Hi, Brady and Clint.
Hey .
Hey. Will Clint be the presenter, or will Brady be the presenter?
I have the presentation on my—we're not in the same room, but I have the presentation on my laptop.
Okay, then you, Brady, you need—you are logged in via the web, so you will need to download the software to present from your computer.
Wait, no one told us that?
Yeah.
Gosh. Been asking about this for the longest time. Okay.
That's why we have the practice session. Please, it takes just a second to download the software to present from your computer.
Yeah. We've been on for 10 minutes, by the way. We're trying to get your guys' attention. Okay. I'll log out and log back in, I guess.
Yeah.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
All right. Can you guys hear me?
Yes, we can hear you, and we can see the great—have a great session screen. Please pull up the presentation, and we're ready to go.
Okay. That's not the screen I want to share.
Okay. What's that?
I want to share my other screen. Can you guys hear me?
Yes.
Can Brady and I be seen, or are we only audio?
It's just audio, but I mean, you can turn on the webcam if you'd like.
Sure. We can do that. Okay. No one can see your screen?
Can you switch the screen so you can only present from the second screen? Let me take a look.
This is frozen.
Is it GoToMeeting? Is that the camera that you open?
GoToMeeting. Hey, Chris, can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you.
All right. How do I show my other screen?
We see the presentation. You should go to Display Settings at the top, right on the right, and then click Swap Presenter View and Slideshow. Now we see the full screen presentation, and you're ready to go.
Excellent.
If I share my webcam, that will put me on video, or?
Sure. At the top.
Okay. Is that what people are doing, or is that?
You could do it if you want. Up to you.
Okay. So most people aren't doing that. Is that?
Yeah. We're good now. You have about 40 minutes to present.
Great. Sounds good. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thanks. You ready to go?
Please go ahead when you're ready.
Great. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it. Are we good to start?
Yes. Please go ahead when you're ready.
Great. Thank you for having us, Chris. Really appreciate the opportunity to present today. I'm Clint Stinchcomb, CEO at Curiosity Stream, and my partner, Brady Hayden, our CFO. Brady, you want to start the presentation? For those of you that do not know, our mission at Curiosity Stream is to satisfy the world's enduring curiosity through premium factual content that informs, enchants, and inspires. We have nearly a million hours of audio and video rights for a whole variety of platforms. We have over 20 million paid subscribers in 175 countries, and we have very low churn relative to our industry competitors, in large part because we are not a hit-reliance service, but we are a service that provides considerable breadth and depth around factual categories. As such, we aspire to be a trusted resource in the home and in many homes. Next.
Our library spans the full range of factual, which I think in the next slide will identify exactly what that means. What that means is traditional programs, films, series, movies in categories of science, history, nature, technology, crime, lifestyle, and lots of subgenres underneath, as you can see here. Additionally, our secondary categories, where we have a considerable amount of content today as well: religion. We own the world's largest collection of Catholic courses content. We have content that's directly applicable to certain educational requirements, sort of courses. We have a great variety of kids' content. Biography is a key subcategory for us. Outdoor, that's outdoor entertainment, fishing, hunting, adventure, travel, and then increasingly combat sports. Next slide, please. Curiosity Stream was started by John Hendricks, who founded Discovery Channel, Discovery Communications in the late 1980s. John has a great eye for quality, for aesthetics.
As such, he got us off to a good start, and we've been able to layer in a lot of high-quality content over the years. As such, consumers consider our quality to be number one or certainly among the best. Next slide. Just a quick overview of the subscription video on demand entertainment landscape. As you can see, companies like Netflix have what I would call escape velocity. They're going to continue to grow for a long time. They're going to continue to dominate. They don't really need anybody else. Prime Video, similar. Then you get to the additional large services with over 50 million subscribers: Disney, which includes Disney, Hulu, and ESPN; Warner Bros. Discovery, which is Max; all the Discovery networks; Paramount+ and Showtime; Apple TV+; and certainly Peacock and NBC, who are, if not in that category, pretty darn close today.
Then it is a significant drop to services that have even a million-plus paying subscribers. You can see it includes services like Curiosity, Starz, Britbox, Crunchyroll, Shutter, AMC+. As you dip down to 100,000, again, not a lot of services in this range, but certainly more than in the million-plus category. If you go below that, you get to some real subscale services. In light of the competition, we have already seen a fair bit of carnage there. Next slide, please. The nice thing about factual content is it travels really well. You are not subject to colloquialisms that you will find in typical comedies or dramas or general entertainment programming in the U.S. A shark is a shark is a shark. An atom is an atom.
