bought Quint. Quint is a premium hospitality provider to over 90 sporting events globally, we believe the transaction will be immediately EBITDA accretive. And it's a logical extension of F1 and sports more broadly. We think enhancing for Quint -- enhancing an F1 partnership and that closer relationship will allow them to expand their locations and also leverage Liberty's relationships to expand to new and live events partners. For F1, it's going to be great to have better knowledge of our fan base, bring more efficiency to our ticketing distribution and create better fan opportunities to do high-end things at the track, a dinner on the track, a tour -- a garage tour, a track tour, potentially a hot lap. Creating those opportunities in different ways for our fans to touch fuels demand and is also accretive to that flywheel. So I'm going to turn to Vegas in a moment, but before we talk about it, I'm going to show you a teaser from the opening ceremony. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#4

If you can't tell, we are very excited about Vegas. We think it will be iconic, the biggest event in Vegas history and it will capitalize and further fuel our strong U.S. growth and expand opportunities and excitement worldwide. The engagement for this race has been unbelievable. Over 144 million social impressions. 12 million people have engaged on those impressions, and there have been over 71 million video views. We've also done great work in the community. We know we have taxed them with our construction and road delays. But we've done great work in the community to bring local hires, investments in facilities, donations. We think it's a pilot for sustainable event initiatives that we've undertaken at F1 and we estimate that the total economic impact we will bring to Las Vegas will be about $1 billion, $2 billion. But the significant benefits to the broader ecosystem are more than just 1 race. We think this is going to impact our fans globally. The excitement of a night race down the strip will be unparalleled. And we continue to bring in and expand partnerships because of F1 in Vegas. An example I mentioned already is AmEx, who is excited to bring their customers, their branding, but most of all, engage and activate on-site at Vegas and other races around North America. And we're going to use the learnings from Vegas across the race calendar, and we're going to work with other promoters to raise the bar and continually improve the experience at our races and attempt to create a super like -- Super Bowl like experience every weekend. We think this is all going to be positive to grow our fan base over time. And there is more potential to grow and optimize both the size and profitability of Vegas in years to come. A key element of both Vegas and Quint and many of the things we're doing is trying to build deeper fan relationships. We want to understand and prioritize what our fans want and what they do and know that in a way to serve them better. The direct-to-consumer data that we're going to get from Vegas and Quint and other owned properties between Vegas ticketing, the app that we created, the on-site spend at Quint with the database of leads and clients they have, which is over 1 million today, in across 114 countries at F1 TV, which has grown 30% year-to-date, as I said, and at F1.com, the app, which has grown 32% year-to-date over the prior year. All of those give us a huge opportunity to better understand and leverage our fan insights. We'll have greater fan outreach, improve the customer experience, allow new opportunities for content creation, and we can share this information with partners to better serve them and optimize revenue to us. All of this is important to understanding who our new fans are and especially important in some of the growth markets who come in, these fans have come in for different reasons than our traditional fans are -- our heritage fans. It's great to have growing fans. It's even more impactful if you understand how to make them great customers. So we're super excited about the F1 business and its future opportunities and prospects, but we're not the only ones. Let me show you a quick teaser from our friends at CNBC, who are going to talk about the business of F1 in a special that airs next Thursday night at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time in advance of the Vegas race. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#5

So F1 is super exciting. It's a great example of leveraging premium IP but we have another one in our portfolio, Live Nation, which is equally exciting and doing a wonderful job also of leveraging IP. There's a controlled supply of artists meeting huge demand, and Michael Rapino will talk more about this shortly. But when your fans are your strongest, most passionate customers, you have a great customer set. 92% of fans say they expect to go to the same or more shows in '24 that they did in '23. 67% of fans say that live concerts are among their most memorable events of the year. At Live Nation, the supply drives demand or you could say, harnesses latent demand. When favorite artists announce a concert, people say they want to go. They want to go and are excited to attend. And that strong fan connection with artists is a huge opportunity for Live Nation, particularly as it grows globally. And you've seen global audiences grow across TikTok, Insta and streaming. And demand for concerts today is truly global, and artists are able to tour a wider set of markets. And you can see that particularly with the growth in the international markets. And these expanding opportunities with more growth to come, the tailwind from the shift to experiential spend, concerts being an affordable luxury that are underpriced compared to many other live experiences are driving continued growth. I mentioned how much of it's overseas. International fan growth was 34% last year. And International acts have doubled their representation over the last 5 years as -- out of the total pie that's growing. And the pipeline for new venues and new acts remains very strong, and this expansion fuels fan growth as well. So all of this is very positive in terms of creating that premium IP flywheel. SiriusXM has many of the same elements with a strategy that emphasizes unique content in a lean-back model. It is premium IP with fans leveraging the loved host and celebrities and exclusive content like sports. Sirius customers are, first and foremost, fans. They find community and comfort and listen to their favorite SiriusXM host. For example, the top 25 channels on SiriusXM are hosted channels. And they build relationships with those hosts in many cases, connecting in the car. 3/4 of Americans drive to work alone. That may not be believable to this New York audience, but it is the predominant method of travel to your office or to your place of work. And a high percentage of them actually have anxiety in driving to work. and Sirius can be an oasis. So we've talked about some of those [indiscernible] connections and providing that opportunity to bond with your customers. Sirius has that in spades. So this brand with a huge scale with a huge sticky customer base, attracts desirable talent, and there's a positive flywheel that flows around that as well. It fuels that premium strategy. And one of the things you heard about -- talked about yesterday at their event and Jennifer Witz will talk about more, is continuing to leverage the strength of that content, the strength of the experience across new platforms to grow their fans as well, that positive flywheel. The last one to talk about is our friends at the Braves, who absolutely have premium IP content. Scarcity of sports wins -- teams, rather, is a huge example of IP content that has been bid up. And it's exciting to see what's happened in baseball because of all the new rule changes, which have absolutely reinvigorated the baseball ecosystem, shorter game times, more successful stolen bases. That's been a more exciting season with higher attendance, and interestingly, like F1, they've been able to actually draw a younger fan base. The Braves are arguably the most successful team in the baseball ecosystem, Bleacher Report, both of them as having the best on-field and off-field business performance. And you can see it while it was disappointing, obviously, we didn't make it all the way back to the World Series like in '21, we did manage to have an unbelievably good season, our sixth straight National League title. The Braves have the longest active division title streak in baseball since the divisions were created in 1969. In the regular season, we tied for the second most wins in season in the franchise history. We had 6 finalists for the Silver Slugger, 3 golden gloves as you heard earlier on, 8 on the Barbie -- tape 8 of our players go to the MLB All-Star game. And we were the finalist for the first-ever team Silver Slugger recognizing overall offensive excellence. Look, it's valuable sports IP. There are only 30 baseball teams, and most importantly, there's only 1 Braves. We'd like to think we have a history of strong returns at Liberty. We are investors, first and foremost, for the long term and the strength of the portfolio has shown that at almost double the S&P 500 since I joined in '05. But we also think about how to make it a sustainable business for the long term because that's good business. And we're driving meaningful impact with tangible results across our businesses at F1 with e-fuels and road applicability, at F1 Academy, growing the opportunity for women and girls in the sport led by Susie Wolff. It's already received support from all 10 Formula One teams. At the Braves, we have enormous high community impact with the Braves Foundation and the Henry Louis Aaron Fund. And supporting HBCUs to increase representation at the Braves. At Live Nation with sustainable events and diversity across all the platforms. And at SiriusXM showing talent with different perspectives and allowing a platform for meaningful dialogue. All of these are based on what's most important and necessary for each company and their stakeholders. So with that, I'm going to say thank you, and will be back soon to talk about some other companies.

Unknown Executive

executive
#6

Good morning. This is what we announced last year. It happened. Just a quick reminder of what we went through. The Braves tracking stock became an asset-backed security through a split-off transaction that was completed in the middle of July. And in connection with the split-off, we recapitalized the tracking stocks and created the Liberty Live Group. Holders of Liberty Sirius and Formula One Group received shares in Liberty Live Group equal to their proportionate interest or share of net assets and the intergroup interest were settled out, which brings us to where we are today. A simplified tracking stock structure with separate securities to track our holdings in SiriusXM, the Formula One investment and Live Nation. Liberty SiriusXM now only tracks our investment in Siri. We also have meaningfully reduced the debt balance here, which we'll talk about more in a minute. With still solid liquidity there with $1.1 billion in capacity under the margin loan. The Formula One Group is primarily our investment in Formula One, along with our Vegas investments. Here on the NAV, we've conservatively included the purchase price for the Vegas land. We've also included the Quint acquisition at the announced enterprise value, and adjusted the cash balance for this pending transaction, which we expect to close later this year. The ultimate cash consideration could vary based on various closing conditions. There's private assets included here in the -- with the investment in F1 Arcade, Meyer Shank racing and the pit building related to the Vegas race. We've also taken attractive balance sheet actions and reduced the cost of debt since last year. More to come on that. Liberty Live Group has our Live Nation stake in various private assets. Live stake as of yesterday was $6.1 billion. There's also cash and liquid investments at quarter end of $417 million. We also have $400 million available on the Live Nation margin loan. There's $380 million of private assets, which were measured as of the S-4 filing date. We don't plan on giving updates to that value in the future. On the liability side, we raised the new 2.375 live exchangeables and repurchased 93% of the existing 0.5% exchangeables. Looking at the SiriusXM, the LSXM balance sheet, The prioritization here has been simplification and deleveraging of LSXM this year. Note this slide doesn't factor in the reduction for the Live Nation debt that was attributed to the new live tracker along with the live equity stake. So since last year, we've issued a new 3.75% convert. We used those proceeds to retire the 2.125% Siri exchangeables and partially retire the 1.375 basket convertible before quarter end. After quarter end, the basket convert and associated bond hedge and warrants were fully retired. In total, we've reduced LSXM net debt balance by over $500 million year-to-date, using cash on hand, including the Siri dividend proceeds, the FWON intergroup interest settlement that was done in connection with the reclassification. And then earlier this week, we completed the exchange of the 1.8 million Batter shares for proceeds of $61 million, which was used to repay margin loan debt. The net debt to asset value here improved from 14.7% to 11.3% as of 9/30. Looking at Liberty Live Group. We've capitalized Liberty Live Group with cash and monetizable holdings of $315 million in cash and $102 million of liquid ETF assets as of quarter end. There's $400 million undrawn margin loan capacity resulting in total liquidity of $817 million. We have the ability to monetize against an attractive live equity. Following refinancing activity earlier in the year, we had $1.2 billion principal amount of debt against 69 million shares with a value of about $6.1 billion as we just discussed. There's 49 million unencumbered live shares. There's less live shares per bond under the new exchangeable due to a 16% increase in the exchange price. The result of all this is an attractive 14% net debt to asset value. Turning to Formula One and their profitability. We've seen impressive growth in OEBITDA since 2018, with 10% CAGR through the 12 months ended 9/30. Margins have held steady as leverage in certain expense categories such as team payments, have been reinvested to fuel continued growth in the business. In aggregate, team payment dollars have grown from a little over $900 million in 2018 to just under $1.2 billion as of last year. It's an increase of 27% as the teams have benefited from the overall growth in the ecosystem. With that said, team payments as a percent of OEBITDA have come down nearly 400 basis points during this period. As we said at earnings, year-to-date, we're at 64.6% versus the 65.6% in the slide. And this reflects generally higher Q2 and Q3 team payments, which are higher than the full year amount due to the higher mix of European races. F1 is reinvesting this cost leverage on growth initiatives like the Vegas Race, F1 Academy and generally just supporting growth in the other revenue streams. The pie charts here show year-to-date 2023 to 2022. As you could see, freight costs have come down meaningfully with a corresponding decrease in revenue but improving margins year-over-year. Hospitality and experience costs are up, driven by increased Paddock Club attendance, cost of higher quality experiences offered for our guests and inflationary pressures. And lastly, you can see here the impact of the F1 Academy and the LVGP investments from the current -- from -- in the current year. As we've said before, other costs and SG&A are best viewed as a percent of total revenue versus just other revenue. Some examples of other increases we've seen are higher commission costs as we sign more commercial partners and grow F1 TV. There's also inflation in travel costs post pandemic. And we've also, as we mentioned last year, transitioned the F1 L-TIP to a cash-based program from a stock based. This slide should look relatively familiar. I think we went through this at least 4 times so far. Here, we look at the 5-year average of OEBITDA, free cash flow conversion for F1. F1 continues to have a very strong free cash flow conversion despite organic investments in the Las Vegas race. Compared to last year, we continue to see interest expense come down driven by refinancing activity and debt reduction. Working capital has gone from nearly neutral in past years to a much more significant positive. This is largely due to timing of Q1 race fees being received in Q4 and also impacts from the Vegas race for the first time. Taxes are generally consistent, but we expect to see a modest uptick in the cash tax rate due to changes in U.K. rates. We expect to be a high single-digit payer as a percent of F1 adjusted OEBITDA in 2024, trending towards low double digits in future years. There's been a modest uptick in F1 CapEx driven by investments in the improved media and tech center out at Biggin Hill, which enables remote broadcast operations and enhancements in regional feeds. These are improvements that should reduce travel costs in the future and help get us to our carbon neutral goals. Major impact to CapEx has been driven by the Vegas race-related activities. And as we've discussed before, the pit building investments are at the FWON corporate level, while the track-related CapEx is at the OpCo level. Even with these Vegas investments, you see free cash flow conversion at the FWON consolidated level is relatively consistent with the prior year at 58%, that improves to 70%, if you exclude the Vegas start-up investments. We've been managing leverage at Formula One. We've continued to reduce our leverage despite recent investments and have taken steps to reduce interest costs. We lowered the term loan B 25 basis points from meeting certain leverage tests in early Q2, and then we completed an attractive refinancing in October to further reduce the spread another 75 basis points to 225. This will result, as Greg said, in about $17 million of annual interest savings going forward. And the liquidity picture at the Formula One Group is still strong, with nearly $1.2 billion of cash on hand pro forma for the Quint acquisition and $500 million available on the F1 revolver. We've done this while investing. Since the first quarter of 2022, we've made significant investments to continue to grow the F1 ecosystem. We made the Vegas land purchase and invested in the pit building. And track instruction. We announced the Quint acquisition, and we invested in the growing F1 Arcade business at both the corporate and OpCo level. The business has performed incredibly well in London and is now expanding to the U.S. The broadcast center refurbishment that we just discussed will optimize the efficiency of our broadcasting capabilities and should be margin accretive as we move forward. We've also spent over $1 billion in strategic capital structure actions, including net debt paydown of over $700 million, which is attractive in this current interest rate environment, and we also bought back the FWON shares from the settlement of the IGIS. We continue to -- we will continue to invest where we see opportunistic uses of FWON capital and weigh all capital return strategies. And as we said, we still have $1.2 billion of cash and the $500 million revolver. Vegas Baby, it's next week. We're almost at the long anticipated race weekend. It's been amazing progress by the Vegas team to get the pit building built, the track ready and all the associated infrastructure in place. 18 months from the time of our land purchase and only 1 year after breaking ground. There's been an incredible amount of new sponsors that have been brought into the Formula 1 ecosystem and Vegas, in particular, as a result of the race. As Greg mentioned, Vegas is about more than the race week, and we are seeing tangential benefits to the overall ecosystem from the race. Our land and building purchases represent long-term investments in Vegas, we're expect to be raising beyond 10 years. We believe the CapEx spend is an attractive organic investment in the business versus acquiring an existing business. And for this first year, we're especially focused on the highest quality fan experience that includes certain startup costs to ensure that experience. Examples of these costs include the opening ceremony, which you just saw, enhanced security, overprovisioning of access points, overprovisioning of food and beverage, developing our own way finding app and other costs. We are confident in the long-term returns and see significant opportunities for efficiencies and incremental fan engagements in year 2 and beyond. Despite the Braves being spun, I would be remissed if I didn't remind investors that sports assets have had attractive returns over recent years. And the scarcity of sports assets only enhances those ultimate values. I'm not here to walk through on that on the Braves. But the Braves have an attractive dynamic with a successful baseball team and a successful and growing mixed-use commercial development with the Battery. We would note that the private market transactions have historically been executed at a premium to this Portico and Forbes values. Here on this slide, Portico attempts to include a very conservative estimate of the Battery and their valuation, but we'll just leave you with the stabilized NOI of the various Battery projects and allow you to do your own math. And lastly, looking at the Braves capital structure. The Braves have consistently executed on a strategy to maintain strong revenue growth while investing back into the team. Through 9/30, revenue was up 11% year-to-date, excluding the post season and showing an 8% adjusted OEBITDA growth while growing payroll prudently. Incremental Battery development requires minimal capital outlay, which has historically been funded by the Battery cash flow. The Office 3 equity investment of $20 million is complete and the remainder is to be funded through debt. The Henry Land contribution is complete. And on the debt side, since the last Investor Day, we've refinanced certain mixed-use debt facilities and entered into a new loan for the Office 3 project. We have a reasonably weighted average cost of debt of under 5% and a comfortable average maturity of 8 years. Thank you.

Unknown Executive

executive
#7

Hello, everyone. I'm excited to give you an update on the Formula One business. Since this time last year, Formula One has continued to go from strength to strength. With 2023 setting many new records as the sport popularity continues to grow across metrics. We are continuing to see sellout crowds at the majority of races. Record attentions and strong growth across our social and digital platforms, which continues to outperform that of other major sport leagues. 2023 will also see another record sales year for our Paddock Club premium hospitality product. Underpinning our strength is a sustained demand for high-quality live events with full races often the largest sporting event on a host country national calendar. Our events continue to attract huge spectative numbers. Rather significant economics and social benefits for the countries and the city where we race. From a sporting perspective, we congratulate Red Bull and Max Verstappen on their incredible performance this season. Max has taken his place in the esteemed company of only 5 drivers to win 3 successive titles. Congratulations on their stellar performance and to the all Red Bull team at the races and back at the factory. On the business side, we've made excellent progress in securing new and renewed commercial deals this past year. Looking at our promotion agreement, unprecedented demand for limited calendar slot continues to drive renewals at competitive rates. Cellular races even renewed earlier to secure a long-term spot. We extended agreements with both Austrian and Hungary beyond 2030 bringing the number of races contracted equal or beyond that date to 9 events. We were also pleased to renew the Netherlands, Azerbaijan, Belgium and Brazil. On our media rights, this past year, we signed contracts in important markets, including Mexico, Belgium, Japan, Latin America, China, Spain and Portugal. Our broadcast partners are improving the quality of their coverage and now the increased coverage hours over 10% this season compared to 2022 according to Nissan data. We have also invested in expanding content to increase the value for our media partners, including introducing helmet cameras for all 20 drivers new regional feeds and our first-ever F1 broadcast for kids, which aired from Hungary and Singapore, and will do so again in Abu Dhabi. Finally, new and existing sponsors are increasingly finding value in the strength of our global brand and the resonance of our ESG commitments. Qatar Airways has been a key supplier supporting our international airfreight in recent years and became our global airline partners at the start of the season. Following a competitive process, we recently confirmed Pirelli will continue as our global tire partner from 2025 to 2027. Pirelli have put a focus on research and development of sustainable tire solution as part of their support of the sustainability targets set by Formula One and from 2024, all tires using for F1 events will be Forest Stewardship Council certified. We announced a multiyear regional partnership with American Express as an official payment partners for the F1 in the Americas and for the Las Vegas Grand Prix. We also renewed an upsold agreement with Heineken, MSC Cruises, Paramount+ and Liqui Moly mode and welcome Puma as our new official apparel pub under which they will create licensing collection of apparel and footwear products beginning 2024. Looking to the future, we are capitalizing on the current momentum to drive maximum value for our sport. And invest strategically for sustained economic growth. These efforts are focused across several initiatives: maximizing value across the commercial rights, augmented our diverse and valuable fan base, investing in strategic markets, bringing world-class racing and prioritizing sustainability in our operation with our partners. Starting with maximizing value across commercial right. We are fortunate to have multiyear contracts across our primary revenue streams, some extending as long as 15 years. As of the third quarter, FWON has $11 billion of contracted revenue secured in multiyear agreements, nearly doubled the balance at the year-end 2019. The interest from external commercial partners continues to grow. There is only one Formula One. We are able to leverage the scarcity of this asset and drive demand across revenue streams. Touching first on race promotion partners. We have announced a '24 race calendar for next year. We recognize and appreciate the effort from all our teams, the FIA and our own personnel that will be required to execute a calendar of this size. After reaching this milestone '24 race's calendar, our priority is to increase the quality and the value of every race slot, limited weekends and high demand from host location has created a positive competitive tension upon renewals. We are working with our promoters partners on the force to enhance race weekend, including through better fun experience, best practice around sustainability, improved fan access and circuit connectivity. Moving to media rights. Broadcaster recognize the size and the loyalty of F1 audience and is very attractive demographics. Season to date, our global TV audience are averaging nearly 70 million per race weekend. Further exceeding event audiences of other large sport properties. Our F1 TV product has continued to grow, delivered an impressive 30% increase in active F1 TV Pro subscribers year-over-year through the third quarter. As an incredible sport property with 24 races across 5 continents in 2024, we will continue to offer arrival levels of global reach and recognition to our media partners. Alternative bidders for live sports, including digital players will only increase competition for scarce rights. On our sponsorship agreement, we are focused on optimizing our existing inventory to maximize impact exclusivity and value for our partners. At the same time, we are creating a new tailored asset to satisfy growing demand. The Sprint and F1 Academy, are just 2 examples of expanding our available inventory with high potential for incremental partnership. The other untapped category verticals we are covering focused on, including financial services, consumer electronics and betting to name a few. In 2023, our broadcast production team introduced a new solution to incorporate enhanced [indiscernible] into our programming by delivering multiple variants of our international fit. To both service existing partners in a new way and to bring in new partner on a regional basis. Our recently announced American regional deal with American Express is a great example that will leverage these capabilities. And finally, on hospitality. We continue to enhance our fan F1 partner club, Working with our delivery partner, [indiscernible] to refresh a look and feel for 2023 and to continue to deliver a best-in-class experience for our guests. At the same time, we are developing new high-end hospitality products, including the F1 garage, which allow guests to experience the excitement of an F1 race from hospitality situated in the pit lane. Liberty's planned acquisition of Quint Event will enhance our ability to grow in hospitality and experience. Now turning to our second area of focus, augmenting our diverse and valuable fan base. Our fans continue to be among our most valuable assets. To help us better understanding them, we generated an enhanced audience segmentation analysis that spans 10 global markets and aggregates face back from over 20,000 F1 fans. A key area of focus is understanding the attitudes and behavior of our newer fans, defining as those who started following F1 in the past 4 years. This group represents 1/3 of our global fan base, an even larger share in the U.S. Newer fans skew younger and a large share are female. According to FWON survey, they are down to F1 for a multitude of reasons, including the global nature of the sport, the driver personality and their story of the racetrack. We are leveraging this insight in creating efforts on and off the track to engage our fan base, both for cultivated loyal and longstanding fans while also developing a deeper relationship with newer ones. Starting with on the track, the Sprint Series is a successful example of innovating and our core product for increased fan engagement. In 2023, we expanded from 3 to 6 Sprint events and introduced a new format that increased the level of intensity and action across the entire race we can. We have 3 full days on track aside them, and the Sprint is a stand-alone event with no bidding on the Grand Prix. The TV audience on Sprint weekends have consistently surpassed comparable non-screen weekends with the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend viewership up to 10% and the Belgium Grand Prix weekend up to 20% compared to 2022. Friday race attendance on sprint weekends, which includes qualifying for Sunday race has trended on average of 30% higher than the Fridays of traditional race weekends. Of the track, our digital platform enable us to expand the content beyond races momentum, and we continue to see sustained growth across our F1 website and social preference. Apple is well into production, their high anticipated F1 movie starring Brad Pitt. Filming has taken place at several races in 2023, including at Silverstone where the A-list actors and their fictional team film on track, operating from a garage into the pits and line up their cars on the creek alongside the F1 teams and drivers. In the way Netflix has introduced a whole new audience to F1. We believe Apple's stream will similarly boost interest in our sport among the broader audience in the U.S. and globally. Our new license exponential venue, F1 Arcade and F1 Exhibition have exceeded expectation. F1 Arcade opened in London last November and has already welcomed at least 300,000 visitors. Their team plans to launch 20 additional F1 Arcade Venues in the next 5 years, starting with the second U.K. venue in Birmingham opening later this month. followed by new U.S. destination in Boston and Washing D.C. in 2024. The first F1 exhibition opened in Madrid in April and became Spain's biggest temporary show in 2023. We will now move to [indiscernible] as the next stop on its 10 years global tour, bringing immersive experience and building F1 brand equity to drive fan engagement. F1 fan today access the sport through an unprecedented garage of channel and platforms. New behaviors especially those of younger digital natives require a review of how we measure audience and engagement. For example, fans are increasingly turning to streaming and digital platform, including F1 TV and YouTube for content that is not captured by standard TV-rating system. Formula One has taken a step towards more holistic measure approach that can capture our wider viewership and engagement. We are working closely with key distribution partners to integrate these measurement capabilities for capture and streaming and social audiences. This will become increasingly important as OTT platform continue to lean into Live sport content. We are also measuring the quality of fan experience through ratings in addition to audience size as complementary methods of engagement. Our capabilities around analyzing contents and channel consumption by demographic have meaningfully improved, which is increasingly important as the diversity of our fan base grows. Our new approach will help us better measure our F1 fans engaged with the sport and demonstrate the value generated to our partners. We will continue to update you on our progress with a richer and more holistic set of audience metrics. Our third focus area is investing in strategic markets. Growth markets for F1 are about far more than hosting new races. We are constructively canvassing for strategic markets with undermonetized fund potential where we can engage across all pillars of our business. This includes opportunity to improve the media coverage, cultivate commercial partners with strong local prices and potentially bring new races. We believe the U.S. and Asia are both underpenetrated fan markets with an incremental growth opportunity across revenue streams. In the U.S. while our momentum has been incredible, we believe we are still early in our growth trajectory. The U.S. represents the largest market in our fan database and our largest market on social platform like YouTube and TikTok with over 50% growth in social followers across U.S. social channels versus last year. On TV viewership, we've seen growing U.S. TV audience season to date. With average viewership per race weekend up versus 2022. 3 of the 4 largest U.S. audiences for the F1 races are [indiscernible] during the 2023 season. I noted that in the U.S., 18 of our races are simulcasted across ESPN and ESPN Plus, while reported linear viewership figures do not capture ESPN Plus viewership. The Las Vegas Grand Prix further cement our commitment to U.S. as a strategic growth market. With only 1 week to go, we are confident the event will set new benchmark for our sport. It will be a spectacle like no other. And the Liberty ownership, F1 has championed at turning Grand Prix weekends into multiday spectacle to maximize value for both the fans and the host destination. Vegas will showcase the vision in an unprecedented way, beginning with a must-see opening ceremony on Wednesday evening that will be broadcasted and feature leading music and entertainment acts. We are confident that Las Vegas Grand Prix will deliver an incredible fun experience and accrue long lasting commercial benefit for the broader F1 ecosystem. Our next area of focus, the hallmark of sport is bringing world-class racing. Formula One is the pinnacle of Global Motorsport and the sport history dating back to 1950 set us around the trail of racing and technological innovation. We are defining our technical sporting strategy to ensure automotive relevance for years to come. The proof of these efforts can be seen with the 3 new OEMs committing to enter or rejoin F1 beginning in 2026, Audi, Ford and Honda. This is a testament and validation of our next-generation hybrid engine strategy as well as our 100% sustainable fuel initiative, which I'll touch on shortly. We are 3 years into the 2021 concurred agreement, which amended the technical and financial regulation to provide the most sustainable economic environment for our teams. While we recognize Red Bull and Max Verstappen's dominance this season, they play [indiscernible] and has indeed become more level. And the 2023 season has delivered a compelling rating across the rest of the grid. Season to date, over half the teams have been represented on the podiums. We have had incredible batters in qualifying rounds, especially in Hungary. The team, in particular, are benefiting from lower cost of competition following the successful introduction of the cost cap, but also from growing price money and sponsorship income. Surge in popularity combined with improved financial sustainability has resulted in meaningful appreciation in the F1 team valuations. Prior authorizing sustainability in our operations and with our partners. Sustainability is integrated into all facets of the F1 business. It is critical to our personnel, commercial partners, teams, fans and ensuring longevity for our business. I'm proud of the credible progress we have made. The sport commitment to 100% sustainable fuel is a next-generation hybrid engine in 2026 has attracted more of the world's largest OEM branded to enter F1. Recent discussion and view across the EU showed the potential for this solution in the automotive sector for existing and new vehicles, adding further validation to have a future power units and fuel plants. The proportion of Formula One's carbon footprint related to racing cars themselves is less than 1%. While small, our sustainable fuel initiative will have a multiplier effect, F1's advanced sustainable fuel are designed as a drop in fuel, meaning they can go into the car without any modification needed. The societal input could be tremendous. We have also taken a significant step to reduce our own emission introducing a new fleet of biofuel truck in 2023 to support U.K. and European freight movements operated by our partner, DHL. With the European season now complete, we believe that the new operation has reduced our European road freight emission by 83%. Our '24 race calendar for next year is organized with increased geographic efficiency to minimize the carbon footprint from our freight transport between races. F1 Academy launched this year the female only racing series led by former racing driver, Susie Wolff. It has been established to inspire a generation of women into our sport, not just as a driver, but in other roles such as mechanics, team leaders and strategists. I'd like to congratulate Marta Garcia on winning the inaugural F1 academy title this season after claiming a spectacular victory in Austin. F1 Academy will get a huge boost in 2024 with all 7 races running alongside F1 race weekends, thanks to the support of our promoter partners. We are also very proud to confirm that all 10 F1 teams will be participating as each will support 1 driver and allow deliveries to be used on the cars. In closing, we have much to be proud of at F1 and an exciting future ahead. The sport popularity continues to grow and is delivering sustained commercial growth. We will continue to invest in our sport to capitalize on our momentum and deliver value to our teams, our partners, our fans and our shareholders. We appreciate your support and hope to see you at races soon. [Foreign Language]. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#8

Good morning. Good morning. It's great to be here in New York. The Atlanta Braves always like to visit New York. Have a good time here usually. So it's always good to be back with you. We had a good time at the investor dinner last night. Thanks for all the people that were sitting at my table. I'm joined here with the CEO of the Braves development company, Mike Plant and our CFO, Jill Robinson. And I think it bears some repeating of what the video just saw and what you heard from Greg and Brian about the wonderful season that we have had this year. So just going through some of the numbers. This is a season of records in so many different ways. And while we didn't win the World Series, they're so much to be proud of for this Atlanta Braves team and all of the other business aspects of our organization. As mentioned, we have 54 sell-outs. There's 81 home games. So that's a tremendous feat onto itself, matched with Mad Olson, our first managements, 54 home runs. We have 3.2 million tickets, as was mentioned. There's 307 team home runs. That's a franchise record and it's something that I don't think will ever be beaten in my opinion. The ratings -- TV ratings are indicative of the fan support. We're going to go into that in just a little bit more in just a second. But batching that is Ronald Acuna feat that really has never been done in the history of sport. 41 home runs and 73 stolen bases. And once again, with that record, I don't see that one ever being broken. It was really a remarkable season by Ronald Acuna as well as the rest of the team. This year, we've had growth in our fan base. We've seen over 20 million fans across the United States, say that they are fans of the Atlanta Braves, matched with our 104 wins and our 6 straight division champions. So we are NL division champions for 6 straight years. I don't have to tell you who in this room might be fans of some of the other teams in the NL. A lot has been talked about with the media side of the business, and I want to go into a few highlights, and then I'm going to delve into some of the opportunities. I think the thing that I would focus in on this part of the presentation, and this slide in particular, is the circle graph. When the Braves are on television, we are the most watched, the highest-rated program when we're on TV. Think about that. Every time we are on TV, when we are on TV, there are more people watching the Braves game than any other program. The population in Atlanta is going to grow. So there's more opportunity to be had. We've seen increase of ratings. And the reason why I point that out is, as most of you know, we've seen a decrease in distribution. And so when you see increase in ratings and the distribution go down, it certainly reflects that you're commanding more of the marketplace that's able to see the games. All 162 of our games are broadcast, 146 of them this year, broadcasts locally or regionally, the rest national. And then of note, and I think this is worth emphasizing is radio is not dead, certainly not in live sports. There's 173-plus affiliates in our radio network. It's the highest and the strongest, the biggest radio network in any professional sports league. So let's talk a little bit more about our territory specifically, our home television territory. There's 27 metered markets in that territory composed of about 6 states. 34 million people live in that territory in about 14 million homes. 7 markets have 1 million homes. So looking at that a little bit different way, there's certainly huge opportunity for growth when we figure out some of the disruption that's happening in the broader media landscape. So thinking about another way to measure the demand on the Atlanta Braves and how good we've got it. And one of the things that we're enjoying is we've got about 4,000 premium seats, all of them are sold out. We've got 11,000 people in our waiting list waiting to buy tickets. Our sponsorship revenue for the third straight year is the highest it's ever been. And as mentioned earlier, 95% of our total ticketing inventory was sold out this year. That's the highest percentage capacity sold out in all of Major League Baseball. The demand is enormous. Specific to tickets, we're a proud ticket monster partner, by the way. Our friends are represented in this room. About 3.2 million tickets. And you can see the growth since we moved -- 2017 was the year that we moved into Truist Park. We've seen sustained growth. Of course, COVID had a little bit of interruption there of note. But as I said, huge capacity, the fans are really turning out for this environment, which is partially due to the Battery. Making a look at just the statistics that kind of highlight the business elements of our -- of the Atlanta Braves ticket revenue up, sponsorship revenue up, concessions revenue up. Greg had a point in his slide where you talked about some of the rule changes in baseball. You've seen a decrease in about 25 minutes in the time of the game with the pitch clock. Among a few other changes to baseball. You would think conventional wisdom would tell you that concessions and retail revenue would go down since there's a few -- less time in the games. We were ahead of the curve on this. We've implemented technology and all kinds of things like just walk out technology for concessions, a better POS system in our retail and concessions environment, all of which result in increases in our revenue on both concessions and retail. Looking at the broader sport. Greg mentioned this as well. Look, baseball is having a bit of a resurgence. And I'm not sure that it's a really fair way to say it because baseball has always been extremely strong. One of the things that baseball has as a real big asset is you have 162 games, 30 teams, you're certainly the footprint of the United States, has fan base everywhere. And with the number of games as well as the fans across all of those markets, you can see that baseball for the first time in several years, got its total attendance about 70 million. So you add up all the other leagues in the big 4. They don't equal the amount of people that are going to an Atlanta -- or to a Major League Baseball game. Huge opportunity when we all figure this out right. Live sports content is king, as was talked about. So let's transition a little bit to our real estate empire, the Battery Atlanta. We got 37 tenants that have a long-term lease about 10 years. There's multiple events going on in the Battery every single day. We have regional corporate headquarters with some of the finer companies in America here. We've got a regional headquarter of Comcast, of course, moved in recently with Papa John's and Teekay, Gas South. And then we've got a Truist securities building that is being built right now, a little status update on that to come. Overall, what that represents is we've got 10 million people that visit the Battery on an annual basis this past year. Putting that in the context of some of the other attractions as you can see, we match up very nicely with all of the different things that are going on out there. Certainly a different way, the Atlanta Braves, Truist Park, the Battery Atlanta, they're great places to visit. It's a safe, friendly community -- it's a town square, if you will, and it's got a lot of room for growth. So let's think about growth. The Battery Atlanta still has opportunities for growth. So one of the things that's going on right now, if you're visiting our campus, as you would see the construction going on for the Truist Securities tower. Some status update photos are right there for you. It's going to be 9 stories. It will house all of Truist Securities divisions. Have about 1,000 employees working there and creates further density that all supports all of the other business metrics that propel the Battery Atlanta to help fund all the things that we do for our operation. We still have some acreage to develop. So there's still room for growth, and we'll deploy that acreage and deploy those opportunities when we see fit when there's opportunities. So looking at the totality of it all. Again, going back to pre Truist Park, we moved in, in 2017. You can see the enormous lift that Truist Park and the Battery gave us from '16 to '17. And again, taking away the COVID years. We've had a 12% CAGR, and we've got some nice growth still ahead. So specific to the numbers and this year, our 2023 year-to-date, importantly, year-to-date results. They got baseball revenue up, development revenue up, total revenue obviously up, OEBITDA. So obviously, when you look at the totality of everything, the business is exceptionally strong, doing very, very well. And I would just tell you that when you think about this business, and the opportunities. Remember, we won the 2021 World Series. So obviously, we're at the top on the field. I would still tell you that our business has room for growth beyond what you're seeing here. One way to put it. In the past, we've had very good years. This year was an exceptional year. And I would tell you, in the future, we still have room for growth and the future is tending to be brighter. Thank you very much.

Unknown Executive

executive
#9

There's a teaser you'll see this afternoon. We're going to take a quick break now. So the program will start right at 10:40. There's snacks downstairs, but again, right at 10:40. Thank you. [Break]

Unknown Executive

executive
#10

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here today. As Greg mentioned, we had our media event yesterday, and hopefully, many of you had a chance to tune in or be in the audience. And if you didn't, it will be up on our site later today. As Greg said, we had a lot of great star power there to help us announce many parts of our next generation of SiriusXM. And I will say, had to be pretty good because Greg was there the whole time, and it was 1.5 hours. So I'll be able to recap some of that today and also dive into some of the financials a bit more. At SiriusXM, we believe that the future of audio is one where everyone is effortlessly connected to the voices, stories and music they love. For most Americans, audio is a daily habit, and that's with 4 hours spent listening to some form of audio content each day, split between home, in car and beyond. But figuring out what to listen to during all this time has become very complicated. Today, there are millions of songs and shows available with a push of a button or a simple voice command. And navigating through all that noise has become overwhelming. Fundamental shifts in the marketplace have created a paradox of choice and have resulted in consumer -- growing consumer demand for human curated audio. Today's audio files are seeking community and connections, as Greg talked about earlier, amongst a hyper-fragmented and overly saturated landscape, and this is where SiriusXM comes in. We have built an incredibly successful and profitable business by creating an experience centered on our premium human-curated radio that is more relevant than ever. So what sets us apart from other audio services, it's our human touch. It's the people who curate our channels. It's the artists, the personalities and the content creators who drive a deep connection with their fans. SiriusXM is an ever-present companion throughout the day. We're always there with just the right mix of music, news, sports, comedy, storytelling and podcasts. And because of this, listeners develop an emotional attachment to our content and service. And this unique and differentiated position gives us a huge opportunity for growth. So who are we trying to reach? Our core audience today represents about 25% of the audio market. They're Gen X and older. They grew up listening to radio in the car, and they represent one of the largest and most affluent consumer groups. Then you have what we see as our growth audience opportunity. It's an additional 25% of the audio market. They're younger, more diverse and more varied in their audio consumption. These consumers are open to subscribing to more than 1 audio service to meet all their needs, and they're willing to splurge for a premium experience. They're fueled by Fandom and are used to listening whenever and wherever they choose. So while our growth in our core audiences represent half of the general population, they drive 84% of total audio spend. And we know what it will take to attract them. We've done a lot of research, and it confirms that our differentiators remain at the heart of our value proposition for both the core and growth audience segments. But to bring in more subscribers, we needed to address key pain points. We need to improve in the areas of pricing, control and discovery, all with a sleek, modern look and feel. And we're doubling down on our differentiators and giving our product and programming the spotlight in our new next-generation platform. We're making it easier for consumers to immediately find what they love and go deeper. We call this the next generation of SiriusXM. So as we announced yesterday on December 14, the new SiriusXM experience will begin to roll out first on streaming and then in the months and years ahead in the car. At launch, it's a platform that modernizes our entire business. It's a fundamental rebuilding of the full tech platform. We also shared that with the launch of our new streaming platform, we will be offering consumers a new lower streaming-only price point, all of our content for $9.99 a month. We believe this creates an extremely compelling value proposition for consumers, and it allows us to better showcase the complementary aspect of our service priming us for growth among those who currently subscribe to an on-demand music service alone. We expect to have more to say about our in-car pricing and packaging offering early next year. Our new app creates a compelling product experience that addresses the key pain points I talked about around discovery and control for everywhere from onboarding to search to playback. And we're also focused on providing a more connected experience for our listeners across, in car and streaming devices. Yesterday, we also unveiled our refreshed brand identity, which highlights the uniqueness of what we offer, our incredible programming, iconic personalities and a channel for every perspective. We're also bringing back our mascot with a new twist, and we're effectively calling our new pup, Stella. At SiriusXM, we are home to the stars. The ones who are already legends and the legends in the making. This new branding provides the opportunity to give them the spotlight and to demonstrate that SiriusXM creates space for each and every one of us to get closer to the things we love. Speaking of content, we officially welcomed the newest member of the SiriusXM Top family, James Corden. He is a legendary actor, writer, producer and host, and we are thrilled that he chose to work with us as he makes his move from TV to audio. We are incredibly proud of the special relationships, our programmers and hosts have with musical artists. We bring some of the biggest acts to smaller venues around the country, giving subscribers once-in-a-lifetime experiences. And our artist channels give creators a unique opportunity to connect directly with their super fans. Yesterday, we announced the launch of our newest artist channel, the Kelly Clarkson Connection, along with the launch data and programming for our upcoming channel with John Mayer. And this December, we'll be launching takeovers of some of our biggest channels with over 175 artists. This includes everyone from Olivia Rodrigo and Cardi B to Metallica, Tim McGraw and many more. These new takeovers bring listeners even closer to the artists they love with sets hand curated by the stars. Today, we're proud to have more than 150 million SiriusXM-enabled vehicles on the road, and we are offered in more than 80% of new vehicles as well as about 55% of preowned vehicles currently sold. This means it is easier than ever when someone buys a new or preowned vehicle to try our service. And our best-in-class build for the road platform continues to make us the favorite premium entertainment solution for North American drivers as we hold the largest share of year outside of AM/FM radio. This year alone, we have renewed and expanded upon agreements with Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Honda, and we're close to finalizing an extension with Volkswagen, Audi. Yesterday, we announced a new agreement with Polestar, and I hope in the months to come, we'll have more to share on other EV partners. All of these new agreements include commitments to rollout 360L, our hybrid in-car audio platform, which combines streaming and satellite delivery, contributing to our growing 360L pen rate. Outside of the vehicle, we are live today with many of the biggest consumer and technology brands ranging from T-Mobile to Walmart with offers that bring new listeners into SiriusXM through a variety of channels. And yesterday, we announced a new collaboration with Audible to give subscribers the opportunity to experience each other's offerings through content and trial offers beginning in 2024. So as you can see, there's a lot happening all across SiriusXM with over 34 million total subscribers today, strong relationships with the major automakers, sustained low churn at 1.6%, a diverse array of content and customer satisfaction at a 15-year high. We are building on an incredibly strong foundation. From our next-generation technology platform, refreshed brand identity, new distribution and new channels and shows that bring subscribers closer to what they love at a compelling new price point. All these key levers are powering our transformation and positioning us for future growth. And we will now have the infrastructure and optionality to rapidly test, learn and innovate across our business. We are targeting to migrate Pandora to the new platform infrastructure in late 2024, in addition to enhancing the listening experience of our 47 million active -- monthly active users at Pandora. This will drive cost savings while also giving us the option to combine the SiriusXM and Pandora products sometime in the future. A key component of our ad business is the SiriusXM podcast network, which is home to the most shows in the top 50. The scale of our streaming, broadcast and podcast advertising offering, combined with our advanced ad technology and depth of sales expertise, provides advertisers unmatched opportunities to connect with their target audiences. And now let's dive into the financials. Taking a look at the trailing 12 months since we last met, we delivered solid results, including just under $9 billion in revenue. Additionally, while we have been focused on investing in our products and tech platform, we have simultaneously become even more disciplined on cost management across our organization. We grew self-pay subscription audio revenue over the past 12 months by approximately $80 million, while paid promotional revenue fell on new improved OEM relationships and national podcast ad revenue at SiriusXM remained challenged. In our Pandora and off-platform segment, we continue to see strong monetization at Pandora, and our podcast revenue was up 28% year-over-year and in the third quarter. Cash operating costs were down 2% in the trailing 12 months, even as we absorb higher music royalties. And our adjusted EBITDA margin remained strong at roughly 31%. And during the third quarter, we delivered our highest ever quarter of EBITDA at $747 million. Longer term, we have demonstrated a strong track record of growing revenue and adjusted EBITDA and converting very substantial portions of that EBITDA into free cash flow. 2021's $1.8 billion of free cash flow was boosted by a onetime satellite insurance recovery and by relatively low CapEx and cash taxes. In 2023, we transitioned to become a full cash taxpayer and stepped up satellite CapEx associated with our normal 15-year fleet refresh cycle, the combination of which is driving our free cash flow guidance of approximately $1.15 billion this year. With satellite CapEx expected to fall to near 0 by 2028, plus improved working capital and taxes, we are confident the business will see a meaningful step-up in cash generation in the coming years. Our growing cash flow and strong balance sheet provides us flexibility to navigate a variety of future market conditions. We have consistently kept leverage in the low to mid-3x range over many years, and we think this is the right place for our business to be in the long term as well. We have a largely fixed rate balance sheet with no bond maturities until 2026. We expect to finish this year with a completely undrawn revolver and growing cash balance, which together will provide us with approximately $2 billion of available liquidity. As you all know, Liberty Media announced a proposal regarding a potential transaction involving our companies. The SiriusXM special committee of independent directors is currently reviewing the proposal, so I'm limited in what I can say. However, what I want to emphasize is that regardless of the outcome of Liberty's proposal and any transaction hypotheticals, I am confident we can quickly delever to our communicated long-term leverage target if need be. SiriusXM has maintained this responsible leverage position while delivering sizable cash to our investors. Since we began our repurchase and dividend programs, we have delivered approximately $20 billion to our shareholders. In addition, last month, we announced another 10% hike to our recurring dividend, the seventh straight double-digit annual increase and marking a 15% CAGR since inception. This long track record of increases has pushed our dividend yield to approximately 2.2%. While the Liberty proposal is pending for regulatory reasons, we are out of the market for our own stock. And following any transaction, you would likely see us more focused in the near term on delevering than repurchasing stock. But we plan to continue our strong dividend payout strategy with the option of resuming opportunistic share repurchases as we move toward our long-term leverage target. In closing, we are at a key moment in our journey. We are pleased with our results, our financial stability and our growth opportunities. And as you saw today, the next generation of SiriusXM can access even more deeply with our vision and purpose, and I could not be more excited for the future of SiriusXM. Thank you. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#11