The history of ancient Rome is as interesting to a 15-year-old woman in India as it is to a 35-year-old steelworker in Indiana. If you just looked at our announcements last week as to the kind of global appeal of Curiosity, we announced that Signal in the Philippines, the largest distributor in the Philippines, was launching a super bundle with Curiosity that includes Curiosity, HBO Max, Lionsgate, Hallmark, and really premier networks. It is kind of representative of an excellent way to grow going forward, and that is being bundled with big services. We also announced last week that Samsung was rolling out our FAST channel Curiosity Now in Spain.
We announced a handful of traditional content licensing deals that covered France TV in France, Canal+ in France, NA TV in Korea, Kanopy, which provides content globally to academic markets and library markets, additional deals in Korea, Canada, and even the Middle East. We have really broad appeal and a really, really broad section of third-party partners that we can license to, and that includes licensing our overall service and licensing individual content. Today, our content is dubbed or subtitled in about 12 languages.
One thing we look forward to in the future is as the cost to dub comes down through synthetic solutions, essentially AI solutions, we really believe that will benefit us in a greater way than many other services because if we can put our content, go from 12 to 50 languages at the minimus cost, we believe that will have a significant impact on our overall international subscriber growth. Next slide, please. This is our flagship service, Curiosity Stream. $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Next slide. Additionally, we have a subscription service called Curiosity University. It's part of a tuck-in acquisition we did a few years ago of a company called One Day University. We've since rebranded it to include not just professors, and these are typically the best professors as rated on RateMyProfessors.com, but also subject matter experts.
Today, we have about 500 of America's top professors and subject matter experts delivering really compelling talks and lectures. We offer this directly to consumers, and then like Curiosity Stream, we're offering it in the largest channel stores, meaning Roku and Prime Video today. They've both recently launched the service and will roll out with the others over the next year. The nice thing about this service is we own all the rights internationally. We can kind of hit a button and we go. We like this service, a lot of upside, and it's a really helpful companion to generating reactivations and minimizing churn with our flagship service because we can bundle it in at even minimal costs in order to prevent people from deactivating Curiosity Stream. Next slide, please. I mentioned earlier, this is a diamond in the rough.
We have not talked about this much, but this is another—as part of an audio acquisition we did, we acquired what we believe to be the world's largest collection of Catholic courses content. We are offering this as a subscription service, $10.99 a month, and it is also beginning to be offered through channel stores. We think there is a lot of opportunity here. We are not investing a lot in this as of yet, as we see building this with endemic partners and others who have credibility in the space. However, again, the nice thing here is of all those titles, we own them all over the world. Big global opportunity here. Our other subscription offering is a smart bundle or a premium tier. That includes Curiosity Stream, Curiosity U, SOMM TV, Tastemade, Kidstream for $69.99 a year or $9.99 a month.
If you were buying this by itself, it would be almost $69.99 a month. This is a heck of a deal. As people see it, we have a pretty good sign-up rate and a big margin. These are our linear TV channels, linear streaming channels. We offer a paid TV channel with a whole variety of international distributors. In the FAST and AVOD space, which we started leaning into about a year ago, we offer our flagship CuriosityNow. We have three U.S. Hispanic services, Cura Español, Animales, and Motores. We work with the second-largest U.S. Hispanic company in the U.S., MediaCo. We program it. They handle sales and distribution, and we split the revenue. The nice thing about that is this is an area that is still growing, not saturated like some other areas.
In light of their integration into the Hispanic media agency world, they can sell these channels at CPMs that are six, seven times what the platforms can sell it for, and certainly a lot higher than what we could sell it for. We split the revenue with them, which works out being a much greater proposition for us than if we launched these without a partner there. Next slide, please. Another kind of diamond in the rough, we have over 8,000 audio titles. We have these up today. We have two subscription services on Apple Podcasts, one Curiosity University, the other Catholic Stream as an audio subscription, different than the video subscription. We have a whole variety of content that we've developed that is syndicated with partners like Odyssey.