Good morning. Thankfully, we have no on sales today, inside joke for those of you here last year, made sure we didn't have anything today. I put that campaign program up. We're really proud of that. We wanted to make sure that we connected with the developing artists in our business. We all talk about the Beyond states of the world, but we're going to do 27,000 club shows this year. It's a big part of our business. So we put this program together with Willy every night in one of our clubs, the opening act and the support actor gets a $1,000 gas card and a $500 card to fill up their bus with groceries. So it's been an incredible program to invest back in this community and been a big part of kind of the backbone of our business. We look at Live in general. I've sat up here for a few years now talking about the robustness of this industry. This is a business that's had incredible growth for the last 20 years. A lot of talk through COVID is what's the future? Are we living in this pent-up demand moment? Or is there structurally something going on. And when we look at the data, we absolutely believe the future is going to be better than the past. We think the next decade has even higher growth rates because we think the structural shifts happening with the customer on a global basis. We look at these 5 drivers in the top here, and we'll talk about them in the presentation. But they're kind of the underpin on what's going on in this industry, that's going to keep this live industry growing at these rates. We look at social media, I mean, it's the gift that keeps giving to live entertainment. You think about social media, TikTok, Instagram every night amplifying that live show, those formal moments that everyone has to shoot from the sphere and the U2 show, and they're connecting with their fans and their artists direct, like they've never been able to before. Streamings made it accessible for every consumer in the world to listen to that song. Globalization will talk about experience economy. We've talked about for many years. And this last one called venue infrastructure, you're seeing really come to life in our Venue Nation division. But in general, outside of America, there's a whole movement now if you're a major city to figure out how do I build venues. So Live performances can come there. Typically, they have soccer stadiums. They don't have arenas. They don't have a 5,000 seat, been underdeveloped, under service most of the world, and we think that helps grow that global platform. And every day, there's a new arena built in Sao Paulo or Milan, show count goes up and artist wants to play there. So we think all of these drivers are the underpin on why there's a structural shift and you're going to see for the next decade, even higher growth rates than historic. When we ask the customers, and the fans, they're telling us the same thing, what's changed? What's new in your life around live? All of these stats you can see there emphasize that this is all translated into a much more engaged fan with a higher purchase intent. Going to that live show has never been more important than history and now all the ways I want to connect and be part of this live show continue to excel. When we look at the globalization, this is just really probably the biggest shift we've seen in the last few years. There are no borders for these fans and artists. Historically, this business was made up of the toured, artists came from America and England. That was kind of the base of what most of us grew up listening to. Today, there's no borders. These artists are global, the fans are global. If you're a 17-year-old in Milan today with the phone, you know that Drake dropped a song and demand is generated. You're a young artists in Mexico called -- and you launched a song on TikTok, you're playing in the Greek theater in a few months. It's just incredible the way this shift has happened. And when you look at some of these stats and consumers in America alone. So the globalization of the artist and the fan is going to be a big part of why this industry is going to excel. We've talked about this many years, but this one just continues to give -- you look at the share of wallet, the consumers are talking live experiences, live entertainment specifically, above sports, and every other item up there is on the rise and consumers want more experiences. And this sheet kind of brings it all to life to me, it's kind of the way if you really simplify our business and famous Jay-Z said, I'm not a business man, I'm a business. I mean, these artists are businesses, this is one example. You look at Bad Bunny, he's at 150 million followers and listeners monthly. We actually only have to sell 3 million tickets. We have the easy part. We're the scarcity on the overall pie. So in our business, we don't actually create the demand. The demand gets created and then we sell the demand. So generally, the artist becomes big and then we have to sell the tickets. The great part is, an example like this, when you hear a lot of questions around scarcity, are there going to be pullback in tickets, what's the pricing strategy, this chart kind of says it all, 150 million really dedicated Bad Bunny fans, and we've only got 3 million tickets for sale. That demand is going to be scarce and help drive our business. And this isn't just a Bad Bunny or a AAA artist example. It's any artist. You look at the artist playing in a theater right now, they probably got 8 million followers on Instagram and monthlies, and we're selling 1,000 tickets. So kind of the funnel of the way these artists have become media empires, unlike sports, unlike athletes, unlike actors, these are direct-to-consumer brands, right? This artist now has no gatekeeper. They built incredible direct relationships with their fans, with TikTok, social media, Spotify, et cetera. So this is the piece of the puzzle that's going to continually be our great friend because they are the salesman, they are the promoter. They are building their own audiences. We're delivering the scarcity. The great news is, as much as the demand is out there, the supply continues. Every year, there's more artists on the road, whether they're U2 or The Rolling Stones or this -- regenerated every year. There's new artists and the grads going to a club elevating. So we see the pie growing bigger of supply to meet that continued expansion of demand. And as I kind of referenced in my first slide, this is not just about the top end of the business. This is an industry that's growing at all levels, while you'll see some of our press releases at the odd time and we built a club in Pittsburgh or Milan or theater or a ballroom. We're seeing growth at all levels. Our business is diverse across all segments, and obviously, geographically, it's diversified. But this is a business where we're seeing a boom everywhere. There was a period of 20 years where there were no live clubs. They were being replaced by EDM clubs or kind of live clubs. You look now in every city, they're rebuilding, they want that 1,000-seat venue. They want that 2,000-seat venue. We're kind of the movie theater of the business now. If you're a developer and you're building, you want foot traffic, you want to fill more, you want a comedy club, you want a 5,000 seat as we've done successfully with the Atlanta raise development. And I think this is a really important chart because we get asked us a lot, okay, you're going to grow internationally, but we see what happens to the Spotifys of the world, that customer that's going to pay $9 in New York is going to pay $1 in India for subscription. That doesn't happen in the concert business. That concert ticket truly is a global currency. So when we put Coldplay in Detroit, we'll still be able to charge the same ticket price or more in the Pacific Rim, Eastern Europe, Latin America. This is the reason why these artists now -- who are globally and the demand is growing. For many years, you couldn't get that same ticket price and you couldn't make the same amount of money. So you played an extra night in Detroit. Now the pie has grown, that artist looks at us and says, "Great, I want to get everywhere." And it's all connected back to a lot of the social media we talk about, is now this artist knows that they have 100 million followers, actually, know where they are. They never knew that for many years. The gatekeepers knew that. So we sell an artist now and they'll say to me, Michael, I got 21 million followers in Brazil. I got to go play Brazil, too. And I got to play Latin America, and I got to play Milan. So this is the money slide for the artists that says, this global world is expanding, and we can make you as much money anywhere in the world because that concert and that stadium date still is a scarce commodity that can drive similar pricing. And as we look into '24, thankfully, the trend is continuing. We're looking at, I mean, coming off an incredible '23. We look at '24 double-digit growth right now and our show count, we look like we're going to have an incredible year in '24, and this growth will continue. And when we ask the fans to make sure we're following the latest trends and the latest news. The fans are telling us the same story. Their purchase intent for next year is higher than ever. I love that middle slide because I always like to remind people, as big as the noise that concerts get, it's still a smaller business overall. 36% of American fans went to -- the population went to a show last year. But if you ask them, 51% say they want to go to a show. And those are incredible figures, right? Because that says, not only are you going to get the same people that went this year, there's another 20% of customers who didn't go this year that want to go to a show. So we see this demand, FOMO moments, Instagram. I mean you can't live on Instagram and not want to go see U2 at the Sphere. We had 9 billion impressions since that launched for that band and that experience. So that's what's driving this business right now. And everyone wants to make sure are we resilient. If there's a pullback -- recession, this is an industry that has proven time over time, it's very durable. It does become one of the last things that people do pull back on. So as they're pulling back, this is one of those ones that's still the most affordable moment, and we have not had a great effect during pullbacks. And a lot of that is -- this slide, although again, press loves to talk about the 9% at the very top. This is a very affordable magic moment. The average get in price of $38 to go to a show, 65% of tickets under $100, certainly can't go to a Braves game for that, sit at the dugout. And I say that all the time because God bless sports, it's a badge of honor to pay $25,000 to be at a court side at a Knicks game. But g*****n you if you charge $400 for a Beyonce ticket, that happens once every 4 years. So we got -- we have a pricing PR problem, not an actual problem. So it's very affordable. So all this thesis is on, is pricing pull back, are you -- as you increase the price too much and -- have we gone too far, we're nowhere close to figuring out the top end of pricing yet. Secondary is still a $10 billion category and growing well. So we know there's lots of demand, lots of pricing potential available still. When you put those pieces together, we believe we have an incredible great future of continued double-digit growth. We're going to talk about this in our afternoon session at our Investor Day in more detail on these 7 drivers. But today, we wanted to touch more based on the macro perspective of live, the shifts we're seeing, why we think on a global basis, it's an exciting time to be in the live entertainment business. And as the leader in that space, we think we're going to be able to compound that growth. Thank you.

Unknown Executive

executive
#12

You noticed [indiscernible] did not talk about the price for Maple Leaf tickets. But you have heard, before I get to Qurate some of the same themes echoing through about IP, about scarcity, about your fan base and about going direct. And while we didn't really coordinate all of our talks, they ring a consistent theme because they have consistent values and they are leveraging, in many cases, at Liberty Media, some of the same consistent drivers, and that we're very excited about them. But I'm now going to talk about how we're very excited at Qurate as well. When we were here last year and over the last year, we said that Project Athens would deliver a lot of value to Qurate. And I think you can see that's exactly what happened. The operating initiatives are on track. At the cost margin, fulfillment has had a 220 basis point tailwind in the third quarter at QxH. Our new freight contract went into effect in July with positive results. OIBDA grew 54%, excluding Zulily in the third quarter. We've seen improved execution with a healthier inventory base. We've seen better efficiency in programming and merchandising and fulfillment, and we've seen growth initiatives begin to show some value, expanding our distribution on smart TVs and digital devices, streaming and other digital platforms, and we've made the important next steps for Q's trajectory. We've also taken a series of balance sheet actions over the course of the last year, to improve the strength to make sure we've got the fuel and fire power to complete the transitions of Athens, closed on the sale and leaseback, both in the U.K. and Germany, monetize several noncore assets, divested Zulily, which was a cash drain and simplified our portfolio and received $660 million of Rocky Mount insurance proceeds, $280 million of those were received year-to-date. We also worked on our liability side. We've reduced total debt year-to-date $741 million. We repurchased a series of notes in the [ 24s ] and [ 25s ] at a discount. We retired delivery in our active exchangeables, reduced our overall interest expense to fight the fact we had a raising interest rate environment. And we're maintaining our long-term leverage target and close to it at the 9/30 balance sheet. You should expect that all free cash flow that we have will be applied to debt reduction in the coming months and years. And we've been successful at that, with meaningful debt reduction while maintaining a strong liquidity base at Qurate. We reduced both the revolver and the corporate bonds, totaled $741 million, as I said, year-to-date, we have $3.2 billion of liquidity across -- with cash and the revolver capacity. And we generated $359 million of free cash flow year-to-date, primarily through working capital and OIBDA improvement. Lastly, looking at the rest of the balance sheet. We have a diverse set of maturities that are staggered, and we're well positioned to address the near-term ones with the liquidity we have. As I've mentioned, we've addressed already a good portion of the '24 and '25 that are due, and we will continue using our cash and the revolver capacity. And as we noted on the earnings call last week, we're going to continue to look to opportunistically reduce debt, in many cases, at a discount to its face. Qurate has had a long history of fears that technology would reduce its business or eliminate its business. And Qurate has successfully moved through many transactions to transition rather from analog to digital. People worried about the explosion of channels, but Qurate did quite well, still holding an upper hand through excellent channel placement. E-com 1.0 made shopping on Qurate and HSN more convenient, not less convenient and actually was something that grew the business. E-com 2.0, continue to make it more convenient with live stream capabilities. In the third quarter, e-com revenue at Qurate -- QVC rather, grew 58%. So we continue to see strength in growing our online revenue. And I think we're well positioned for the next wave of streaming. We have reach on digital exceeds, our linear reach. We have better economics than many other streamers because we monetize on product sales, not on a subscription or ad model. And it's an important driver of growth for new customers and we are migrating existing customers to the next stage of multi-platform evolution. So we remain forward-looking, looking at the technology changes as we have in the past and looking at a way to make sure we capitalize on them. There are a lot of trends out there that people are pursuing for proprietary products and brands, daily deals, popular programming and a wide distribution model of growth, both linear and streaming platforms. Qurate really sits in the middle of that. The intersection of these industry, industries, and we're seeing convergence. And as they come together, Qurate is right where many of them wish to be. We already know what people want, and we already know how to sell it to them, and I think we will continue to move forward. And well, with that, I'm going to introduce Gabriel [ Wallentin ].

Unknown Executive

executive
#13

Thank you. Let me recognize first, Bill Wafford, our CFO; and Mike Fitzharris, the President of our QVC business. Those individuals have been real heroes in the business. Last year, at this event, the business was admittedly in a very challenging place, we were coming off a post-pandemic decline as people stop watching television in their living rooms and went out back into the world. We're dealing with the effects of historic disruptions in the global supply chain. Inflation was destructive and unpredictable at the time and our business was still reeling from the largest structural fire in North Carolina history, a fire that destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars in inventory, drove the loss of more than 1 million QVC customers and eliminated 65% of our distribution capacity in the U.S. We were also facing heavy near-term debt maturities and a meta narrative that cord cutting net, the end of this business model. It was, I assure you a very fun way to start a new job. I talked last year about our transformation plan, Project Athens. A plan to do inspiration from the creative and humane character of Athens that contrasted with their rival, the militaristic Sparta, a stand-in for so many of our depressingly sanitized competitors. Competitors that either perfected selling cheap goods in concrete boxes, or perfected algorithms that exploit our natural human tendencies for profit. I believe that we had a path back. If we could improve the customer experience, execute better, lower the cost to serve, clean up the portfolio and build new businesses and above all, build on our legacy of creating a human and connected way of shopping in an increasingly lonely world. Today, I want to report on our progress against that vision, and I want to report on why you should be paying more attention to Qurate Retail. We are a company at a compelling inflection point. As a reminder, Qurate Retail is the largest media shopping company with 15 channels globally, delivering over 125 hours of live television each day, through our video commerce brands, QVC, both U.S. and international and HSN. Many have tried, but no one has successfully recreated a franchise anything like Qurate's. We also have Cornerstone brands, like our video brands, the brands within Cornerstone, Frontgate, Ballard Design, Grandin Road and Garnet Hill are all about inspiration, in connection with a highly attractive and loyal customer base. We generate approximately $11 billion in revenue across these brands, $6.5 billion of which is e-commerce, and we touch over 40 million customers, reaching the 200 million households, and we are the leaders in curating visual and video moments to make shopping habitual, personal and enjoyable. Let me show you a bit of what I mean. If we can start the video. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#14

Great. So that's who we are. This is what we've done. Project Athens, has been a journey of love. We've been hard at work over the last year on Project Athens, and we're encouraged that we're finally starting to see a turnaround in financial results. 2023 has been about determined focus on execution and optimization, primarily around cost, margin and cash flow. Our OIBDA improvement shows the result of our work on gross margins, both from addressing product and pricing with early actions and optimizations, as well as improvements on the cost that we have cycled past supply chain challenges in the macro environment, challenges that were deeply exasperated by the fire that occurred in December 2021. As this slide shows, for the first time since Q2 2021, we grew OIBDA in the third quarter, and we grew it at 54%. Further, within our all-important video commerce businesses, we have made substantial progress in reversing the slide in revenue, down only low single digits in Q3. We have also made progress on restoring the cash-generating capacity of this business, which has historically been a strength but was a weakness in recent years. Last year, we committed to growing cash flow in 2023. We said the first half of the year would be fueled by working capital improvements and the back half would be more OIBDA driven. We've delivered exactly that. Year-to-date, free cash flow improved $464 million, with progressive improvement throughout the year. I already mentioned the fire, in hindsight, the fire did much greater damage to the business than we were able to fully appreciate. Our best estimates are that it affected about 1 million customers. We lost about 1 million because of the fire and over $0.5 billion in revenue. The impact exaggerated the appearance of decline in this business and it fed the bear case. But we have now mostly worked our way through the impacts. Delivery times, which had grown are now better than pre-fire levels. The customer count is stabilizing. We are out of expensive excess emergency storage. The fire was a massive exogenous shock, but we are past it. This is a reminder of the basic 5 pillars of Project Athens. I'll address each of these in turn. The first pillar is to improve the customer experience and grow relationships. The team's rigorous focus on the customer and continuous testing and piloting of new initiatives is slowly showing up in the customer file. QVC U.S. and HSN had 8.2 million customers on a rolling 12-month basis, just over half of those are repeat or existing customers. Existing customers on average buy 30 units a year and are growing their spend year-over-year. These are some of the best customer performance stats in our industry. On a quarterly view, our efforts highlight the turn and trajectory of both our total customer file and our new and reactive customers. As we reported in Q3, new customers at QVC U.S. and HSN grew 8% in Q3, the first growth of new customers since Q1 of 2021. We have gotten refocused on our customers. A new cross-functional team is now viewing all aspects of the business through the lens of the customer. This has led to enhanced promotional capabilities and up-leveled digital marketing capabilities. We are better targeting both e-mail and messaging. One driver of the improving customer trends that we're seeing is that the prior slides have been because we were not executing well on some of our key events. This year, paired with even stronger merchandising, programming and marketing, we refocused on things like Christmas in July at QVC. It delivered 3% year-over-year growth this year in holiday products. A QVC best customer buys an average of 75 units per year and spends an average of $3,800 annually. That has been growing by 5% over the last 2 years, and we have a nearly perfect retention record. These customers deserve to be rewarded and we are in our own way doing more for them, like inviting select VIP customers to our studios for live shows or having them attend personalized dinners with our top-notch celebrity chefs, like HSN's Curtis Stone. While we have done many things to stabilize the customer count, we have not been focused squarely on overall customer count growth, yet. Project Athens was intentionally targeted at profit and free cash flow growth, not top line and customer growth. As we lean into growth in the post Athens period, we have been building the capabilities to do so efficiently, and I look forward to sharing more on that over time. Pillar 2 -- sorry, let me see, can we go back one -- forward. All right. Pillar 2 is about rigorously executing our core processes. The real time and often impulse-driven nature of our business means that we have to keep refreshing our assortments. We have to keep bringing new value to our customers. Year-to-date, through September at both QVC U.S. and HSN, we've introduced over 700 new brands. For example, we've had 25% growth in the number of beauty brands just at QVC this year. We carry many of the critical names in the category such as Dyson and Apple and Birkenstock and Skechers and Vitamix. But our real advantage rests with our proprietary brands. At QVC, 4 out of 5 of the top selling brands are exclusive apparel brands in our Apparel segment. One example of the cross-section between new and proprietary is Fire Light. Our lab-grown private label diamond jewelry brand. This added new life to our Diamond business. So far this year, we've sold $42 million in both real and lab-grown diamonds versus $25 million last year, and average sales price has gone up from $850 to $1,600. And when we create a new brand that we know works, we expand it in the new categories. This is what happened with Cella, which originally gained traction as a kitchenware private label brand, and this year has expanded in the home decor and storage. In fact, approximately 36% year-to-date of QVC sales are proprietary or exclusive. If you love it, you can only get it here. Differentiated products lead to differentiated programming, but programming is not just about inspiration. Though that is critical, it is also about flawless execution. We scrubbed every aspect of it from how we schedule programming to how we return urgency by making our daily special even more special, and we are seeing the progress, dollars per minute of airtime for our today's specials and today's special values were up 8% year-to-date in 2023 versus down 4% over the same period in 2022. Our host, the original influencers, have also been key as demand to watch them and hear their stories continues to grow. They have helped drive a 15% increase in our total TV minutes of viewership across our 5 channels. And we have gotten smarter and pricing what we show. We are now fully incorporating sophisticated analytical approaches, as a result of this and our elevated merchandise assortment, QxH average sales price is up 3% year-to-date. I should add here that QVC International, like the U.S. businesses, is also implementing a transformational program that is focused on margin opportunities, content and broadcast strategies as well as optimizing execution. These efforts are paying dividends there as well. QVC International grew revenue and OIBDA compared to last year and sustained gross margin gains from Q2 and Q3. Pillar 3 was lowering the cost to serve. To support our customer-facing, programming and pricing, we need an operation that delivers superior value and superior service. The supply chain team has made great progress here. $20 million In labor productivity improvements this year, and it is not just cost going down, delivery performance is now faster than it was before the fire. On freight, we've recorded $63 million in year-over-year benefits from renegotiating lower ocean freight rates, renegotiating our last-mile service contract and lessening our detention and demurrage costs. We have now redesigned our entire approach to labor productivity and the fulfillment centers, getting better optimization with a more flexible, variable labor model. But we have not just done it there. We have been getting more efficient even as our performance has been improving. Though difficult, we've made many hard decisions. We effected workforce reductions throughout the company. Through September, these have created $35 million of OIBDA benefit. We expect these organizational changes to create recurring benefits of $60 million. Discipline around people have led to a 19% reduction in head count. And we did it not simply by cutting heads, but by instead rethinking and reimagining every aspect of how we work in every single part of the business. Pillar 4 was about optimizing the brand portfolio. I spoke earlier about the Zulily divestiture. Greg spoke about it as well. This action eliminated one of our primary cash drains and one of the primary barriers to growth. Our other portfolio organization, the Cornerstone Brands, which I discussed earlier, are focused on bringing proprietary and exclusive design services and products in or outside of the house. Ballard and Frontgate in particular, have a strong multichannel presence and retail has done very well for them. Today, they are underpenetrated in physical retail, which represents a real opportunity. While the home market has been contracting with fewer moves and less housing being built and high interest rates, operational discipline did allow Cornerstone to report it's first positive quarterly year-over-year OIBDA growth since Q1 2022, in Q3. The final pillar is building new high-growth businesses anchored in our strength. We are putting -- we were early in putting our channels on 3 over-the-top and ad-supported streaming services fast. Our reach is growing 25% year-over-year in these areas, including the launch of Vizio Smart TV and the app and on 3D recently. We have nearly 100% penetration in the MVPD or virtual subscription services already today. In the streaming service, we brought a ton of new content this year. We brought Kim of Queens, a new show starring Kim Gravel, and the edit, which gives a modern and the editorial you'll take on our products. Collectively, these shows and many more are helping us grow minutes per household by 23% year-over-year in Q3. And we have just started scratching the surface. We are seeing multiple levers of growth and hearing from many partners who want to work with us, and perhaps most encouraging because we monetize our service directly through product sales, and we can make volumes of new content cheaply in our studios. We arguably have the best business model in the streaming universe. Further, we believe that shopping will not just happen on the large screen streaming apps, but also on the small screen. We believe that shopping is such a passionate activity for so many, dedicated apps and streaming services will be attractive to millions of future customers. Sales from U.S. livestream shopping are projected to more than double from '23 to '26, according to Coresight Research. QVC U.S. recently launched QVC Livestreams, which are pop-up live stream shopping videos on our digital platforms. These streams give existing customers extra ways to engage with their favorite brands and hosts. In Q3, we had a monthly user base of 250,000 viewers across our web streams. Likewise, QVC International has launched 2 new digital live experiences, centered around the home garden category in the U.K. and food and culinary in Germany. Both include category experts, who help field customer questions and bring the human side to shopping. The reaction so far has been encouraging. In March of this year, we launched the beta of Sune, our first ever stand-alone mobile app targeting a new demographic, Gen Z and millennial shoppers. Sune is speaking to the next generation of shoppers, shoppers who like a thumbable experience and turn to influencers to make decisions. The team has created over 3,000 videos since launch and are growing downloads daily. It is a very exciting time. And if you have not done so yet, please download the Sune app, spelled S-U-N-E. In short, as livestream shopping continues to gain momentum over the next few years, we are already there, positioned and ready to lead. Midway through Project Athens, we feel good about our progress. We feel confident we can hit our goals by the end of 2024. We reiterate our goals of stable revenue, double-digit compound annual growth rates of OIBDA and free cash flow and a 2.5x long-term leverage target. We believe the achievement of Project Athens goals, leaves the company that is competitively advantaged, strong and profitable. And we believe that Q3 marked an important inflection point in this company's history. With that said, I've also heard a lot coming back at us. I hear, what about after Athens? Sure, you can cut costs, but can you grow? Doesn't cord cutting mean the business is in a permanent state of decline? Aren't all of your customers old and dying anyway? Aren't you hamstrung from investment by all of your debt? I want to address this outright. First, today, we already have a business with a better operating model and better capabilities as a result of Project Athens, a business better able to drive pricing, cater to customers and target marketing, drive product extensions into new categories and make airtime more efficient, a business better able to use its customer service and host relationships to grow, a business with a lower cost to serve that can give greater value to its customers. A streaming TV app with near universal distribution that we have only started to unlock and a set of early innovations in live streaming. About 22% of our sales come from international markets, where cord cutting is less of a threat. We have already been making the investments needed and building the necessary capacity while servicing our debt. And then you add the opportunity to further retail expansion by Cornerstone. If you have a new product, there is not a better place to launch it than on QVC and HSN. That is not going away. We will emerge from 2024, a largely remade company, more nimble, more capable and more differentiated with more ways to grow. Second, this negative narrative misunderstands this business. Yes, it grew up through linear television, and that is its shining foundation. But with every month that goes by, we are a business more and more defined by a powerful set of consumer brands that perform well across multiple platforms. Already, most of our sales go through e-commerce. Going forward, we will not be a business defined by our linear TV presence. We will be defined by being one of the most trusted brands for women entering perhaps their most meaningful life phase, the second half. Even in the U.S., the population of women over 50 and those over 60, is growing by 2% to 4% from '23 to '25. The population of older Americans is growing faster than that of younger ones. This is a worldwide trend. This business will eventually be everywhere the attention of this wealthy cohort is. And we will grow with them, and we will take share because we care about them, and we understand them. The world is becoming wealthier and greater. Are you working with that trend or against it? We are with it. In closing, that is who we are. That is where we are, and that is the story we're continuing to write. Our 19,000 team members are still passionate because we still believe there is a better way to shop, a more human way and that we at Qurate retail should own it. We have lived up to the milestones we set for success last year, and we are still only getting started. I hope you will stay with us. and continue to engage as we continue to try to prove that retail can have a soul. Thank you. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#15

Great. Normally, we try and do a think piece about where things are going and what's happening in the world, but we're not going to need to do that anymore because generative AI is going to do it for us. But to help in that process and to train your large language models or at least your -- the one related to generative AI, we brought together Brad and Joe. The -- we'll start with a cheap shot. The -- we asked whether -- which was a bigger hype machine, generative AI or Ozempic?

Unknown Executive

executive
#16

I noticed you asked Bard.

Unknown Executive

executive
#17

Because -- and ChatGPT is a little weird, right? They're '21 cutoff date, which isn't really a cutoff date, is a little vague. And it didn't seem like Ozempic was as much in the public conscious.

Unknown Executive

executive
#18

I guess Google needs somebody to use Bard. I would say I think that AI will be bigger, I've said this before, than the disruptions around Internet, mobile and cloud. We certainly see some valuations in the short run, that are maybe a little bit overhyped. The valuations are being set by strategic investors, not by financial investors in OpenAI, et cetera. But if I look at the impact, right, the use cases, AI is already having in corporate America among consumers. To me, I haven't seen a step function improvement, for example, in efficiency in enterprises like this in 20 years, I haven't seen a shift in consumer behavior like this in 20 years. So I suspect that when we're sitting here in 3 or 4 years, Greg, we'll have said that it was under hyped, not overhyped. We lived through a hype cycle in 1998, right? We dreamed of a world that might exist in 15 years. Today, we have 3 billion supercomputers in our pocket. The rate of adoption of these technologies is radically higher than it was in 2000, and so I think it will get here sooner than we think.

Unknown Executive

executive
#19

So I was -- heard the big 4, OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, all talk about how the convergence of chipsets, LLMs, and then the technologies themselves has done this acceleration. But there's still a lot of hype. Joe, set the stage. There's been lots of talk of AI, a lot of talk of generative AI lots of talk of large language models. The current concept and the name, artificial intelligence actually got created in 1955 at Dartmouth. It's been around a long time. Why now?

Unknown Executive

executive
#20

Easy, easy.

Unknown Executive

executive
#21

I had to hype the home team. Why now? Why now, Pandora had a history of being a place for innovation with AI or machine learning, that is how I view it. Why now? What's different?

Unknown Executive

executive
#22

Yes. I mean I think it's a great point. The Pandora's Music Genome Project, which is basically the ability to analyze music and figure out how songs go together, is based upon something called transformers, which are the underlying technology used in all these large language models and things like that. So to your point, they've been around for a long time. But I think there's a barrier that's going to look like the K-T barrier with the dinosaurs that occurred between -- what we've done in the past in AI, which is really like optimization and signal finding and things like that, can I see how these things are correlated together? Could I use all this computer technology to see how things are correlated? So what we're doing right now with these large language models in the generative side, which is really much more about reasoning and conversationalism, improvisation and things that we have not typically seen before. And these emergent behaviors, I think, even surprised the industry as to how much of a step function it was. And the thing that's so crazy about it, it's not the underlying technology that got better. It's the scale, they got massive. So it's actually a technology that was relatively well understood. And then all of a sudden, you just make it many, many, many, orders of magnitude bigger, and you get these emergent behaviors that are incredibly powerful.

Unknown Executive

executive
#23

So that's in part why these chipset revolutions are an important part. It's a software hardware interface and a combination that's made part of that?

Unknown Executive

executive
#24

A great point. I think if you look at companies like NVIDIA and you look at Amazon and Google, like you needed to have these massive scale data centers and massive numbers of these [indiscernible], network together in a way that was super performance to get to the point where you can kind of give birth to this thing. And so it took the confluence of a bunch of different things. But I agree, what's happened now is really something other than that, like we've transitioned into this new thing where this emergent behavior is just like I said, I think it even shocked the people that were doing and it's like, wow, you make it bigger and bigger and bigger, and it just keeps getting better. There's downstream effects like hallucinations and things like that, but that will get rung out eventually.

Unknown Executive

executive
#25

We can -- we'll talk about hallucinations when people start getting hungry for lunch in a minute. But we will cover -- why do you want to talk about that? Lots of our companies at Liberty have been using this, lots of ways. TripAdvisor creating trip recommendations using AI. F1, leveraging is an accelerant of enabler tools enhanced transcription, for example, on, across F1 TV on multiple languages. You guys both look at the consumer space, CPTO at Siri, you're an investor in these. Where do you see some of the most interesting examples? If you could pick up one of the -- we didn't quite process this -- if you could give up Liberty examples being great, that would be all the better. But if you have good consumer examples, I'd love to hear, what do you think, give me a couple of brand you think are out there, that are particularly interesting.

Unknown Executive

executive
#26

Well, I think that to me, and I'll ask this audience. Who's used ChatGPT in the last week and substituted its use for a use you would have previously had for Google. Okay. If we had asked that question 4 years ago or 3 years ago, no hands would have gone up. In 23 years, the defining metaphor, the organizing principle for all consumer Internet has been 10 blue links. There was no substitute. Everybody had to play in that ecosystem. Every -- you and I would sit in a boardroom where you talked about SEO and SEM and we had whined about Google and they just controlled the platform, and they extracted massive rents. I think the single most important thing in the last 20 years in consumer is the top of the funnel. The glass is changing. And a lot of people talk about, I've been -- I've said, I think it's going to be very difficult for Google to replicate the monopoly that they have in search in this new thing, right? Agents are going to be at the top of the funnel. You're going to have a conversation, you're going to ask questions, answer bots we have today in chat GPT, action bots. So is this hotel available for next Wednesday, at what price, okay, book it. That's just a simple conversation you're going to have in your iPod or on your phone, you're not going to have to go to a different website and peck in all of that little information. So to me, I think every company that's in vertical search or horizontal search needs to be thinking about a world post search, post apps that really takes advantage of interfacing with these agents. Now we're going to have 4, 5, 6 agents competing to be the top of the funnel. It's going to be an epic battle between Microsoft CoPilot, chat GPT, meta-AI, Google's Bard...

Unknown Executive

executive
#27

Open Source [indiscernible] which will drive down -- we talk about -- we told a little bit about [indiscernible] what's going to happen to pricing. This is going to be a competitive business. For sure.

Unknown Executive

executive
#28

So I don't want to fill a buster. But that's -- to me, on the consumer front, I'm less focused on what are the little turns of the screw, the individual companies are making. And I'm more thinking about like how is Zillow going to be relevant in the age of AI because I don't think that the Metaphor a vertical search ports to the world of AI.

Unknown Executive

executive
#29

Joe, you want to comment on that and then we'll go back and defend poor little Zillow, which.

Unknown Executive

executive
#30

No, I love Zillow, I mean.

Unknown Executive

executive
#31

I mean, look, I totally agree with that assessment. I think that's definitely the world that search and discovery -- general discovery and really the utility side of it is going. I spent most of my career in the sports and entertainment side. So looking at it from a media lens, I do think it changes things dramatically. I mean, certainly, like customer service and some of the use cases that we've seen here today, no question that already we're at a point where these intelligent agents -- these intelligence agents are not a chatbot. They're as good or better or very shortly will be better than the human agents. Customer satisfaction going up, cost going down, really good stuff like that. So it's going to start there. But I think if you just think about the generative side, let's just say that you could use some of this technology to make TV episode or a movie at half the price. Well, there are going to be some companies that get there first and they're not just going to reduce costs on that side. They're going to reinvest it. So now they're going to have twice as much content out there, which is then going to put pressure on everybody else. And so things are going to start to shift around but I think the use cases are going to start with the stuff that's obvious and low hanging, but it's going to start to really accelerate. And companies that have positioned themselves for automation are going to be the ones that are able to get into this revolution first because if you don't have the automation stuff, you can't really use any of this technology. So it's like a continuum from manual to automated to some level of AI to then, oh, boom, you hit this generative hockey stick. And if you're in one of those later stages, you're going to be able to get there really quickly.

Unknown Executive

executive
#32

I mean, Greg, if you're not -- if you're in the media business, content creation business and you're not AI first, you're going to have a really big problem. 2015, Yiming, a Chinese entrepreneur comes into my office and he has a little business called Toutiao in China, a news feed, doing $1 billion in revenue breakeven. And I said, how are you going to target content to your consumers when you don't have a social graph, right? I understand how Facebook does it, but how are you going to do it?" And he waves me off immediately. He said, "Brad, AI is way more powerful than a social graph. We now know that little company, Toutiao, as TikTok as ByteDance. It does 100 -- we invest in the business in 2015. This year, we'll do $130 billion in revenue, right? Every single piece of content they create is created by AI, all the targeting is AI, all the ad targeting is AI and it caught Zuck offguard at Meta. It took him 3 years to realize that the game had totally changed. He needed to rebuild every data center he had around the GPU. He needed to get into targeting content like reels in Instagram rather than the social feeds that he was doing. And that's the level of transformation that I think is coming to the entire media business. It's got to be AI first.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#33

But is AI, a big boy game? Do you have to be open AI? Do you have to be ByteDance? Do you have to be Microsoft to play? Or is there -- are they going to participate down and be competitive in the platforms in which extensions are built, which are interesting. Could it be the case that the Zillows of the world have their own extensions, their own LLMs with specific data, specific knowledge of what customers are doing and what they want, that is the protection and the enabler for them or are they going to get -- how do you look at that protection?

Unknown Executive

executive
#34

Yes. I mean, look, I think it's going to -- the landscape is going to shift, but it's sort of like if you take a step back, let's go back to NVIDIA and Intel and everything. Everybody kind of runs the same processors. They kind of do this, they run very similar operating systems. Things have always moved up stack in technology. And if you think about the cloud revolution, you had a whole bunch of companies that were known and made their bones really on-premises data centers and then you have this massive cloud disruption. And so the big growth wand up being in the cloud side, it's going to be the same thing with AI. There's going to be a big boy set of tools and services that are out there. And then there will be a rich ecosystem of folks around it that are putting them together in novel ways, creating their own sort of special sauce side of it. But to build a foundation model is $100 million a train at this point in time to get something trained or more. So I don't think you're going to see like little tiny companies, but I agree with you about open source. I think that's a really astute observation. In the way that Linux is still underpinning of this -- the last revolution, there will be Open Source models that are going to empower a lot of people to do a lot of things. And not every single task needs the biggest model you could possibly have out there. And so I think these models still cost money to run. So you really want to run the model that is the right size for your use case. And in many cases, you may need a couple of models to get your use case out there. So I think there's going to be a robust ecosystem around it. The players are going to change. You'll see some of the same incumbents just like you did from the last revolution that can catch up and get in there. And you'll see some new folks that like didn't exist before that all of a sudden show up on the map and be like, okay, now we're here. And we're going to own this piece of the market, too. But there'll be -- I'm just say the whole ecosystem is going to be very dynamic.

Unknown Executive

executive
#35

If you're a content company or in the business of commerce, okay? In 2000, if you didn't have a website, you were dead, right? You had to build a website. You had to be discovered. And all your activity moved to the web. In 2010, if you didn't have a mobile app, remember, Zuck was going to build HTML5, stack creator goes to $17 a share because he said, "Oh, I don't think I need to build a native app." That changed quickly, okay? So web pages became native apps. What happens in the age of AI? So when we were talking with our great friend, Rich at Zillow, Rich is one of the best visionaries in the business. He understands we're moving into a post app world. So you need to get good. If you were an app, you need to get -- if you were one of those companies you got to get good at the app store. If you -- during the age of Internet, you need to be good at SEM and SEO. Now you need to get really good at being an agent because your agent is going to interact with the master agent and the master agent is going to be Bard or it's going to be chatGPT or it's going to be Meta AI. Behind the scenes, these agents will be having conversations. They are APIs and digital interactions. So you need to make sure that you're on the bleeding edge of making sure your agent is discovered, interacts because they're not going to need to go to 1,000 different agents to get their questions -- sub-agents to get their questions answered. I'm not sure what the economics of that are going to be, but I'm pretty certain that's going to be the new operating metaphor.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#36

So for both of you, and I'm going to do this. When I was at Microsoft, Microsoft was behind, then started to get caught the Internet title wave in '95, Bill wrote a famous memo, launched Internet throughout the company said, "Look, we're not going to create an Internet division just like we don't create an electricity division, it's going to run through everything we do." How will AI be organized, do you think smartly in the best companies? How are the best companies going to think about it? Are they going to have an AI effort? How are they going to embed AI in what they do? How will they roll out product road maps, will they be integrated or separate verticals within their own companies? How do you think about it, Joe?

Unknown Executive

executive
#37

I mean, look, I love your metaphor. And I would sort of -- if you took it up a level, the Internet revolution was all about getting information accessible, I think as much information accessible as it is. The mobile revolution was really about constraining what you did with that information into a use case that was super beneficial to the customer. So I go to this app and I get my weather. I go to this app and I get the other thing. The next one is going to be even further reaction back down to the agent level. And I think, Greg, the clip that you threw out, I think, is perfectly spot on, which is companies that made a web division didn't do well. Now we don't have web divisions. We just have companies. And yes, the website is built by somebody and managed by somebody and all that sort of stuff. So I think the companies that get there back to the automation side, the companies that are already positioned with automation and everything already have a lot of the rails to sort of take advantage of this. So Mich presenting earlier and we were talking about like things like tickets, like that's a highly automated process. They're already there. So now all of a sudden, the notion of grafting on some AI, for example to take it to the next level, so everybody gets a personalized come on for that ticket based upon all the knowledge that they have about it, is a pretty incremental step as opposed to this massive step function. So I think companies -- there will be those that do it both ways. Like you said, there's a division that does this, but the companies that excel. The companies that really accelerate into this trend are the ones that are already -- have already made the automation step and are just flooring it at this point in time to just scale it out.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#38

Do you want to add anything on that or?

Unknown Executive

executive
#39

No.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#40

Let's -- we'll drill -- we're going to go big picture for a second, and then we're going to drill a little too. So big picture. A McKinsey study thinks that generative AI could add $4 trillion of economic impact through new cases and $25 trillion. So that's really forward-looking and $25 trillion primarily through enabled worker productivity. There's also going to be a lot of roadkill here. A lot of jobs lost, a lot of retraining required. How do you weigh this? How do you measure productivity? How much of this will be forward out because you're focused on the consumer side and what your comments were and how much is to be the back end? There are -- what's going on at the charter is enormous opportunities in the back end around customer service. And that's where true for many cases, what's going on in automated processes and driving those. How do you weigh the front and the back? How do you look at those productivity? And how do you look at the road kill not the road kill of companies, but people whose jobs are lost and how that will be reworking?

Unknown Executive

executive
#41

The reason I think there's going to be a golden era in the United States is in the lead, and I'm an American optimist when it comes to this, is that for companies, this ought to be expansion to bottom line and acceleration to top line. Ultimately -- I mean, we've never seen anything that can make an engineer 5% more productive let alone 30% to 50% more productive. Just take this data, meta compounded its head count at 40% CAGR for 5 years leading up to 2021. Mark's now saying they're not going to -- they'll have no hiring despite 20% growth for the next 4 or 5 years. That's because they're getting incredible efficiencies out of engineering, incredible engineering...

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#42

You would also argue, they had 95,000 employees before they started this process. You like -- what were all these people doing? Honestly, 95,000 people run facebook was nuts, right? I wrote the letter. It's time to get fit. It was... We were saying this last night at dinner. There are 95,000 people at Charter. I know what they do. They do truck rolls. They roll out fiber. There's physical elements. What are these 95,000 Facebook doing?