We also have a lot of audiobooks, meaning courses that get distributed by Spotify, iHeart, available on Audible, Hoopla, all the big audio platforms. It is another area where I think with the right approach, we see real opportunity here. It is not at the scale of some other areas that we are focused on. Again, over time, we see real opportunity with our audio proposition. Next slide, please. The history of Curiosity Stream is in 2018. The company started in 2015. In 2018, it had over $100 million. Over $100 million had been spent. It was about $40 million in debt. Obviously, at that point in time, we needed to raise some outside capital. We did that in 2018 through 144A process.
Thankfully, we closed on about $130 million in funding in November of that year, paid a $35 million loan back to B ofA , and started to invest in content and paid marketing, just what you've got to have to grow a subscription service. As we did that, our whole strategy was all gas, no brake, grow top-line revenue, grow subscribers. If you need to raise more money, go back to the public markets and do that, which is an okay strategy until you can't. We doubled revenue for three years in a row. When we hit 2023, we just looked at our approach today is not sustainable, really, if we continue to spend at the levels that we're spending.
We said, "Look, we're not going to grow in 2023, but we are going to rationalize our cost base and become a profitable cash flow-generating company." I am delighted to say that we've now had five positive quarters in a row of positive free cash flow, and there's no turning back from this point. For a second quarter, our revenue projections imply 30%-37% year-over-year growth, just free cash flow, $2 million-$3 million. We also pay a dividend, I think, which is rare for growth companies. If you own the stock today, or if you owned it on Friday, the last day to register for the special dividend, you'd own a stock that yielded about, I think, 8.7% yield over the course of the year. I think it's attractive from that standpoint and obviously from a growth standpoint.
Brady and I continue to focus on rationalizing the cost base further, and we have real room for continued expense management over the next couple of years. Next slide, please. This is just a quick look at, again, how we make money, make money through direct subscriptions and bundled subscriptions. That is kind of our overall subscription revenue. We make money through licensing, both traditional format and increasingly through licensing to top-tier tech providers for AI training. We had our first net income and positive Adjusted EBITDA quarter, Q1 2025. Again, we have heavy guidance for next quarter, really strong balance sheet, and feel really good about the future. It is a great time to be in this business.
In the 30 years I've been in it, I've never been this close personally to the kind of opportunity that is in front of us, which requires a lot of shoulder to the wheel, but really exciting. Okay. This is a large area of growth for us, data set licensing. Again, we have now rights to nearly a million hours of content, includes raw video footage, includes produced hours. Those are programs that run on broadcast or cable TV or high-end streaming services. About 8,000 audio titles. And then we also have images, scripts, eBooks, course guides, proprietary code, and other things that are attractive to tech companies for large language model training. Next slide, please. Some of the investment highlights. Millions of subscribers around the world. We're in a category that doesn't require massive content investments every year. I mean, we're not competing for sports.
We're not competing for Game of Thrones, which is $20 million an episode their last season, or even some of these procedural dramas that you see on NBC and CBS that at this stage cost about $10 million an episode. The economics around factual content are much better, lower cost, which provides us with an opportunity to continue to amass content every day. Next, we've got a lot of upside. Obviously, we're upside in the advertising sponsorship side, and then considerable upside in licensing to top-tier AI companies. Beyond the top tier, there are, based on our tracking, probably 79 other companies who have been funded to a level where they could license data content at some point in time. We track them as well. Next slide, please. All right. I'd like to hand it over to my partner, Brady, at this point. Yeah.
Here's our balance sheet. As Clint said, we finished Q1 with a little under $40 million in cash and no debt. We continue to invest some in our content assets, but as Clint talked about, the majority of our content acquisitions are acquired not on the balance sheet, but through revenue share arrangements now. We finished the quarter with about a book value of a little over $1 per share or about $58 million in stockholders' equity. For the last 12 months ending in Q1, we had adjusted free cash flow of over $10 million, $10.3 million. As Clint talked about earlier, 2025 will be a return to growth for us, projecting both double-digit returns in improvement in revenue and adjusted free cash flow.
As Clint talked about, we reported our first positive net income in the first quarter of 2025, and also our first Adjusted EBITDA positive quarter at $1.1 million. Again, in the first quarter of 2025, we reported adjusted free cash flow of just over $2 million. Clint, back over to you.
Great. Thank you, Brady. Let's just quick look at the management team. Thankfully, at this stage, we have a lot of good people who know what they're doing. Next slide. That's it. Happy to answer any and all questions, and really appreciate everybody taking the time to sit through our presentation. Thank you, Chris.