Unknown Executive

executive
#43

Eat sushi and drink espressos. So we're seeing massive efficiencies that I think will roll through -- we asked -- I asked at dinner last night, Ted, when we think we'll see this show up in productivity figures for the country, it's impossible to believe that it won't. But it -- but the technical progress is not distributed equally. It will be disruptive, right? I think more disruptive. But next -- this year was the year of testing. Next year is the year of production. 2025 is when this stuff really starts rolling out. In terms of employment, it's not going to mean that we're going to overnight get rid of 30% of the people in the call center, but it's going to mean we're not backfilling attrition that we're going to let the bottom 10% go at the end of the year. And so I think it will be an employment headwind and I think a lot of those jobs will not come back. Now listen, we're going to have a lot of jobs created. I made -- I talked about on CNBC yesterday, I'm doing this thing called Investor America, followed on Twitter Investor America '24 but it's a private investment account for every child born in America. And part of the reason we have to do this is we're -- less than 50% of people under the age of 40 believe in capitalism. And it's because they feel like the system of progress is rigged against them, right? And we're about ready to have the biggest labor displacement in the history of the country over the course of the next decade and so we need to get in front of this. We don't want people arguing to stop progress because they're left out. We need to take everybody on the path of progress with us. So I think it's of that order of magnitude. I think it's going to be good for all your companies.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#44

Well, we're going to talk about our companies and how we're going to make so much money in a minute. Joe, let me throw this to you. There is all this disruption. There's all of these things happening. They're machine-driven, [indiscernible] is built around the idea that a human connection is meaningful, Jennifer talked about it, we've talked about it with our Olympic system bonds. As generative AI scales in consumer applications, what is the balance in this product and between how much is knowing about automation of your customers? How much is just touching your customers? How much of this is antithetical to the things that we believe are the Olympic systems, how do you look at that tension?

Unknown Executive

executive
#45

Yes. I mean I actually see them not in conflict. And so certainly at Sirius in my last job as well, when you're dealing with content creators and you're dealing with sort of this really creative side of it, which is very different than the utility side of it, computers are still really bad at taste making. So like if you look at like some of the generative AI, for example, that makes pictures, like the first one you see you're like, "Oh, my god, that's amazing. That's like Greg riding a unicorn, how did that work? In an old Western site, you're like, this is insane." And then you see 5 of them you're like, well, they all look the same. So like the creative part of it isn't really there. It's exceptionally good at the sort of taking the creativity and the compositing it. So when we look at it, the human curator is still a big thing. The question is how are you scaling that human curator? Or that human creator into something that's much more broad? And every time that -- even with the generative stuff, any time that we put the 2 things together, it's like generatives are up here, people are down here. Both of them together is greater than the sum of the parts because when you get to the creative efforts, there's just a thing about taste making. And so when we look at it Sirius now what we're really looking at is how do we fuse these new things together in a way that allows us to scale in a way that would be amazing. So like, for example, I get -- I'm walking around the office. I can talk to the guy that does genre music that I like I say, what's hot right now and he will tell me. But that answer is really different for different people.

Unknown Executive

executive
#46

[indiscernible]

Unknown Executive

executive
#47

Absolutely. But that answer is different for different people. So the question is, how do you take that? And then how do you scale it up to the point where now everybody could have that good of an efficacy of a conversation with an agent that is already seeded with a bunch of information as well as the entire cannon of things that are out there. And so I think about like -- back to the optimism side, I think it's about how do you create human excellence with this because people are good, the tools are good, people with good tools are going to be the ones that win.

Unknown Executive

executive
#48

Let me build on that. As humans, we have cognitive dissonance around this idea that a machine without human curation can actually do it better. But the truth of the matter is my 13-year-old son is buying all this stuff off of Temu the #1 app in the United States, probably the fastest-growing e-commerce company in history. And I said, why are you -- why do you get it so excited about buying things on Temu. He said it's fun and they know exactly what I want. Temu is using the same resources that Yiming does at TikTok to target products to my son Jack because it knows that he wants to buy fake Yeezys for $7, right? Like it just -- and this is what I'm talking about being AI first. There is no human intervention. If you ask anybody at Temu, why they're targeting this IP, this app user with Yeezys, they would say, ask the black box. We don't know. And so I think that's what -- where the world is....

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#49

We're going to come back and talk about when I'm going finish with a couple of more. We're going to indulge you for holding out on lunch for a little longer. Travel. Brad and I have -- both have a long history and travel back to Expedia, TripAdvisor all the way. Earlier this year, a bunch of investment banks listed an AI short list of who's going to get hit and TripAdvisor was top of the list. We thought it was misguided. TripAdvisor has a bunch of compelling AI initiatives, generating AI power travel inventories is very powerful ability to execute on that improve capabilities, running analysis of their extensive content base, what consumer behavior, if there's something in particular you want that's unique they're going to know it better than certainly most people because of the LLM that they own. In your view how is Travel position? How is Travel move? You talked about generating your hotel? How is -- what's the future of travel in that world to scale it? And how is the portal TripAdvisor going to survive this?

Unknown Executive

executive
#50

I mean, listen, I think it's one of the -- as you know, I've been an investor in lots of the online travel companies over the last decade and started a couple myself. It's going to have to change a lot. If you think about travel, it's really broken down into 2 halves. There's the utility half, which is I know I'm coming to New York for this event, it's already in my calendar. And I just need to book the hotel. I want to get the right room. I want to get the best price et cetera, many of you probably have a personal assistant who does it for you. Now we're going to give that personal assistant for free in everybody's pocket and all their utility will be as efficient as your interaction with your personal assistant. You'll have a conversation with your Meta AI, right, whichever one you migrate toward. And it's not going to be about discovery. It's not going to be about entertainment. That side of your travel habit. In fact, it will probably be predictive to say, I see in your calendar, you got to be in New York, you want me to get you the same room you always like at whatever hotel, at the addition and you want me to get to such a such price, okay? And it may ask you or it may not, may say, "Hey, do you want me to book it directly at the addition. So you get your points or do you want me to book it through Booking.com because I know you like that site but there's going to be a fight is to have. Now these are going to be agents talking to subagents. There will be no human in the loop. And then on the other side, I think where TripAdvisor plays is when we're dreaming, when we're discovering, when we're thinking experientially about what we want our families to do this summer, AIs will also have a role there. But I think the role in the content and the value of companies engaged in the experiential part is much more durable and sustainable and important.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#51

That actually plays pretty well for TripAdvisor versus the OTAs, right? Because we're in the thinking, developing, exciting travel business, not the execution.

Unknown Executive

executive
#52

If you think about -- when you and I got into the travel business, right, the big market caps, Sabre, right? What happened to Sabre? They got pushed down the stack by Travelocity and Expedia. What I would be worried about if I was running a Expedia or booking today is that you're now Sabre, and you're going to get pushed down the stack and now the abstraction layer is going to be the agent right? And now you're going to simply be in the game of transacting a reservation, and you don't get paid 15% or 20% of the total room value if all you are as a transaction engine.

Unknown Executive

executive
#53

Yes. Well, I mean, speaking at Liberty companies, I think what you guys have done with [indiscernible] is exactly on that, right? It's the same thing because I agree, in the world of the highly automated and the highly precise, the innovation side of it, that sort of flare side of it is super important. We did a piece of research, which I see is somewhat analogous to this where we were like testing things out. And there's the saying, "well, young people don't like radio." But yet actually, when we did the actual testing, the [indiscernible] testing, the younger audiences we're the ones who like the DJ more than the older audiences. And I was like, wow, that's really strange. And so I was like, why is that? Like something is wrong, not of a good sample, et cetera? And I start reading the comments and this one like nailed it for me is a 20-year-old woman. And she's like, "Oh my god, this is so cool." It's like a podcast with music.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#54

I love it. I love it.

Unknown Executive

executive
#55

Right? And so in this world of everything is sort of curated and all these types of things, these like flourishes. I agree with you 100% about the travel side, the experience side of it is there. And so I think, like I said, like what you get guys did to F1, I think it's brilliant because it's that thing. That is going to be a precious unique [indiscernible].

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#56

So another place where you have some history, Joe, is in baseball. Baseball is a history with rich data sets, no sports captured more information for longer than baseball. And they've been leveraging those new analytic tools very well. Alex Anthopoulos is a star at this [indiscernible] display metrics you help create, on player strengths and weaknesses, the sweet spot, exit velocity, protected home run distance used by the coaching staff to advance training regimes, informs player acquisitions and game strategies, informs players. You should be doing this. That's on the business side, too, things like wait time. We use it for product use, for ingress, egress, how to master planning, how to price all these things. But taking a broader lens on this, and you most may have a view, how is this going to turn into not just hey, you hit better on this kind of picture. How is this going to be turned into human performance and talent development? Obviously, that is a huge issue for Hollywood. We've just seen the fight that went on. There was a settlement. I have to say, I've not ingested all that got agreed upon, be interesting to know. But what do you think about applications across athletes, musicians, performance, other public figure -- public-facing figures.

Unknown Executive

executive
#57

Yes. I mean you're right in my sweet spot. I mean, the first -- the first line of my career, I spent with the White Sox, the Chicago Bulls and the Black Hawks. And so I've been on that sort of technology coaching side and 3 professional sports, 3 rings with the bulls in the '90s kind of for the folks that are fans [indiscernible] and it was all about player performance. And so the answer is it's already doing it. Like back then, we had to do a bunch of stuff manually. Like I had loggers, I had 3 loggers during the game that we're putting like what shot was taken? Where players were on the court, things like that manually in real time during the game but now I can just point out GoPro app and get the same data. But it's not just that part of it. So when you talk about performance of athletes, it's like blood oxygenation, muscle fatigue, lactic acid buildup. It's what they eat, how they train, how do you tweak these things. I mean it is done at such an incredible level from the actual athletes themselves like as great as Michael Jordan was. If Michael Jordan played today, he'd be even better because of all this technology. So it's already happening. So I think on the sports athletic side, it's already in full swing. And I know because I've been working with a couple of universities on this, like there's a lot of work going on in taking this generative AI technology and really taking a look at these data sets and seeing what else is there? Because at some point in time, it's not just the signal finding. It's like, well, yes, okay, this is blood oxygen. But how do I make it better? But I think that same thing is going to apply to all regimes in there. So you start talking about actors and things like that. The performance of almost anybody when you talk about an actor or an athlete or something, you get to see the 10th of a percent that is the part, that is the actual performance. 99.9% of that is preparation for that one tenth of the percent. And that's where the machine learning and the sort of reinforcement learning and this AI thinks I'm just going to blow it out.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#58

Do you want to add to that, Brad?

Unknown Executive

executive
#59

No.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#60

Okay. So one of the things that is a huge legal fight and it also applies -- I'm going to ask both a specific question and a broader question. Sampling in music is a huge deal, but the record companies are fighting to ensure that, that is not occurring more broadly to train LLMs, there's lawsuits and threatened lawsuits that are already occurring. And Marc Andreessen has written recently about this that if this happens, it's a huge limitation for the United States ability to compete in AI. China. So I got a couple about 5 areas that you rip on. One is, how do you look at sampling? How do you look at this question about how to train LLMs? How do you look at some of the [indiscernible], which are evolving, but also China is a closed world. What are the strengths of the U.S. to compete in the space is that we are an open world? How right is Andreessen if we shut this down, that we're going to look more like China. China has had a lot of advances in AI, but a lot of people have -- other people have forecast that they're limited because of the nature of their society, the nature of how they're going to limit their LLMs, nature of what's good code.

Unknown Executive

executive
#61

Well, I mean, you and I lived through this 20 years ago and the fair use doctor and saved the Internet. And without it, there would be no Internet, right? It would be a vastly, vastly different thing. And I think if you look at it today, if you apply the metaphor music sampling, which has been legal for a long time, now if we're producing a synthetically created song that sounds like A, B and C, the LLM is not being trained. It's not going and crawling 1 person, right? That LLM is trained on millions, if not billions of inputs that allows it to create the output. So I think the Supreme Court of the United States can be very, very hard-pressed under fair use to say that now, people can withdraw from the public purpose, their music -- but once your music is in the public domain, I think it will be very hard for them to enforce this thing that is synthetically produced by an LLM was somehow extra appropriated from them.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#62

Spotify got a lot of trouble in your world, Joe, for this. For producing near music, right which was -- it's a very.

Unknown Executive

executive
#63

But I also think that's in the eyes of the consumer. If you hold out to the consumer that you're doing something. Right? If you appear that you're extra appropriating from an artist, their unique works, and you're in the consumer business, then I think people will say, "Hey, we don't know if we trust your brand." As you know, I'm on the Board of iHeart. And this is a topic that I push hard on that Board because I think for myself, there are genres of music that I want to hear and to be perfectly honest, I don't care. As a consumer at certain hours of the day, I just want to hear the sound that sounds like the thing I want to hear and I don't need to hear the head end of a particular artist. But the second part of that is just about the competitiveness of the United States.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#64

Let's look, Joe, quite a view on the music. No, it's good.

Unknown Executive

executive
#65

I mean, look, I think that -- the thing that's very surprising to me is like we have these technological revolutions where things are radically different. Like this is just something that has not existed before in history. And then everybody runs and says, well, how does this law that was written or the thing for 50, 75 years ago inform us? And the answer is, the law is going to have to change too. So I feel like there's a little bit of like it's got to be a little bit of A and a little bit of column B. When you have something that says, artists all were using generative inside the studios. So they're making content, using [indiscernible].

Unknown Executive

executive
#66

I mean, the dirty little secret is they're using a lot of AI. And arguably, a lot of artists, their music that you attribute to the artist is 70% or 80% made by an AI themselves.

Unknown Executive

executive
#67

No question. So I think that the notion of like in the process and like music kind of in the background and stuff like that is one sort of use case. I think it's very different if you say, make me a new album that sounds like Oasis. Like if you're Oasis, you're like, well, wait a second. Now there's no way that you can make a song that sounds like me if you don't ingest me in the first place. And so I think that we're going to have to get into something that's not quite fair use and not quite the black and white of the copy where it says like, look, this is the extent that you can use the source material to replicate similar source material, use the extent you can use it to train a model much more generic foundational things. But the law is going to have to catch up. And like we're sprinting so fast on the AI side. I think this is going to be a very bloody 4, 5 years of people just trying to wrap their heads around. How do we get this to watch.

Unknown Executive

executive
#68

Usually, the incumbents that run to the courts, that try to slow down all of this progress. And for me, part of the magic of the system, we know that today She is coming to San Francisco in a few weeks, hopefully, for a [indiscernible] with President Biden. But we know that the battle that's playing out is now being played out over chips, not over weapons, right? Because national security and national economic security is about silicon and AI. It is no longer about weapon systems, right?

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#69

And I'm not sure they would quite [indiscernible] Ukraine or Gaza right now.

Unknown Executive

executive
#70

But I mean if you look at what's flying around in Ukraine, blowing up Russian tanks, it's AI-driven drones made by companies like Anduril. The other countries can't replicate because they don't have the technology. So my only point is that for the United States to seed its competitiveness, by getting wrapped around the litigation axle would be a huge mistake today just like it would have been a tremendous mistake in 1999 to do that and impede the progress of the Internet.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#71

So last one, lunch is waiting. Lot of talk about co-pilots, playing a crucial role in enhancing productivity, but there's also a lot of talk that they're not exactly perfect. Can we run our example, show the screen. They ask you my copilot was. Some of these people are not -- actually people, Gregory [indiscernible] somebody I do not know because I'm Gregory Maffei. Brian Roberts is a wonderful man, but he is not really my Copilot. There are hallucinations everywhere. There are clearly mistakes. We've seen all the power of AI but we've seen also the excesses and the craziness that comes out things that are just beyond random. How does this get to where we have -- everyone tells me I can drive my Tesla in an automated mode, I can't. It does not work. AI is useful for some things, but is unreliable in many other ways. How does this get fixed? How do hallucinations go away? How do you see this becoming something where we can actually rely on it?

Unknown Executive

executive
#72

I mean I think there's really 2 things to that. Like, when you look at stuff like that, it's not like humans don't make up that stuff, too, right? So I think.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#73

We don't trust humans already.

Unknown Executive

executive
#74

Right. But I think there is this the question of like, what's the bar? Like, how do we get into some empiricalness about like how good is good enough. And so part of it is that to the car situation, the number of bad human drivers out there is far worse than the number of AI drivers that are out there driving cars. So -- but yet when an AI does it we're like, "Oh my god, that's horrible, right? But I think we have to start looking at some of these things statistically and try to figure out like how good is good enough and then have some real conversations about like resetting some of these things because AI is going to be around and back to the notion of our competitiveness worldwide, other people are going to have different tolerances for that. And those tolerances will allow those AIs to learn faster, which will then ultimately be a threat for us if we put the training wheels on too tight for something like that. So I think that's part of it. And I think the second part of it, though, I think, is technologically. Much like in our brain, each one of these AIs almost looks like a specialized part of the human brain. Much like our brain, we have conversations with ourselves internally. And whether you call it Ensemble or you call it Socratic, there's a bunch of things now that are going on, where like AI models can talk to AI models sort of before they answer to you. And I think that's where a lot of this stuff gets pressure tested in the same way or your trusted -- your actual trusted human friend when you're like, "Hey, I think this is like, that's crazy, you might want to think about that differently." As soon as the model starts to have more conversations like that, this stuff goes away.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#75

Where do you see this Brad?

Unknown Executive

executive
#76

Well, I just have finished on that this is really important, I think, for folks to understand. If I ask one of my analysts to go do an analysis, right? There will be mistakes. If I ask 5 other analysts to fact check that analysis, the accuracy will go up. What he's saying about the Socratic Ensemble model is now this is happening today. right? Agents are now fact-checking agents. And so the problem of hallucination, I think, will be dealt with very effectively. And as an investor, maybe I wrap with this, I think it's a golden era. I really -- I think the era of information retrievable search that defined the last 20 years, unlock trillions of dollars of productivity and value creation. I often describe Google is the largest card catalog ever created. But the reality is we had to pull out the drawer. We had to sit between all the links. We had to go to the links hunt and pack. We had to read what was on that page. We had to try to figure out whether it answered the question. It took a bunch of time. And as ads took over the page, it took even more time. And now you can just have an interaction with an agent who gives you the answer. And yes, these will progress, but they're progressing very, very quickly. And I think for existing businesses who get on board the trade, just like people who adopted the Internet early or mobile early or cloud early, right, bringing those incumbent assets to the table and the party of this new disruption, I think, will improve bottom lines, reaccelerate top lines. But to be clear, there's going to be a lot of roadkill here as well. And so I think as a stock picker, we get paid when there's dispersion, when things go up and things go down and we try to anthropologically figure out, which is going up and which is going down, and so it's a really interesting time for me in that regard. These 10-year periods where it's just the disruption happens and now it's just an application of the disruption, they get pretty stable and sometimes even a little boring. It's not boring right now.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#77

On that happy note, we took you long for through lunch. I thought it was worth it. I hope you do agree. Thank you to our panelists.

Unknown Executive

executive
#78

Thanks for having us. Greg.

Unknown Executive

executive
#79

Thanks. Great job.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#80

Just we are going to start back at just after 1:00 p.m. So we'll see you then. [Break]

Angela White

executive
#81

So we will have Liberty TripAdvisor and TripAdvisor, then Liberty Broadband with Charter and GCI, and we will end with our Q&A with John Malone and Greg Maffei. Just a note on Q&A. We will have mics being passed around. So we have some pre-submitted questions, but we'll take some from the group here. Please wait for a mic to get to you before asking the question. And for your viewing pleasure, please watch an additional FLS. [Presentation]

Angela White

executive
#82

Finally, we do have a bit more entertainment for you. It would not be Liberty Comedy if we did not offer some musical entertainment. So without further ado, please enjoy. [Presentation]

Gregory Maffei

executive
#83

Liberty's continued ability to make fools of ourselves remain strong. I'm here to talk about Liberty Trip and a little bit about Trip. Trip has a very attractive portfolio of travel brands. Just for emphasis with three distinct assets. TripAdvisor Core was an example of high-quality data, for that if you're a light sleeper, we can recommend a hotel and perhaps even a room based on the noise level. At Viator, we're improving customer economics even as we invest in the business, we're very excited about the growth prospects for Viator. If you look at how its nearest comp was recently valued at $2 billion, you've got to think it's not clear. It's being recognized inside the TripAdvisor brand and stock. And finally, TheFork, the leader in European dining, we expect to be profitable by the end of '23. Many on the street look at TripAdvisor on a DCF basis and or inhibit multiple basis, and you really don't get the full value because two of these brands are not profitable today, but expect to be profitable in '24. And particularly Viator with enormous growth, I don't think is being recognized fully on that kind of PCF or EBITDA basis. The sum of the parts will be a far better method, and we believe on that basis, it's quite attractively priced, which is why -- one of the reasons why they recently just instituted a stock buyback program. One of the ways that TripAdvisor is unique is both the content and the quality of the data it has. The scale is huge and much of it is proprietary and much of it is highly valuable. Those click streams, the intent of consumers, the history of consumers, all of those are elements that go into making the LLM for TripAdvisor quite valuable. The ability to provide a holistic travel guide, [ Brad Gershon ] touched on this in our session on AI is really where some of that opportunity exists, and the ability to bridge that scale of data would also combined with a trusted brand name and the quality of perception that TripAdvisor had, we think, is unique. Gen AI is going to bring a lot of that together and we believe create a lot of opportunities for us to leverage all of these assets in a very interesting way. You can see this beginning in the TripAdvisor planner, the planning tool we're working on. Now there are a number of players out there with AI planning tools. Certainly, we're not unique, but not all of them have this data have this interface, have this trusted brand on top of the things that the AI interface provides. And we're the only one that can match planning with direct bookings. So you should go check it out. Please do look at what we can do for your next trip. And with that, I'm going to introduce Matt Goldberg.