Okay. Great. If you do have a question, you could please ask it in the question section of the GoToWebinar panel. We'll start with some questions as some other questions come in from the audience.
Do you envision special dividends on an annual basis?
That's a great question. I would say that paying a dividend has been an excellent strategy for us. It's brought a lot of people to the table to look at the Curiosity Stream story. I think as it relates to special dividends, it's something that we'll always consider. In the environment that we're in right now, where there are such large potential licensing deals that we're working on, I think depending on the levels that we get to there, that will have an impact on whether or not we do a special dividend. I think that's always part of the consideration set. We're super focused on just growing the company from a cash flow and revenue standpoint.
However, sort of architecting the dividend to appropriately reward shareholders is something that we're always considering.
How is it going as far as AI helping to translate your content into additional languages?
Yeah. I think we have, I don't know, maybe 70, 80 titles in various parts of the world that are synthetically dubbed. And so typically, like Voice of God, narrative, natural history titles, when you're only dealing with one voice, it's a little bit easier. Now, at this stage, we've not seen the cost come down to where we believe they will be 12-18 months from now. And so we've been careful about synthetic dubbing or AI dubbing. As it becomes more accepted and even better, and it's improving every single day, and obviously lower, and obviously when it becomes a 20th of the cost of traditional dubbing, we'll go all wild.
I mean, we're really excited about what's possible there. It's just from a cost standpoint, it's not quite there yet as it relates to dubbing into a language that has, call it, where we have maybe 25,000 customers today. That's part of the calculation as well. However, AI does help on the cost and expense side. We're no different than any other company. Helps as it relates to customer service, helps in certain editing, sequencing type of thing. Increasingly for us, because we are licensing out so much content, we're doing some things on the technology side that are pretty unique and certainly helpful and give us a leg up with potential licensing partners. There I'm talking about structuring our data, labeling, annotating, clipping, those types of things. I appreciate that question, though.
Do stock repurchases make sense, or are dividends a better distribution of capital to shareholders?
So far, dividends to shareholders has proven to be the superior option there. We'll consider anything and everything going forward to drive shareholder value. I mean, we really are a company that seeks to reward the shareholders above all else.
Is there a certain revenue amount that larger players look for as far as potential acquisitions?
Yeah. I think in our case, what's different about us today than even a year ago or two years ago is that if you just look at our trajectory, we're on track to generate double-digit cash flow, EBITDA this year without providing specific guidance. And we have some revenue categories that are growing at significantly high percentages.
I say that to say that not only can we deliver strategic value and a massive exploitable library to any partner, but we can also deliver significant cash flow and EBITDA through what we would do as a standalone company. When you consider additional leverage we would have and what that would yield as revenue synergy, and obviously the obvious cost synergies, we have a lot to offer there. I mean, tens of millions of dollars in cash flow for sure very quickly in the right combination. Lots of intangibles and longer-term value-driving properties.
Can you talk about your profit margins? What items are your best profit margins, make the most money?
Yeah. The good thing is we're in a position now where we enjoy good margins across our business line.
An easy way to think about the company is not unlike an X. We have three lines of revenue, really: subscription, and those are our—that's anybody that comes to curiositystream.com and signs up for one of our subscription services. It's anybody that signs up through the Prime Video curated channel store. Also includes certain enterprise customers and then includes distribution that we have with traditional cable operators, direct-to-home providers, wireless providers. That's the subscription side. In addition to that, we have licensing, and that is traditional content licensing and then granting an AI training right, which is a really competitive space right now as it relates to the hyperscalers and others. Thirdly, we have advertising and sponsorship. That's a more nascent business for us, but it's a predictable business over time.
Even though it's early there and it's not a significant portion of our revenue, we believe that it will become that. There is some money that, or there's some licensing revenue that, if we treated it a little bit differently, would be applicable to advertising as compared to going into the licensing bucket. Those three categories, pushing hard there and seeing an opportunity to grow all of them. Obviously, data licensing side is where the most near-term, and I would argue over the next three, four, five years, six years, opportunity is.
How do you determine what I can see on YouTube versus what is behind the paywall?
Yeah. Great question. Great question. It's an easier proposition today because we have rights or even sliver rights to so many hours of content.
I think what you'll see on our subscription services is content that is largely premium content. It is not to say that we do not have premium content in front of the paywall, but typically in front of the paywall, what you will find is shorter-form content that we own or maybe the first, second, or third episode of a specific series that we have, which is designed obviously for monetization, but also to compel people to go sign up for Curiosity Stream or Curiosity University. We have a small subset of content that runs on YouTube. While we are interested in the monetization there, particularly over time, we also like it as a promotional tool.
Again, when you don't have a lot of assets like the biggest companies in the world, being able to put compelling content in front of the paywall that ideally will lead people to subscribe to the service is critical.
Can I see any of your content on traditional linear TV?
Yes. If you mean Comcast, Cox, Charter, Fubo, if you mean can you consume Curiosity content through those providers, then 100%. Absolutely. It's not just there, but outside the U.S. as well. We have what we call pay TV relationships with probably 25 different partners, and that's growing.
What subject matter or genres seem to be very popular right now?
Yeah. I appreciate that question as well.
One of the things I said in the presentation is we try to make sure that we're offering a lot of content in the key categories so that as tastes evolve or certain events come up, we can be right there for people. One really enduring category for us that I think is more unique to Curiosity than other categories is engineering. We have a series called Ancient Engineering that just continues to crush. The nice thing is it's largely evergreen because it's ancient, but really, really interesting. I will say that just as of recently, content around Rome and the Pope has done quite well, and there continues to be certainly a level of curiosity there.
At the same time, the narrative history specials that we have, like Titans: The History of Hollywood or The Rise of Hollywood, which is a six-part series we did in conjunction with Steven David, who recently did Wyatt Earp on Netflix. He's well known for an A&E series years ago called The Men Who Built America. He's a great, great storyteller. The History of Hollywood tells—it's an incredible sort of entrepreneurial story of largely immigrants who could not get a job in New York and went out to Hollywood and built incredible businesses. It's really fascinating. Another series that does really well for us is Titans: The Rise of Wall Street, which through a narrative storytelling approach basically traces the history of finance from the Civil War through the 1980s. Those are some that just continue to deliver, deliver, and deliver.
And then lastly, I would say, and not limited to this, but we have an ongoing original series called Breakthrough, which focuses on new scientific breakthroughs to keep it really simple and largely around technology and space. Those are a few, but there is a lot. Thank you for that question.
How will Curiosity look three years from now relative to how you look today?
Yeah. I think three years from now, if we are a standalone company, we will be bigger in every single category. A big part of that is because just like painters are continually painting the Golden Gate Bridge, it never stops. That is our strategy around content acquisition and around amassing additional content.
It'd be hard to find a company, even the biggest in the world, that has access to as many hours as we do, some type of right to as many hours as we do. We're only going to build on that. As we do that, it enables us to put a little bit more money into paid marketing for the subscription services. We believe that we can make those grow over time. It won't be absence in key events or a lot more money. It won't be dramatic growth, but there will be growth there. On the advertising and sponsorship side, as we roll out with more third-party partners there, as we roll out additional FAST channels, and as we begin to advertise with more of our pay TV partners, that's going to rise.
That is also an area where we would consider targeted creative M&A opportunities. The largest area of growth is obviously licensing. I mean, there are extraordinary opportunities here to license content, video, audio, images, scripts, code, other data to any company that is engaged in building or fine-tuning a large language model or anything else in the AI space. This is because of the money being spent here, so there is an extremely large opportunity for us. Our traditional content licensing business will continue to grow, just the press release we did last week. There is lots and lots of opportunity here. I think three years from now, if you look at our revenue components, they will all be up.
Whereas today, direct subscriptions are one, content licensing two, advertising three, three or four years from now, I think I'm certain, I suspect content licensing will be one, and that includes all forms of content. Our subscription business will probably be two, and then our advertising business will be three. Hopefully, that's helpful.
Yes. Thanks for that answer. That concludes the Q&A session for today. Do you have any final closing remarks?
Just want to thank everybody for taking time today. I think it's an extraordinary opportunity to invest in Curiosity. I think that the only reason that our stock is trading down as of today is in light of some sort of unstructured insider sales. That's a short-term issue. It has nothing to do with the operations of the business.
I would just say that if you like the story, believe in the story, it is a great time to buy right now. We appreciate everybody that's considering taking a position in Curiosity Stream and are available to talk through any issues virtually anytime.
Thank you for hosting.
Great. Thanks for that. That concludes the presentation.