Matthew Goldberg

executive
#84

Thanks, Greg. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Matt Goldberg, I'm CEO -- what did Maffei call us? Poor little TripAdvisor. Today, I'd like to talk to you about the progress we've been making across the group since we were here last year and how each of our segments has become more efficient and more effective in executing on their respective strategies. Quickly remind you, safe harbor. Across the group, our vision is to be the world's most trusted source for travel and experiences. We believe we're better positioned than anyone else in the world to achieve this, thanks to our global scale, our trusted brands, our strong partner relationships across all categories. As a reminder, at TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel guidance platform, over 300 million users come to us every month. And this includes, importantly, more than 130 million active members. And our strategy is designed around first and foremost, to super serve these high-value users through engagement that leads to higher levels of monetization. At Viator, we're accelerating our leadership position in experiences by connecting travelers to the world's largest supply of high-quality online bookable experiences. And we're driving high revenue growth, approximately 57% year-to-date with significant upside in a large and fast-growing market with low online penetration. And finally, at TheFork, we're the leading restaurant booking platform in Europe, connecting millions of diners to restaurants in 12 countries and offering a variety of services to our restaurant partners to help them grow their businesses. I'll start today with our TripAdvisor core segment. With the strategy we launched earlier this year, putting travelers at the heart of everything we do has been our guiding principle. The question was, how do we do that? By building on our heritage of trust and shifting to a model that encourages a deeper, more persistent relationship with those travelers. To answer that, I'd like to outline some of the progress we've made and why we have conviction about the path ahead. The first part of our strategy is to deliver product innovation around world-class guidance. Now good advice is hard to find. And we're in a privileged position as the brand that travelers trust but we can take it further by driving innovation around our product. One example is the recent launch of our beta trip planning tool that Greg just mentioned. Now with this product, travelers can regenerate a personalized itinerary in just a few seconds, powered by Generative AI. And we've seen incredibly strong early traveler feedback that indicates we have early product market fit. And I want to reinforce some of the data that we shared in our earnings this week. The product is driving repeat visits. Members who create itineraries have returned to engage with us at much higher rates in the following months than members who didn't create an itinerary. And this will help us drive monetization. Those same members who build an itinerary also generate 3x higher revenue than the average TripAdvisor member, we're 30x higher revenue than the average nonmember. And we're going to keep iterating and improving on this product. adding more features for trip planning and deeply integrating hotels and experiences that can be monetized directly. In the coming months, we'll roll out the trip planning and itinerary products in our mobile app, where we're creating a differentiated experience for our best users. Now we really like our global scale. It's hundreds of millions of users. But the second part of our strategy is to put even more focus on driving growth among a group of highly engaged, high-value users. A traveler who reads our reviews and then leaves doesn't monetize as well as a traveler who builds an itinerary, books an experience in the app and returns to write a review. So how are we building a deeper relationship with our highest value users, the short answer, Data. So we stick with the trip planning example. We recently added a For You feature that leverages our first-party proprietary data to deliver personalized hotel and experience recommendations based on what you've already added to your trip and what travelers like you recommend. It's easy to imagine this approach, leveraging our vast data asset with personalized recommendations that drive higher conversion scaling across the entire traveler journey. And we're also building ways to incentivize members for their loyalty and contributions to our community, including badging that recognize their top contributors and other rewards. And finally, we've rolled out a test on hotel pages that uses generative AI and our traveler data to summarize reviews and deliver unique insights on key quality attributes. So we can provide that clear signal about the noise level of a particular hotel. And even on the 15th floor last night, I heard Times Square. I'll have to add that to the review. And because trust is the most important reason people come to us, we actually provide the underlying reviews from members of our community that were used to generate each insight and provide a direct path to travelers to go deeper on what matters most to them, whether it's the atmosphere, the location or the value of a particular location. Well, we'll talk about monetization for a minute. Let's go back when -- Finally, when we do improve this engagement, we create more opportunities for monetization. We've historically focused revenue opportunities on our siloed offerings, and most of you know us for hotel Meta. Now Meta is a compelling business. And we believe it will be for a long time to come, but it's not necessarily the growth driver for us. So we're leaning hard into growing both our marketplace and media businesses, taking advantage of our scale to accelerate the diversification that's already underway. In the marketplace, the growth and experiences exemplifies how we can participate in transaction-based economics by connecting our traveler demand with the best supply. In this case, powered by Viator. And given the demand we have today, we see meaningful opportunities to add other bookable supply into new categories and geographies, which will drive value for travelers and partners alike. In our media business, we're broadening our value proposition for brands beyond our legacy display business to leverage data, new formats, native ad integrations and custom solutions for both endemic and non-endemic partners. All this adds up to a healthier, more diversified revenue mix for TripAdvisor, and we're excited about our path forward and well positioned to carry the momentum into 2024. Now on to Viator, where we're on a journey to bring more Wonder into the world through amazing travel experiences. Globally, we're the market leader in travel's fastest-growing category. More than $3 billion in bookings will pass through our platform this year. By year-end, that will be about 2.5x 2019. And we do this by connecting travelers with the world's biggest and best online catalog of experiences. We offer more than 300,000 products for more than 55,000 operators. This is everything from pasta making in Tuscany to Glowworm spotting in New Zealand. Historic tours in London and skip the line tickets to The Colosseum. Our market leadership is why technology and travel giants rely on us to power their experience as storefronts. We have more than 4,000 distribution partners, including the likes of Uber, Amazon, Expedia booking and nearly every other major name in travel. And of course, this also includes direct access to TripAdvisor's global audience. Well, that was the slide we needed before. We will pass that one up. But what's so exciting about Viator, it isn't what we've already accomplished. It's the enormous opportunity ahead. The total addressable market for the category will be nearly $300 billion in GBV in the next few years. And amazingly, still in 2023, 80% of it is offline. And I think the opportunity is best summed up by these two numbers. For 94% of travelers, when you describe an online booking platform for experiences, they'll tell you it sounds compelling that they'd use it. But 70% of them still think no such product exists. We see this in the way that people book experiences today. They're doing it in high friction, fragmented, unsatisfying ways off-line maybe talking to a concierge at a hotel and without price comparison, reviews and sort orders. This isn't how people want to shop for experiences, it's just the only way they know how to do it today. So what does that tell us? We need to build awareness because we have strong product market fit. An untapped demand that's currently largely unmet, and there are tens of billions of dollars of addressable opportunity if we get it right. So this year, we started on that journey. We've launched a national brand campaign in the U.S., telling travelers that a better solution exists, and it's called Viator. The campaign has reached hundreds of millions of travelers and we've seen significant growth in our brand health and awareness with benefits like rising brand search and direct traffic. Let's have a look at one of those spots. [Presentation]

Matthew Goldberg

executive
#85

But that, of course, isn't all we're doing, we're turning that new audience into a loyal one. And we're doing this by improving our user experience by easing search, enhancing the app, optimizing our checkout experience and in hundreds of other large and small ways. We're creating clear reasons to come back with programs and incentives that drive loyalty. And collectively, this is driving compelling economics for us. Our most loyal users are our fastest growing, highest spending and least costly of all our users, and they're growing 3.5x the number of new users. We're also earning loyalty with the other side of our marketplace, our operators. We're focusing on the operator experience, driving more bookings and doing that seamlessly. And our success here shows up as higher retention rates with suppliers generating meaningfully more business through Viator, the longer they stay on the platform. And adoption of Accelerate, our operator marketing platform. More than half of the eligible products are now opted into the program with operators choosing to exchange a higher commission for increased exposure on our platform. Both sides of the marketplace are working together to provide a compelling proposition for travelers. Helping us convert new users into repeat users and improve our unit economics. And this positions us well to deliver full year profitability in 2024 with margin expansion as we continue to scale. And finally, at TheFork. Our focus here is to drive healthy growth with significant margin improvement this year. The opportunity in Europe is large and underpenetrated with markets that are early in the transition to online restaurant booking relative to the U.S. In our top 5 markets alone, there are 500,000 restaurants, and we're in just over 10% of them. So there's still a meaningful supply opportunity. As we drive the economics of the business, we have the advantage of increased focus and previous investments we've made to leverage. We've rationalized our footprint to focus on priority European markets. We've modernized our tech platform to drive speed of product innovation. And we've launched new products and services that enable diner payments, restaurant yield management and underpin a value-based pricing model that continues to drive growth for us. On the diner side, we've invested in our mobile app, which helps us generate 75% of our bookings for repeat customers with higher LTVs and better retention. And on the restaurant side, we've migrated to a single software reservation system, which will really help drive growth in our B2B business. And we've done all of this as we realign our fixed cost base to deliver further leverage going forward. And this puts us on track to deliver on our commitment to exit the year at breakeven profitability and deliver EBITDA contribution in 2024. Before we close, let me share some of the financial highlights of the group. And that's timely because we just did earnings yesterday or the day before, so we'll be able to share a little more. In Q3, we grew revenue 16% year-over-year by more than 40% growth at Viator as well as better-than-expected performance at TripAdvisor Core. On a year-to-date basis, Revenue grew 23% year-over-year with Viator growing 57%, TheFork 24% and TripAdvisor Core grew 9%. Our adjusted EBITDA trajectory is strong, and reflects disciplined cost management with a balanced approach even as we continue to drive investment across our segments. Here, you can see our operating cash flow over the last 5 years. We're a low capital-intensive business with very little CapEx and generate healthy free cash flow that's been growing since 2020. In fiscal '23, we expect stable cash flow year-over-year considering some of the onetime COVID and tax-related adjustments in each of the periods being compared. And we believe we can continue to deliver attractive free cash flow as TheFork and Viator move to become more profitable next year. Finally, at the end of the third quarter, we had $1.6 billion in available liquidity. It's a good position to be in with a balance sheet that will provide us with optionality, whether for organic investment as we've been doing in Viator in particular, or for M&A in support of our strategy or other uses of cash. And of course, Greg just mentioned, we recently received board authorization for share repurchases of up to $250 million, which we will execute opportunistically. So in summary, we sit in an attractive market. We're leaning into the strength of a diverse set of assets we're executing more efficiently and effectively to reinvigorate TripAdvisor's Core, to extend Viator's leadership position and experiences and deliver long-term sustainable growth and profitability across the portfolio. Thank you. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#86

So I'm here to talk about Liberty Broadband. Since we last spoke, Charter has made a series of very meaningful investments. They continue to make progress on their rural build, which will be the largest rural built in history. They've initiated an upgrade to their network providing symmetrical and multi-gig across the entire footprint. They've entered the marketplace with a disruptive converged offering Spectrum One, which offers incredibly attractive mobile pricing. And they've launched a next-gen IPTV platform, Xumo, amid an evolving MVPD backdrop. And they've reinforced their operating advantages by continuing to invest in the workforce. All of these have been expensive. All of these are delaying free cash flow, which can be applied to share repurchase, but all of them are attractive investments that we are fully behind. Starting with Rural. As I said, this will be the nation's largest and fastest-growing rural provider. Nobody has done a roll out of this scale. We're capitalizing on the attractive subsidies, the bead and other grant programs previously before that, but bead is the new one that's in front of us. We think there are compelling unit economics on these invested capital. We'll have approximately 300,000 new subsidized rural passings this year and 12 months in we're achieving greater than 50% penetration, which was better than the underwritten business case. And all of these are contributing to mobile growth, which is outpacing the industry. Second thing we're doing is upgrading and securing our network advantage. The coax hybrid fiber footprint we have is incredibly flexible, incredibly powerful. But upgrading it to ensure that we have extra capacity, both direct, bidirectional capacity is highly attractive and particularly in a world where you're going to see more streaming, and I'll talk a little bit more of this about streaming data, particularly around sports, which we think is going to be a capacity constraint for FWA, which does not make it a long-term viable option. Brian Robert said on his call recently, on Thursday night, Amazon is streaming football in the NFL, and that's consuming something like 25% of all the bandwidth of the Internet. We've gone from a world of highly efficient streams. The most efficient way to deliver linear video was satellite. Cable is pretty efficient, and we're going to where we're making highly inefficient by doing each stream individually. The only upside to that is it's going to consume a hell of a lot more bandwidth. And I don't think it's a sustainable condition for FWA in many cases. It is interesting to watch that some of the largest FWA players like Timo are investing in fiber, which must make some statement about their belief in that, too. But the execution and capital costs for this network upgrade are on path. The high split is working at a cost of less than $100 per passing and is dramatically lower than what the competition is spending. Mobile is our next attractive growth lever. We are offering a combined gigabit wired and wireless service across our 57 million passings. We think it's a structural advantage. And we're getting great traction with Spectrum One, our converged offering. It's an interesting leading value for customers, and it's providing great sticky customer relationships. Now we gave them an early free period of Mobile, and we're beginning to see that roll off and become paying in Q3 and into Q4, and we're seeing good relationship on those -- what the test cohorts or how they're performing in terms of churn. Charter added 1.9 million lines year-to-date. That is the second highest pace paid growth in the industry. And when you consider the size of our footprint, it's far and away the highest growth in a comparable size footprint. The MVNO deal we have with Verizon, as we said, offers attractive economics, and we have an opportunity with using our CBRS spectrum to get owner economics where there's sufficient scale and it becomes attractive. All of these we believe, are very compelling. And mobile is a higher gross margin and more attractive product than video. So as we lose video revenue and we gain mobile revenue, we believe it's going to be highly accretive. So back in 2017, we made one of our pronouncements we thought. We showed the slide that the bundle would probably break down, but there would be likely a new bundle. And that is what has come to pass. We've seen the bundle change, but consumer preferences in video have caused them to rebundle in many cases, and you saw the efforts that we did with Disney. Streamers were supposed to be a solution for expensive pay TV by breaking the bundle. But that really has not happened. It's ended up being more expensive and arguably still a bundle as we've merged streaming business now into the linear but has given us a path to work with the content providers together to provide some choice and flexibility for consumers about what they want and improve their consumer experience. We think the next thing that will integrate linear and streaming well is Xumo, our product that we and Comcast are rolling out, and we think that's going to have a major impact on the industry. The final place we want to talk about where Charter has invested. Chris Winfrey will come up and give you a lot more details as well, is in the workforce. And over the last several quarters, we've increased pay and benefits to create a more stable and more skilled workforce with a lot higher tenure and lower churn. And we believe these investments are going to lead to further efficiencies and cost to service customers. And you begin to see that kick in the last few quarters where we peaked out in Q1 '23, but we think long term, there are going to be enormous efficiencies and benefits and we think this will accrue to the benefit of all including the shareholders. We are spending a lot on CapEx, but we have a lot of EBITDA for which to do that. And you can see here how large the EBITDA stream has grown over the last several years and where we're investing. We believe all of these are attractive, including the free cash flow that goes for share repurchase. But we also think that the ones we're spending on line extension on CapEx for Rural are all attractive investments as well. Charter can afford it, and it's creating a long-term stronger juggernaut. So let me turn now briefly to GCI, our Alaskan friend. It was a successful year, solid growth, driven primarily by data. Much like Spectrum One, GCI plus is a converged offering, which is highly successful. GCI plus customers have a 50% lower churn than stand-alone customers and it's been enormously helpful in driving our share in mobile, combined with the strength of our 5G network. We've also seen great strength in business data driven by sales to the rural health care and we were lucky to settle our rural health care litigation with the FCC in May of '23, with a positive result. So good year all in for GCI, solid business that we have a lot of confidence in that is generating free cash flow to the benefit of Liberty Broadband. We still do have this pesky little discount at LBRD but again, if you take the long view, the free cash flow that GCI is generating and the share repurchases we get from Charter create the opportunity to allow us to capitalize on that. We were held up for a period because we were below the 26% cap because of the investments that Charter was making in receiving proceeds through their buyback of our stock, but we have started again in October, and we intend to use the substantial majority of those shares to repurchase LBRD shares at this attractive discount. With that, I'm going to introduce Chris Winfrey and let him tell you a lot more about Charter and then you'll have GCI. [Presentation]

Christopher Winfrey

executive
#87

Good afternoon. One of the things that I spend a lot of time when I'm talking to our employees, just reminding them of is we talk about cable and people say cable, and that's what they mean, they mean cable. I say, no, not cable. Tell me another industry and essentially the same company that's been around since the 1950s that's had the ability to continue to reinvent itself time and time again from the 1950s until now through a combination of investment and then reaping that investment through growth. And when you think about that for our employees, it's great from a career perspective. But for shareholders, it's equally important. So Charter, there's no better place to do it in Charter. We have significant scale. We have 860,000 network miles of plant and that passes 57 million residences and businesses. We have 32 million customers just today. We're the largest rural builder, we have 500 million connected devices to our network every single day, and we have gigabit service everywhere we operate. That's unique, our competitors don't do that, they red line. We have gigabit services everywhere. We also have the best product with the fastest Internet, fastest WiFi, fastest mobile, we're the fastest-growing mobile provider inside of our footprint, and we get to do that while saving customers significant amounts of money. Now you tie that all together with a commitment to invest in service, which really means you can have all these things, but if you don't have great service, customers won't stay. So Charter's always had a philosophy of investing in its customer service, and it starts with investing in our employees by making sure that we have onshore in-house employees that when you call or you have a trouble call, that's the type of person that you're going to get. Somebody that was hired by us, trained by us, mentored by us, has a career with us and actually cares because they're going to be there. So we invest in that, invest in our employees through both pay benefits, training, career opportunities. And then finally, digitization of service, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. So all these things, and yet Charter is growing today at a slightly slower rate than where it had been before, the slower rate, call it what it is. The reasons are a couple. One is that we're coming out of a period where we had a massive pull forward of broadband demand post COVID. The second is that we have continued ongoing fiber overbuild, but that's really been going on for over a decade, so nothing really new there. And then in addition to that, we have a temporary impact of a new competitor in the marketplace with fixed wireless access, which is kind of nibbling away at the lower end of the market. The reality there is that the product isn't -- doesn't have the capacity, as Greg mentioned, to go where the market's going to go. And so that problem, I think, does take care of itself over time. It is the new DSL and I've called it in the past, a parking lot for future customer acquisition, particularly as demands increase and the speeds of our network increases. So we have a bunch of investments. Greg highlighted a few of those. But even without that, prior to that, we have a structural advantage. If I'd asked you 15 years ago, go test the speed of your Internet, what would you have done? You would have gone to the back of the computer in your kitchen and you would have tested, you would have said that's my speed. Today, you expect that full WiFi or other type of connectivity speed to take place on your porch, in your lawn. And if I ask you, "Hey, when you're pulling out of the driveway, who's your provider?" Your answer would be, I don't know. I don't care, it has to be fast. And if that's your definition of broadband, and I think it is, there's only one provider inside of our footprint who can do that, and it's Charter. Because we have a wireline footprint everywhere, we have WiFi footprint everywhere, and we have mobile everywhere that we provide service. Even somebody as large as AT&T, think about AT&T, covers 100% of the country with mobile. But it's a fraction of that footprint where they can provide wireline and it's a fraction of that, that is upgraded or will be upgraded. So they can't offer seamless connectivity, gigabit wireless, the broadband service, which I think is the connectivity that customers really demand. If you go down the line, Verizon has less wireline footprint, if you think about Frontier, they don't have a mobile product. If you think about T-Mobile, they don't have a wireline footprint. So they can't provide the product that I'm describing to you. How is it going? This is our net adds, net additions of mobile inside of our footprint. So we are by far, 7.1 million net adds over the past 4 years. We're by far the fastest grower mobile inside of our footprint. It's prior to some of the investments that I'm going to take you through how and why? Well, it's the fastest mobile product inside of our footprint, and that drives MNOs crazy, I'm sure. But the reason is because 87% of that traffic is going over our network, over our WiFi gigabit-enabled network everywhere we operate. The second reason is we save customers a tremendous amount of money. In a typical 2-line household, $60 of Spectrum. Pick on AT&T, on this chart, it shows $840. It's almost $1,000 of savings that we can provide every year just by taking a better mobile product. So throughout the year, we've been talking about our growth initiatives, which is to reaccelerate broadband growth. We've already got tremendous mobile growth. We're growing mobile in our existing footprint as well as the rural footprint evolution to go through the 3 Es: evolution, expansion and execution. So Evolution is our fixed wireline network evolution. It's seamless connectivity, which I was just talking about video transformation. Expansion is the expansion of our existing footprint into rural footprint into those markets as well as existing markets that, frankly, we realized could have been built out further. And then finally, execution, Greg hit on it as well, remaining committed to our operating strategy and investing in the customer service experience. So network evolution. Network evolution is the ability to take our service today, gigabit service everywhere we operate. We make it symmetrical in multi-gig speed everywhere we operate and that is unique. It's already unique that we're gigabit everywhere. The fact that we're going to do an upgrade, and we'll do it everywhere, and we'll do it at the lowest cost at $100 per passing. That's a fraction of the cost that it will take a telco and we can do it at a faster pace. We also have the ability on the increment to do what we call fiber on demand, which is then to drop 25, 50, 100 gig symmetrical services to any individual customer who wants it. We're already doing that with enterprise today. So we'll have the faster pace to upgrade. We'll do it ubiquitously and we'll do it at a dramatically lower cost and then we'll couple convergence with it, which is what Greg referenced to Spectrum One. So Spectrum One is that, essentially, it's a $49.99 service at promotion that includes Internet, includes WiFi and it includes mobile for free for the first year. Now those lines are sticking. Why? Because they're used the same way as a regular paying line. They're ported it the same way that a regular line is ported. And when it rolls off to a $30 price point, you can't match that price anywhere else in the marketplace. And so it sticks, and that's happening today. So Spectrum One is working well. It's our first foray into conversions. The biggest challenge here is educating customers and trying to make them understand that this can be an entirely separate category and new way of buying broadband. In any event, it's a great product. It works better together, and it saves customers lots of money. Xumo is our IP set-top box and television at retail platform and to put it simply, one, it's a joint venture between us and Comcast. So it has national scale. But it is the platform that you'd like to have on all your TV sets. How many times you're saying, where is Mrs. Maisel? Where is this different content asset? This puts all of your linear and all of your streaming together. And we're deploying that on the increment to all of our video customers. And even if at some point, you don't take our linear video service, it integrates the linear video services and all of your streaming services, it makes it easy to find with unified search and discovery and a voice-activated remote. So you have an award-winning voice-activated remote, which came from Comcast as well as Spectrum TV app, which is the award winning IP streaming app from Charter. To go back to converged connectivity, one of the things that people often ask me is, Chris, where is the growth going to come from, how you're going to get it, you're highly penetrated in Internet. My answer to that is we're not highly penetrated in Internet. We have 54% penetration in our footprint. About half of our footprint has overbuilt today. But the reality is that we're going to be faster everywhere we operate across our entire footprint. So I think we can grow the 54%, and that grows. The bigger point is that's the old definition of broadband. Remember what I said, converged seamless connectivity, gigabit wireless. And if that's the definition of broadband, and I would argue that it is, we're only 7% penetrated today when you have the combination of mobile and our wireline Internet service. So whether you take a look at it as a percentage of passings whether you take a look at it as market share dollars, which is the bar chart on the right, we have the big growth opportunity in front of us. Expansion. So the second E that I mentioned, expansion has started out with the rural build-out, and we kind of came about this a little bit serendipitously. When we acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House, we were asked politely, to upgrade 145,000 homes in upstate New York. Governor Cuomo politely asked us to do that, and we did. What we found out was that actually at scale, we could do it faster, cheaper than what we expected and we could get faster and higher penetrations than what we expected. So when the rural digital opportunity fund came along, we knew we had an operation that was already ready to scale that we could do well with this. And so we became the largest bidder and winner in RDOF. We've extended that through ARPA, and if the regulatory environment is correct, state by state, we'll do the same thing, what's called BEAD, which is the $42.5 billion infrastructure fund from the U.S. government. Now the returns are really good. They're high teens IRRs, and that's not including the fact that a lot of these will lead to future extensions over time. So it has the ability to continue to grow. And in a lot of these markets, think about Texas, think about Florida, think about the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama. What is rural today will ultimately end up being suburban. So we'll pick up free passings that were never part of the math and will continue to grow, and it creates a very long-term tail for growth. If you think about it from just a corporate finance perspective, the long cash on cash payback the value payback is even faster, it's cable math. Within a few years, you have EBITDA at an EBITDA multiple, it's a payback. The other thing it's forced us to do is really rethink all of our construction throughout the company by going through in a very, very disciplined way project by project, on our investment returns and where is the cutoff threshold. What we did is we identified there were pockets of our footprint from legacy TWC and legacy Charter, in particular, where the companies may have been capital constrained at a point in time an entire neighborhoods weren't built out or a strip mall wasn't built out and we are waiting for a requisite number of people to ask at one particular point in time before we build it, and that's not how it works. So we're going back and we're building these areas, and we're getting very good returns there as well. The third E is execution because as I said, you can have the fastest, best network fully deployed. You can have the best products, you can have the best pricing and packaging. You can save customers tons of money. But at the end of the day, if you don't have great service, nobody is going to stay with you. So execution matters. It's always mattered at Charter. We talk a little bit about digitization of service. A lot of people think, oh, that means that my Spectrum app, that means chat, that means artificial intelligence. And yes, it does. We're doing all of those things, machine learning, conversational IVR. But the other piece is investing in the digitization of our systems for our frontline employees. Remember, we already talked about raising the pay, having in-sourced employees having a competitive pay benefits so that you get tenure so that you get higher quality service. But the quality of the job matters, too. And if you imagine being a call center agent or the person who's doing a trouble call to your house, having the front-end tools be seamless to have machine learning and conversational we call it, Tech GPT that we're developing now to be able to help the agent or the technician along the way makes the job, not only does it make the job more interesting, but it actually makes the employee more effective. They solve the issue, the customer issue faster, they get trained additionally along the way. They go home a little bit more relaxed. They come to work the next day. They progress with the company. They get more tenured, they enhance their craft. You have less repeats and you have better service and you have better churn. And when you have better churn in a cable system, that's the real value because the sales and marketing dollars that you would have taken before to go acquire a customer to replace the one that you just lost now gets to be used to go acquire net new customers. So you end up growing faster, which we all like. But you also have more customers on a fixed plant, which means you have a lower cost to operate per customer when you have growth across the front print. So this is still a volume-driven strategy. We do have rate increases when we need to but by driving volume, you actually increase your margin per customer. The final one on this slide is proactive maintenance, which is right in the middle. Everybody knows that you have an outage, whether it's with a telco or cable you have to call in and say, I've got an outage. In the past, nobody knew. Now at least we know. But we've gone past that in the past 1.5 years, where we know through machine learning and our telemetry on our network, we know where an impairment exists, we know. Now you may not have an outage yet already, but we know you're going to. And so what we started last year was about 600,000 proactive trouble calls, proactive maintenance. And this year, we're going to do over 1 million of those, where we call customers and say, you don't have a problem yet. Your video is working fine, your Internet is working fine, but it's not going to. We can see that there's an impairment with 90% to 95% accuracy, we know whether it's in the drop, whether it's in-building wiring or it's with the customer premise equipment. And we schedule the call, we take care of it, it's a fundamentally different way of providing service into these markets. The biggest issue we have is customers say, can't be Spectrum. It can't be the cable company who's calling me in advance for the problem. And so we're getting them to pick up the phone and know that it's not a phishing attempt that's been the biggest struggle that we've had. And I'm not kidding, it's really hard work so that they know that it's real, it really is us, the cable company is doing this. But that's what we aspire to be. We're leading the charge on this. I'm not aware of any of our peers or competitors who are yet doing this, and I think it is not only the right thing to do, and it reduces future trouble calls and future churn, but I think it's a competitive advantage. And we're willing to invest in it, I think that sets us apart. So investment thesis at Charter. We have valuable network assets, they can't be replicated. We're fully deployed across our entire footprint, gigabit today, symmetrical multi-gig everywhere we operate within the next 3 years. We have an advantage in seamless connectivity, gigabit wireless convergence, however you want to call it. We can offer our mobile is about 13% of our mobile traffic, the actual 5G radio or 4G radio. So 87% of the traffic goes over our network. The other 13% is going over 5G. 5G is essentially the slowest radio for our converged service product. Think about that because the other 87% is going over a gigabit WiFi. So we have a structural advantage because people can't replicate that. We have a successful operating model, which puts the customer first all the time, consumer-friendly operating model designed to drive additional penetration across the fixed network, designed to drive additional PSUs into the household and designed to provide great service, lower transactions, save churn and allow you to grow faster. I think despite the lower temporary growth that we have right now, through the investments that we're making and the structural advantage that we have, we have a really large growth opportunity. We're 7% penetrated for Internet I think we've got a tremendous option value on video to be able to use that to drive connectivity services. The combination of the platform with Xumo plus, call it, a new paradigm for the programming agreements that we have enables us to create utility for customers and to give them something of value, which is the first time that we've had that in video really in the past 15 years. So we've got opportunities to develop new products. Once we deploy this fully deployed upgraded network across our entire footprint. The thing to keep in mind is some people say, "Chris, what am I going to use 2 gig, 5 gig, 10 gig for?" and I say, I don't know. But I'll tell you, when we offered 20, I was in Switzerland, we were going to offer a 25 megabit service. And we all snickered and said, who would ever use that? What's it going to be used for? When you build a network and cable does that ubiquitously across the footprint, when it's fully deployed and when cable is moving the way it is today, which we are, you create a network that then people can develop products and services that take advantage of that bandwidth. That's the way cable has always been, and that's what we're all doing now. All the MSOs are rolling out and developing a 10G strategy so that it's consistent across the footprint. And if what's regain our competitive advantage, and it's also what distances ourselves from people like fixed wireless access, and the combination of that and convergence is really powerful. I got excited about it and it went more than I wanted to. So I'm going to finish this up here. Proven capital allocation model. Since I got to Charter in 2010, it actually has not changed. The capital allocation waterfall is very simple, which is one, to the extent you have high ROI projects inside the business, everything else that comes afterwards works better if you're investing in high ROI projects in the business. Two, if you can acquire companies that are more accretive than buying back your own stock, you do M&A. Three, you buy back your own stock. And four, if you have nowhere else to go, and you've really got nowhere else to go, then I don't want to be at that company and you have to go get dividends. And so that's been our capital allocation. We would do it, just don't get me wrong, but we've always had -- it's where I started the conversation since the 1950s, the ability to continue to reinvent ourselves to continue to create new products and services to develop applications for these networks that distance us and put us apart. And because we're ubiquitous, it creates this major advantage. And that's what we have. That's what we're going to continue to do. And the value of our buybacks by having gone through network evolution, network expansion, and going through convergence and going through video transformation and through investing in the customer service. The value of the buybacks that we're still doing, they'll be more valuable. So with that, I'll wrap it up and look forward to any Q&A that comes later. Thank you.

Ronald Duncan

executive
#88

Good afternoon. I'm Ron Duncan, Co-Founder and CEO of GCI, Alaska's largest telecommunications provider. Those who have seen my presentations in past years know that Alaska is the biggest state in the nation with one of the smallest populations. For reference, Alaska is about 1/5 the size of the entire Lower 48 but has a population of just 730,000 people. My friends at Live Nation tell me that's just about the average size of an audience at a Taylor Swift concert. Connecting customers across this vast and rugged landscape is challenging. It's a long-term commitment that requires significant investment. It's not for the faint of heart. But after 40 years of delivering broadband, wireless, video and landline service across the last frontier. We've built a company of innovative, experienced telecommunications professionals who thrive on this kind of challenge. And it's that deep bench of specialists that gives GCI a competitive edge even as new players try to take advantage of the flood of federal funding for Alaska broadband projects. As the telecom market in Alaska becomes more competitive, GCI is focused on growing our customer base by building major middle-mile fiber projects by accelerating the pace of our network upgrades on our march 10 gig by making strategic upgrades to our wireless network and of course, with sales of our flagship product, GCI plus. Our wireless growth has been fantastic, the best ever with 14 consecutive quarters of postpaid growth. Though our broadband subs are essentially flat this year, the summary number hides what's happening beneath the surface. Subscribers are stable in our legacy urban footprint and are growing in our expansion areas but some of that growth was offset this year by the loss of rural subscribers to Starlink. The transition to Starlink in rural communities was driven by two factors. First was a 3-month long middle-mile fiber outage by a third-party provider. The outage impacted GCI customers in two major rural communities in Northwest Alaska. During that outage, a material number of consumers switched to Starlink for their Internet. After the fiber was repaired and GCI 2.5 gig service was restored in September, we turned up 5G wireless service for the first time in both communities. GCI's 5G and fiber data plans are a powerful combination, especially in rural Alaska markets. Since then, in those communities, like in our other fiber markets, Starlink has not been much of a threat. The second factor in Starlink growth is that in rural areas where we are bandwidth constrained because we don't yet have fiber, Starlink simply provides a better service at a lower price. As we build out fiber to much of the rest of rural Alaska, we expect to win those customers back. One of our newest markets, Dutch Harbor on Alaska is an excellent example of what happens when we take fiber to a community previously served only by satellite. When we completed our new 800-mile undersea fiber to on Alaska this year, we turned up both 2.5 gig data service and 5G wireless service. The new speeds are a major upgrade from the 10-megabit satellite Internet that was previously available. The consumer response has been fantastic with almost 50% of addressable homes signed up for the service in the first 9 months. Wireless is driving all the products at GCI, our hometown 5G network with speeds more than twice those of the competition transformed Alaskan's view of GCI Wireless. You can't ignore 14 quarters of postpaid growth. GCI plus, a product that combines 5G with our 2.5 gig unlimited Internet plans has driven both wireless and data sales. The value proposition for GCI plus is compelling, saving consumers up to $1,000 per year compared to our competitors' prices and service. Now almost 1/4 of our data subscribers and half of our wireless subscribers are on GCI plus. Churn for those customers is almost 50% lower. GCI plus is a powerful product with real staying power. It's clearly our platform for future growth and profitability. Like many others in the industry, our video platform is in decline. In 2023, GCI completed the transition from QAM to IP. We've lost most of our video customers and the business is no longer significant but we will continue to provide the service for the remaining customers who want it. The transition to IP freed up significant capacity on our network that has enabled GCI to continue our march to 10 gig, even in advance of DOCSIS 4.0. As we march to 10 gig in Alaska, GCI's networks dominate the landscape. We've been building out our fiber middle mile network for decades and investing in upgrades for our last mile facilities. We're on a path to DOCSIS 4.0 and 10 gig speeds with incremental speed increases of up to 8 gigs along the way, it's a major competitive advantage. In 2021, I visited the University of Alaska Fairbank's campus to announce that GCI would use DOCSIS technologies to bring two gig broadband speeds to 77% of the state in 2022, and 10 gig speeds by 2026. It was a pretty bold claim. We made good on that claim launching 2 gig in 2022 and 2.5 gig in 2023. Now more than 80% of Alaskans have access to those speeds. And we just turned up 5 gig service at the University of Alaska campus last month. Our goal is to turn up GCI's 10-gig service by 2026 or 2027, depending on the availability of DOCSIS 4.0 equipment. As we work to expand and upgrade our fiber network, we've also launched an aggressive wireless expansion project to push 5G service out across the state. Our goal is to deliver statewide 5G service. Over the next 5 years, we'll upgrade more than 300 rural sites across the state. It's one of the most ambitious projects in our company's history. When you realize our state is twice the size of Texas and that most communities aren't connected by roads, you can better appreciate the magnitude of the undertaking. We're making fast and very real progress on the march to 10 gig and 5G everywhere. While some might move at a tempered pace for such a long march like this, GCI prefers to Sprint. That's why, by the time you see this, I'll be recovering from knee surgery. I'm getting a new one so that I can keep up with a team of aggressive sprinters who like to be first to the finish line just as much as I do. I've spoken before about the massive infusion of federal funding to support broadband deployment all across the country. On a dollars per capita basis, Alaska will lead all the states, but that makes sense since we have the smallest population in the most remote and difficult to serve locations. More than $1 billion has already been awarded for Alaska projects and another $1 billion has been reserved for Alaska under the BEAD program. In all likelihood, there will be even more funding available through nationwide programs. This flood of grant money will stimulate competition in many cases, from applicants with little to no experience building, operating and maintaining networks in rural Alaska. And often, it seems from those without a sustainable business plan. GCI has focused our grand applications on the areas of most importance to our customers, and we've had great success so far with our tribal partners GCI has applied for and been awarded 5 fiber project grants to push GCI's fiber network further into rural Alaska to help narrow the digital divide. The communities we connect are some of the most remote in the nation. They are also home to some of our most important health and education customers who rely on connectivity for telemedicine and distance learning programs. That's why we've been very strategic in our approach to expanding our fiber network throughout rural Alaska, including our AIRRAQ network. We recently received $35 million to launch Phase 3 of the AIRRAQ network to connect more customers in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region of Alaska. It will bring significantly improved connectivity to an important market into the area of the state where the population continues to grow. In total, we're leveraging funds from our private capital to build out what ultimately will be 10 gig wired service and 5G wireless in 27 remote communities. When I say remote, I mean remote. In some cases, these communities will have gig Internet before they have running water. It's truly transformational. But you don't have to take my word for it. You can hear it directly from someone who grew up in rural Alaska. [Presentation]

Gregory Maffei

executive
#89

You were sick of my singing, I think, you were saying you -- good thing we made it, didn't have to listen anymore. All right. We got some Q&A.

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#90

We have Q&A. So we have a few that we received in advance. We'll go through some of those, and we'll also take questions from the room. Again, there's mics throughout. So please just put your hand up and wait for a mic to come to you. So we're going to start with what we got in advance for both John and Greg. And then, Chris, if you want to chime in as well. How do you see the future of the linear TV ecosystem? Streaming has proven to be a bad business for all, but Netflix, even Disney streaming platform is unprofitable, and we spoke about this a bit today. Major content companies depend upon linear for profit, what needs to change to stop linear churn and turn it into a growing business? Or is it beyond repair?

Gregory Maffei

executive
#91

John, do you want to go first?

John Malone

executive
#92

Yes. I'd say, first of all, try and distinguish library connectivity to live event, real time. Because they are quite a bit different in terms of the technology to transport them and the impact. Netflix clearly took the lead early on library, random access services. It's a great consumer service, and it gives access essentially the massive amount of library and/or new entertainment programming that isn't time sensitive. When network neutrality became the rule of the land, it opened the back door for essentially no cost transport for new entrants, particularly big tech. And they've begun essentially acquiring live sports at pretty healthy prices and they're producing this streaming alternative to linear, which is very inefficient from a network point of view and very disruptive to the broadcast industry. So it's kind of an interesting evolution. Now to me, the deal that Charter cupped with Disney was the right way to go. It's kind of a win-win. It makes for a smoother transition and gives both sides continuity, rather than sudden disruption, to see what the public ultimately wants and how they want to receive things. The obvious benefit of streaming sports is you can sell advertising on an advanced basis, on an individual customer basis. The downside is, of course, as I think Greg mentioned, it takes a huge chunk out of Internet capacity, which may be beneficial for the broadband companies that have upgraded, but it's pretty inefficient from a technological point of view. So I do see a smooth transition now that we're starting to see bundles of streaming services with linear services. I don't believe streaming can be profitable unless it consolidates and you have fewer players, and you have players who are potentially focusing on different segments so that the combination of streams might end up being a better consumer service and less expensive for the collective providers.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#93

I'll just add. I think when we talked about this in the past, why we thought video was a tough business, I think we were looking at 600 new shows on the streaming side, in scripted content, and up to about $150 billion of investment in content. And just there's not enough dollars to get a return. And particularly as linear, which is the high -- relatively higher paid, higher priced and lower churn product or services disconnected and people move to the more expensive to deliver, easier to sign off, therefore, higher churn, that's a bad proposition. It's not a good winning proposition for content companies. And the only way that this eventually works is there's a hell of a lot less invested in it, and it's a hell of a lot less competitive.

Christopher Winfrey

executive
#94

So I think the piece I would add is from a consumer perspective, it's very unwieldy. You have all of this content out there. You don't know where to find it. And not only that, it's not even cheaper. So the idea was all of the programmers, when you think about the DTC business, the direct-to-consumer business. It obviously worked for Netflix because they bamboozled a lot of library out and they got it and they did a great job, good for them. But if you have an existing linear business, the idea that a direct-to-consumer business is somehow going to be completely different in part, it's never going to work. It's never going to be profitable. Even if you look at it on a stand-alone basis, I don't -- personally, I don't think they'll be profitable. But certainly, if you put it together with what you're doing to your bread and butter, your cash flow engine with the linear business, I don't think it ever has a chance of being profitable. So really, what we did with the deal with Disney and what we're doing now on the increment with all of our deals going forward, is saying, look, our customers already paid for that content. You siphoned off the dollars, you put investments somewhere else, you stripped out the asset, not to pick on anybody, but everybody has been watching football. I saw Paramount Plus advertising South Park, exclusive on Paramount Plus, and I said, "Oh, my goodness, what's left on Comedy Central that we're still paying for?" So our customers paid for it already. They need to have access to it, they need to get it. And the ability to have that fully authenticated through a device like Zumo brings utility back to the customer. If it's made available to us for free, to them for free, you actually put more value back into the linear business through combining with the direct-to-consumer businesses, it is one business. Now over time, I think the question is, how much of the viewership is going to take place in a traditional guide, inside of an IP set-top box, versus through search and discovery of library assets. And I think it will be -- yes, it will be the answer, it would be for an older generation, it will still be for a guide for a long time. For other people, it will be more moving into the app environment. So I think it provides a glide path for the programmers to go where they need to go, and I think it provides a glide path for us and more importantly, for the customers in a way that economically and from a utility point standpoint, makes sense.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#95

I mean just one last thought. If you're putting the same piece of content on your broadcasting all at the same time, it is much more efficient to use satellite or cable, than it is to stream it. That's just a fact. You do get some benefits if you're a customer who wants to go back and on demand draw that up. That makes a ton of sense why streaming or some version of that may make sense. But as a general proposition, you're trading a more efficient distribution technique for a less efficient distribution technique that consumes a hell of a lot more bandwidth and will take a lot more capital. It's not a good model, particularly when we're being asked to pay for it with net neutrality.

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#96

Rich, right there.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#97

Who do we pick?

Angela White

executive
#98

I think I see Rich.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#99

We -- didn't we already give Rich a pre question. This is unfair.

Angela White

executive
#100

He switched I believe to an in-the-room question.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#101

I switched it because I figured I wanted to ask it to you directly. But this follows up perfectly on the last question, so that's why I really wanted to ask it now.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#102

Because I think you asked the first question. Go ahead.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#103

John, you've said that sports is the glue that holds the bundle together. And obviously, as you talked about in the last answer, the bundle is shrinking. But can sports be the glue that holds the streaming services together? And how does that impact the future of sports team and league values, thinking about the Braves and beyond? And then sort of related to that, Iger, I heard you on CNBC this morning talking with David Faber. Iger is clearly taking ESPN over-the-top and not selling it to private equity as you've been talking about for 10 years. Just curious what you think about an ESPN $30 a month service, picking that price point just randomly out of the air, but let's just say, a 30-month ESPN direct-to-consumer. What does that mean to your assets?

John Malone

executive
#104

Well, it remains to be seen what kind of penetration a service is going to get at $30 when it's a subset of a lot of sports, and particularly given that sports costs continue to rise as big tech essentially cannibalizes broadcast for important sporting events, whether it's Thursday Night Football or whatever, we've never felt that a premium sports service at those kind of pricing levels would be economically viable. The other impact, of course, is on localism, because as sports becomes national rather than regional or local, the role of the local broadcaster, I think, comes into question. And so this whole issue about retrans fees and localism, I remember when we had DIRECTV we had to import all the local broadcast signals into Denver so that we could then offer localism as part of the service. I think a big question is going to be what happens to localism as everything does national packages and bundles on a streaming basis. Well, so I don't know. I think the market will dictate what people are willing to pay for sports. A lot of people who bought a lot of sports rights and lost a lot of money in recent years, trying for premium sports of positioning.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#105

Well, if you don't have ubiquity and you don't have an ability to have complete reach, there is going to be a challenge how sports put that together and get the highest value. You are seeing people who are still using that engine. John, great to point out the example of Turner buying Sunday Night Football to get their engine, renting that engine, and you still see that with Amazon. But there are a few people who have that reach who are going to be able to use that engine as effectively. So there is this tension. There's no doubt, and what that will be in terms of revenues, we're lucky, you ask about our products, F1 is on the right side of the curve. And F1, as you've seen, even though we have a modest diminution of linear in the United States for F1, because we're seeing such growing demand, we're able to play through this and you're seeing the growth where there other kinds of engagement, we'll find ways to get monetized. And the U.S. is less -- substantially less than 10% of our total broadcast revenue. Braves, relatively unique as well, because certainly at risk with regional sports networks, but relatively protected, given size of the territory, strength of the offering, relatively middle of the road RSP and fee. So we're not that exposed. But we're lucky. We have 2 really well-placed sports assets. I think the larger question is certainly an interesting one.

John Malone

executive
#106

Doesn't it cut 2 ways also that the cable bundle and competition amongst distributors created perhaps a higher value to sports rights from the structure then would be generated by the consumer given an a la carte option.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#107

Okay. I wanted to shift gears and ask about one point that's come up a couple of times with Formula One, and it was mentioned briefly today, in Stefano's presentation, and that is the work on the clean biofuels. And I'm interested in this because it's certainly not something I think this audience thinks about a lot, but it's provocative if it's real. And John, we got you here in the room and you've got a history in technology, maybe not this type of technology as much. But how real is this, I mean is this something that you think is going to be a consumer reality at some point in the future? And if so, would you be shorting Tesla here?

John Malone

executive
#108

No. I think, look, total -- the total system in terms of -- you're talking about carbon, the total system of carbon, nobody really has a pretty good handle yet on what a total transportation system would and should look like when you take all the costs into place. So certainly, biofuel could be something as straightforward as hydrogen, for instance, there could be one way to store energy from solar and wind to give you a storage capacity and energy storage capacity could then be utilized in a hybrid engine. We really don't -- I don't think -- the race has not been won yet. And principally because an all-electric solution requires some kind of cost-effective generation. And right now, of course, America has a hybrid solution that ranges from old nuclear plants, they're far and away the most cost effective and nonpolluting to, in some places, they're still burning imported oil or coal.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#109

We sell substantial coal in Colorado.

John Malone

executive
#110

Yes. I mean, Wyoming ships an awful lot of coal down to West Texas and New Mexico to be burned in electric plants that then send their electricity either to Texas or on the Southern California. I mean we don't have a very efficient total system, and I don't see much planning right now taking a hard look at where that's going. But the idea that you're developing hybrid vehicles is good R&D. And if you can develop biofuels that are efficient, that may be part of the equation.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#111

The F1 has always had the benefit of being a laboratory for these sort of technologies and a high pressure, but not necessarily scale opportunity to test. The -- we, as a country, have spent enormous amount of subsidizing electric vehicles, I'm on my second Tesla, love it. I am far from clear that that's the right solution for decarbonizing the U.S. auto industry. We have something like 250 million, 275 million cars in the United States, 200 million run. Look at the penetration rate on electric and how long it will take to make a meaningful impact. GM says they're going to get to 1 million cars. This year, they did 100,000. How long will it take to eat into that 200 million that are running? If we had invested a commensurate amount in looking at things like biofuels, we could be much further down the road because they're talking about a much bigger TAM, total available market, to attack. We have looked at investing in a hydrogen capacity as a test case in Formula 1, difficult still. But I think John's right, you want to test these new technologies and F1 is the kind of place where it gets done.

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#112

Maybe you can touch on what it means to be a drop in fuel, what F1 is doing that's different in terms of road relevance?

Gregory Maffei

executive
#113

F1 is leveraging what others are doing, too. I just read recently that the Indonesian airline National Airlines flew the first flight with sustainable jet fuel. People, there are things you can do to build sustainable recycled biofuels and the like, either recycled or biofuels both. There are a couple of paths. The reality is none of them are at scale. None of them are cost effective today, but F1 is not about cost effective. F1 is about testing the high end. And when you find out what works, you then go and try and build it at scale. My point being, if you can put a commensurate amount of investment as we have in electric and subsidization and about other technologies, I suspect we could be much further down the road because it's a much bigger available market.

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#114

Okay. We're going to pivot to another pre-submitted question over at Liberty SIRI -- at Liberty Media. If Liberty SIRI and SiriusXM do combine, that only leaves Formula One Group and Liberty Live as the tracking stocks. You touched on this earlier, but what do you think about longer-term plans for Liberty Live and the broader structure?

Gregory Maffei

executive
#115

Well, tracking stocks have been a great thing for Liberty, but they've also been things that have evolved over time, and we've had many companies move from tracking stocks to being asset-backed securities. Go back to Expedia and go back to DIRECTV effectively spinning our interest out, or look at what we've done with most recently with the Braves. Certainly, that potential exists down the road, no plan or intent today. But looking at what we're going to do with Liberty Live, it's an evolving question. I think I mentioned it, we will certainly look to find assets that are attractive, but also ones that would be synergistic with Live Nation. There are things that we might be able to do that Live Nation can't just because of the nature of how they report earnings or how they're looked at in the marketplace where we could be a helpful counterparty or a helpful partner, and we've talked about some of those ideas around venues, other real estate kind of projects, other kinds of projects that service their customers and service music venues and service music events, all those are on the table, and we'll see. John, do you want to add anything?

John Malone

executive
#116

No, I think it's just a very interesting heavily discounted by the market holding right at the moment, which we really separated out of Sirius, more to make Sirius a pure play than with a near-term aspiration for separating Live, I think Live is an appropriate development situation. And as Greg says, being a companion to its 30% held entity can perhaps be quite synergistic for both.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#117

I wanted to ask you guys about the rise in interest rates the last couple of years and sort of what it means for Liberty. And I'm thinking a couple of different angles. One is, how do you think about leverage for your portfolio companies now? Not to put Chris on the spot here, but I know how he feels about 4.5x leverage. But why is that the right leverage level still, thinking Warner Discovery, I think they want to be at 2.5 to 3, why is that the right level? And related to all this, when you think about acquisition opportunities, I think, John, you've said this in the past, like the public markets don't like companies that don't grow, I think we can see that all over the place, but there's a lot of cash flow out there, particularly in the media sector. Is there anything you think Liberty should do there? There are interesting opportunities as private assets to take your business in a different way than we've seen it in the past.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#118

John?

John Malone

executive
#119

Well, obviously, if you play a leverage balance sheet game, which we've always done in the capital-intensive businesses we've been in, in order to get equity returns to be better than normal, valuations will come down just on the discount of future cash flows. And if you don't have a growth rate that offsets that discount factor, you're going to trade at a substantially lower level based upon nothing other than arithmetic. So we're all experiencing that, just a higher discount rate on future cash flows. We're also experiencing in many of the businesses, maturation, reaching pretty heavy penetration. So that slowdown, that absence of predictable, monetizable growth and a higher discount rate, all lead you to lower current market valuations. So the question is strategically, how do you play the game? Well, if you issued the 2% debt for 40 years, maybe you look at how it's trading and you bought it back because that may be the cheapest way to get profitability and to delever, you constantly look for growth, you constantly look for synergistic green shoots, let's call them, that you can allocate some of your capital allocation to if they show up, so it's like Chris was saying, you always put the highest priority on stuff that has a high IRR and constitutes growth. When you don't find those kinds of projects, then you go down that -- you tick down that list. What else could I do with the cash flow and at some point, buying stock back, particularly if you think it's undervalued for one reason or another, becomes a fairly attractive capital allocation. Also, I think we're -- we are headed to a period of distress. The streaming conversion of the disruption, the fact that rates are now high, that a lot of maturities are approaching, there will be opportunities presented by distress and companies that have got dry powder or some kind of currency, we'll find opportunities -- synergistic consolidation opportunities in that distress. We clearly see it, by the way, of arriving in the broadband business, we see Mr. Drahi, being pretty levered on both sides of the Atlantic now and probably facing some serious distress. He's just wanted many that he probably didn't anticipate the sudden rise in rates or the blowout of the spreads or essentially the difficulty because of competition and now find themselves under near-term financial pressure. And I look at Greg, I remember how opportunistic Liberty was when Sirius got in financial trouble. We had some cash and other people didn't, at that particular point in time and led to a very opportunistic acquisition. So I would say it's always wise to have dry powder when you're going through down cycles.

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#120

In the spirit of asking what is coming to the inbox, I will ask this one. Can you envision Charter buying Altice, Greg, and what conditions would be necessary for a deal like that to happen?

Gregory Maffei

executive
#121

I don't have to answer that. I have the CEO in the room to answer that for me.

Christopher Winfrey

executive
#122

I don't know, is this on. I don't think there's any cable company out there that at the right price, we wouldn't be willing to acquire. That being said, it has to be at the right price. There are certain assets, I'm not picking on one, but you take a look and say, do I have to write down the revenue? Is the pricing too high? Do I have to reinvest in OpEx to get service? Do I have to recapitalize the network? Do I have to recapitalize simple things like trucks and tools, test equipment and outfit the labor force and all that, you have to factor that in. And so there are certain -- I think we can turn around any cable system in the U.S., but in order to make a return on it, it has to be at the right price. And sometimes, that's less than the value of the debt. So...

Gregory Maffei

executive
#123

Not that he's referring to any specific cable company, is he, no, go ahead.

Christopher Winfrey

executive
#124

Look, in a prior life, I used to do cable restructuring. I've seen this show before. I know how it goes, and I know how it ends, and I know how at the right time, all cable is good if run properly and purchased at the right place and financed the right way.

John Malone

executive
#125

Yes. What's a little different this time is we see some of old media that is also facing balance sheet challenges.

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#126

[indiscernible] thanks, Victoria.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#127

John, in a different form, you've talked about tasking Greg to shrink the discounts on all entities over your lifetime. And given comments earlier on Live, it's hard to envision that discount shrinking as it becomes more complex. Can you share your thoughts on balancing those 2 that are somewhat ...?

John Malone

executive
#128

Yes. I think that the spin of the Braves, the offer, which Greg has made on our behalf to Sirius, my willingness in that offer to yield my control position are indications that we're serious about going after this structural discount. Now Live is a brand-new project for Greg. And the idea of being able to spin it off requires a whole bunch of tax conditions to be met. And it's going to take a little while for Greg to figure that out. [indiscernible] enhances the value of Live.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#129

Now you know why I'm regular.

John Malone

executive
#130

Rather than suppress it. But I would say the only equity that I bought this year in the media business was actually Liberty Live when it first got spun off. So I do see dramatic undervaluation and I don't expect to die that soon.

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#131

I'm going to pivot us if I may really quickly to Travel, Greg and Matt. What progress do you believe has been made at TripAdvisor Core that perhaps is not evident from the financials you report? And then as follow-up, just asking now, do you believe the market -- you touched upon this, is properly valuing Viator? If not, what could you do to help with that?

Gregory Maffei

executive
#132

Well, I'll touch on it, and then I'll let Matt give the real answer. I think there's been enormous progress in Trip, in first, management, really understanding who their customer is, what they want, understanding the quality of just the reviews and refreshing and investing in the core, and also investing in understanding how to make the business through ROAS, return on what we're spending, far more effective. And all of those are really beginning to see, along with cost-cutting, impact on the Trip Core because Viator has been on a roll. It is a huge growth animal that I don't think is fully reflected, it could be made profitable in a big hurry. We've been in a market share grab, which I think is a smart profitable market share grab, long-term profitable, but has interim costs. And finally, we're about ready to flip from a loss position at the fork to a profit position. All of those give me a lot of confidence in the progress that management has made and all of those may think, particularly given what Viator could be worth that the stock is undervalued. Matt?

Matthew Goldberg

executive
#133

Yes. Thanks, Greg. At TripAdvisor, it's just important to remember that we are early in a journey of transforming this core business. And we've said all along that it's going to be about transforming our operating model, realigning the organization, bringing in new talent, streamlining the teams, delivering an integrated product road map, really, and of course, delivering flexibility in the fixed cost base as well. We're seeing it. We're seeing it operationally in our integrated product road map in the way that we're starting to launch new products that are meaningful. We're seeing it across trip planning, enhanced content the way that we're leveraging data. And of course, we like the early innovation of generative AI. And our approach is to deliver early proof points that turn into leading indicators that we can then scale. And we've been quarter-by-quarter articulating how we're doing that. You're seeing stronger pricing in the auction that we delivered through product and data, you're seeing a media business that's outperforming the category as a whole. And of course, on the marketplace side, you are seeing what we can do with experiences, and that's already delivering to our P&L, and we believe we can extend that into both new categories and new geographies. So it's early, quarter-by-quarter, we're making progress. There's a lot going on underneath the hood, and we're excited about '24.

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#134

Is that Craig over there? Go back to cable.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#135

Question about wireless as long as we're on the topic of distressed assets. You and Chris talked a lot about the offload opportunity in wireless and the economic benefit of that. Is there a scenario where you would want to take that to macro cells with your own mid-band spectrum, if a certain company had spectrum that was suddenly distressed and available?

Gregory Maffei

executive
#136

Well, it's clearly distressed, but I got to let Chris say about our plan.

Christopher Winfrey

executive
#137

It may have been abated question, but I agree with your research, which is that I think we've got the best model, which is a hybrid model. The -- traditionally, the building out of macro cell towers and the acquisition of very expensive spectrum, it hasn't, I don't think it's a great business on a stand-alone basis. The reason that it works well for us is because we are able -- we have an existing wireline infrastructure that has fairly unlimited capacity that can do upwards of 90% and potentially more of the offload. And we have the ability to lease at what we think is an attractive rate to lease the stuff that costs the most to produce from a unit production cost, and lease it in the places where we need it the most, and we get the benefit of our existing wireline network that can offload that traffic at really no cost, for the 90%. So I think we've got the best of both worlds. Now we have purchased CBRS spectrum. And so I think the shared license spectrum, the acquisition of certain spectrum that lends itself to small cells, which is more localized offload, where we have power, rights of way and fiber throughout our entire footprint, and we can deploy that at a relatively low rate. I think that's interesting to us. And we've spent a lot of time with the FCC, and we're very serious about that. But the macro cell tower business, very expensive. It's not where the traffic is ultimately occurring. And so driving up and down 95, it's just a small portion of the traffic. It's the most expensive to provide. And it's not really where most of the data is being consumed. And we like the relationship that we have. And I should say, I think because of who they are, and they've got that infrastructure already, I think we're good for Verizon as well. So I never say never, but I don't see that as something that we've been able to create a great business case for yet.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#138

Well, the incremental nature of the CBRS, where you have for relatively low cost because some of the elements are in place, and you have the volume already there and you do it on an incremental basis. That's pretty darn attractive, pick and choose.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#139

Regarding the Formula One Vegas race, could you give us more details about your plans for the Sphere in Vegas, inside, outside of the Exosphere?

Gregory Maffei

executive
#140

For our plans in Vegas for this year or for going forward?

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#141

For this year, regarding the Sphere.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#142

For running the Sphere, this year, we have a relationship where we've leased effectively the Sphere both internally and externally. The race will be around the Sphere, so we're utilizing their property. We will own all the advertising on the Sphere for the duration of the race for a fixed fee. We have bundled that into some deals and also sold advertising directly to parties during the race, which will defray part of our cost. It was a necessary cost for us because we need to be on their land, but in addition, it was -- it's a revenue opportunity for us to lease, as I said, or sublease the time on the Sphere. In addition, we're going to have a recovery brunch and you will need to recover on Sunday morning in the Sphere, and we will be showing highlights of the race internally. In future years, and we have a long-term relationship with the Sphere, I think we will have more programming in place. We were not partly because we didn't know if the Sphere would be done, and partly, we were hustling to get ourselves done. That combination made it hard to program for this year. But I think in future years, we'll have a lot more going on. So even though people said, why isn't U2 there this weekend, it's because we didn't know what would happen. So...

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#143

I have a follow-up question on Live. You talked about certain tax considerations to be able to spin it. I was curious if you could expand on what those are and back 9 or 10 years ago, when broadband came out, originally, it was going to be a tracker and then changed about 1.5 months, 2 months later to a Spinco? What was present there that's not here? Is it just that you own TruePosition and Skyhook, or is there something else as well?

Gregory Maffei

executive
#144

Well, in every case, to create and spin away, you need an ATB, active trader business, probably has to be a meaningful percentage, not, maybe not double digits but a meaningful percentage of the business. It's in that active trader business, probably has to be something you've owned for 5 years, or you can show it's a business expansion in a logical way that is defensible, and at the moment, we really don't have either of those at Live. We were able to, for example, do that with GCI, with our stake coming out of -- the charge stake we had that sat inside of Liberty Interactive that allowed us to spin that away with GCI. There are certainly other cases where we've had ATBs when we -- I think the ATB, when we spun out and bought the Braves, we had ATBs that were -- when we took it in, we had ATBs for the DIRECTV piece, which were those RSNs. We've always had that, and that's a necessary precondition.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#145

When you think about the next 3 to 5 years and you think about the cost of capital, what are you thinking about the equity premium? Is it finally coming back? Or is it still going to stay quite low, the way it's been for the last 15-plus years? When you do your own valuation before you make serious commitments what do you use internally?

Gregory Maffei

executive
#146

John, do you want to talk about that? Or -- I'm happy to take a shot.

John Malone

executive
#147

Take a shot.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#148

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The -- well, look, there are -- as you know, there are -- you can calculate using the weighted average cost of capital. You can look and say, treasuries have gone up substantially, measured by volatility. The equity premium has gone up as well. So there's how we get to a capital asset pricing model and we'll look at it that way. But in addition, that is a -- that's a rule that probably leads you astray, to take it blindly. I think we look and say, that's a great way to think about it. And it causes us, obviously, to look at what the alternatives are, and that's what it's weighing. But when you think about risk, you really try and figure out what is the asset likely to do? And what are the things that can go right and wrong with this asset. And in some cases, there may be more risk. And there may be cases where we have synergies which actually reduced the operating risk and take risk out of an equity business. So I don't think there's a rule of thumb, but I certainly agree with your premise that we've lived in a time when money was virtually free and people were willing to suspend disbelief, is that the right literate for expression. And we probably are not in that phase now. In fact, people are probably mostly the other way unless you're 1 of the big 7 that everything is wrong. So you try and balance and take some perspective and tacking against the trend and making the bet when people are not believing is probably a good sign, but also being cautious when everybody is believing is a good sign. So [indiscernible] is interesting. I don't think it's this positive. Do you want to add anything, John?

John Malone

executive
#149

Yes. I would just say, in many cases, you're in a business, especially a business that's maturing but generating cash because it gives you the ability to diversify into something that does look like it has growth in the future and would have higher returns. So a lot of it is strategy over time. I mean if you look at Warren Buffett, he's sitting on a monstrous pile of cash right now. So he must be expecting opportunities to show up. And so a lot of times, you're in business, not because you like the business you're in, you inherited it in one way or another, and you're trying to use it as a vehicle for ultimate diversification or synergistic combination with something that you like a lot better. So just an awful lot of ways of looking at it. It's very hard to take sort of a philosophical view of equity premiums because if you're running a business, you're heavily invested in a business that you've been with for years, you're always kind of looking incrementally, tactically around you and you have to try and figure out what creates -- if your goal is to create shareholder wealth, which mine has always been. You're always looking for that other thing that's going to -- if you could get into it, if you could edge your way into it, if you could somehow are back into it, sort of the way you ride back in to Formula One. Your strategies are much...

Gregory Maffei

executive
#150

Is that how we describe it? Okay.

John Malone

executive
#151

Much more opportunistic and tactical than some kind of investment philosophy, as if you were and had full liquidity to move your money whenever you want, so when you're inside the enterprise, you don't really have the discretion to say, I shouldn't stay in this and get out of that one because you're part of it. And if you want to maximize long-term returns, you probably shouldn't be part of it. You should be on the outside willing to say that the store is open every day and I'd sell almost anything on any day, but I don't believe that that's practical in these kind of enterprises. So you're always looking for a tax-efficient transition or expansion or strength that generally has to do with tactics. You're looking at specific assets, what can you do with them? How can you enhance them? And so I guess you'd say you kind of are where you are, and you've got to figure out what you can do about it.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#152

Well, John, you've always said, look, the highest current value for any business in the short term is sell it. If you go in a tax-efficient manner -- that...

John Malone

executive
#153

It's usually true of any public company, I would say.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#154

But that limits your future opportunities. And hopefully, there's a core of talent and the core of future earning potential with that team that suggests, well, that may be short term, and there may be benefits to hanging around the hoop and figuring things out like Formula One. Maybe last question...

John Malone

executive
#155

One guy told me at one point, you don't want to tread water in business because then the sharks will get you. Just -- you need growth or growth potential, you need a strategy that moves you forward in your goal of creating wealth, and treading water is not a good place to be. It would be better to try and build flexibility so that you can take advantage of opportunity when it shows up. But just treading water, I think, is pretty hard to defend in any business.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#156

Last question. Could we hand the mic over here, please?

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#157

[indiscernible]

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#158

We're ready for the question whenever. Thank you.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#159

Your friends left, could you go too?

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#160

Just talking about opportunities, maybe a little bit closer to home within Qurate Retail...

Gregory Maffei

executive
#161

Thank you for your input.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#162

Just that opportunities a little bit closer to home with Qurate Retail.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#163

She can't even pronounce my name. It would be nice, go ahead. Sorry, can you be a little louder?

Shane Kleinstein

executive
#164

It's on.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#165

Is it on? Okay. Great. Just looking at opportunities to create shareholder value. Looking at Qurate Retail, and the stock trades like a deep out of the money call option, you've got distressed long-term maturities. Is there an opportunity to hand here given your liquidity, the normalization of the business, and maybe, who knows, maybe it will even grow again one day. I think you're on the right path to that, to create an enormous amount of equity value by buying back opportunistically the longer part of the capital structure.

Gregory Maffei

executive
#166

I think it's a great question. I think you heard David outline a thoughtful plan on how to bring back growth. You've already seen part of that plan in Athens, bring back profitability and improved basis and a bit more to come. Look, we've husbanded cash and husband liquidity. We have paid down some debt, but we husbanded the liquidity to ensure that we have the runway. And so you're always balancing how long a runway do I need to complete the plan and how much opportunity do I have to take in liabilities at less than face and create equity value. And we are weighing those alternatives. We've done some modest discounts from purchases of the '24s and '25s which are the near-term maturities. But your point is right. A lot of the longer maturities are trading at larger discounts, particularly ones that are not longer term and either at the opco or even more at some of the holdcos. So we certainly weigh that and are looking at the runway path and confidence in our plan and weighing what opportunities are out there. So, David, now if you want to add anything? Well, thank you very much, everyone, for joining us. Appreciate you coming for another Liberty Investor Day, and I hope to see you next year, if not sooner. Thank you.

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