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51st Annual J.P. Morgan’s Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference 2023

May 24, 2023

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Good morning. My name is Paul Chung. I'm the applied emerging tech analyst here at JP Morgan. I'm pleased to have with me, Robert Park, CFO of Dolby, and John Couling, Head of Entertainment. It's nice to have John here. He doesn't typically do this thing. Let's start with for people kind of unfamiliar with the Dolby story. I guess, Rob, first you needed to mention the-

Robert Park
CFO, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah. For people unfamiliar with the Dolby story, I do have some housekeeping I need to read, so I've gotta read this. We may make some forward-looking statements today, so I should say that actual results may differ materially from any of those statements. We may also get into non-GAAP numbers. To see these GAAP reconciliations or to get more info on factors that could cause our results to differ from what we say here, I'll refer you to our investor website, our latest earnings announcement, and the risk factors listed in our latest 10-Q. Those conclude my prepared statements.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

For those that are unfamiliar with the story, if you wanna just talk about what the business is all about.

Robert Park
CFO, Dolby Laboratories

Sure. It all starts with our mission. We believe that people want compelling and immersive experiences. Quality matters, you know, and we're focused on raising the bar of those experiences with our technologies. If you're gonna walk away with three things to know about Dolby today, these are the three things you should know about Dolby. One, Dolby is an enduring company that's always been the leader in the advancement of sight and sound. We've gone through several technological changes over the last five decades and come out stronger on each side. You know, we make experiences better for content creators, device makers, content distributors, and now developers.

The second thing you need to know is that we have a very hard-to-replicate business model and a powerful ecosystem. Continue to have strong fundamentals with a pristine balance sheet, high gross margins and healthy cash flows. I know, Paul, you love cash flows.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Cash. Yeah.

Robert Park
CFO, Dolby Laboratories

Cash is king again. We are moving into our most exciting phase yet with lots of robust opportunities for growth, and here to share all of that with you today.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Great. John, you know, investors haven't had a you know, a chance to hear from you for a while. Can you give us some more context around your role and, you know, where you focus most of your time?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah, yeah. Happy to. Good morning, everybody. Good to meet a new audience. I'm responsible for an organization called Entertainment. That's the product, the partners, and the customers across the entertainment space. That's what I think about every day. To give a little more color, from a customer-partner perspective, that's creatives who make the music and movies and TV shows, sports games that we love. The companies that distribute that to us, who we might have a subscription with or who might be delivering, you know, a game or a show to us. Then the devices, so all the OEMs that actually make the things that we enjoy content on. That's all across that ecosystem.

It's all the content that consumers enjoy, movies, TV, games, music, et cetera, on all the devices and the ways that they enjoy it, from, you know, the movie theater through to their living room, mobile phone, car, and so forth. In terms of where I spend my time, it's a lot of it is with those customers and partners. As Robert said, our business is very intertwined with building an ecosystem. That's, that's our uniqueness, and that's our strength. The way you do that is you spend time in the market, you talk to your partners, you understand where they're trying to take their business so that you can build that ecosystem together and create something completely new.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Okay. Great. John, you've been at the company for 25 years now. Can you talk about, you know, how you've seen Dolby evolve over time?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah, 25 years. If you think back to entertainment 25 years ago, this is what it was, right?

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Starting to...

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

A lot has changed since. You probably had just stopped renting VHS, and you just started to buy DVD. You could probably play one in your living room, maybe in your PC if you were, you know, fancy enough to have one of those. Maybe you were just starting to think about the transition to HD. That was the entertainment landscape. Fast-forward, we've gone through, obviously, massive change in entertainment. You know, who delivers you the content has changed, right? There's new companies. There's the explosion of the smartphone happened in that time, and that's now a viewing device that didn't exist then. You know, we stream everything from all over the world. A tremendous amount has changed.

At the same time, there are some core things that, for me, 25 years, nothing's changed at all. We all care about entertainment. We all want to be entertained. You probably still love the same sports team that you did 25 years ago. You probably still have a favorite movie. You know, all those things hold true, and that desire for entertainment holds true. The other thing that I think is really striking is over that time period, the creatives who make the stuff that we love are never satisfied and haven't been satisfied through all that time. You know, they continue to say, "Hey, I've got this great idea. Can you make this real for me?" That's, you know, part of the creativity that moves that entertainment experience forward.

Whereas it was, you know, DVD discs and maybe HDTV, and now it's 4K and Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos and, you know, movies like Avatar or, you know, Top Gun and things like this. The industry has changed, but the desire for entertainment and that quest for something even more compelling has stayed exactly the same.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Okay. Great. Then, you know, what is the management team kind of focused on now? What are some emerging trends? Maybe you can touch on AI and some of the content creation there.

Robert Park
CFO, Dolby Laboratories

I'll start with what we're focused on right now. First and foremost, we're focused on what we can control. We can't control how many TVs are shipped, how many mobile phones are shipped every year, but we can control how many of those units have a better consumer experience with Dolby technologies. That's what we're focused on right now, and we're executing well in those growth areas. Our goal is to have Dolby technologies throughout the ecosystem of consumer electronic devices and auto, so that more consumers can experience what, Paul, I'm sure you've experienced too.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Great. Robert, talk to us about the kind of framework for licensing business foundational versus Atmos Vision and some of the imaging patents?

Robert Park
CFO, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah. This is a framework we developed over the last couple of years to really talk about our technologies that have different growth drivers. Our foundational audio technologies continue to be the essential way content is delivered, right? The technologies are adopted wide and deep across electronic devices across the board globally, it's more sensitive to the macroeconomic environments. Think about it as an index to consumer electronic device shipping growth. That'll go and ebb and flow with the state of consumer electronics and consumer demand. Our Atmos Vision and imaging technologies, on the other hand, are much earlier in the adoption curve. We can grow faster despite unit shipment volatility because we can add more and more adoption rates, increase licensees and attach rates to those devices.

We thought that was important to distinction because if you blend it together, you see a blended whatever that is. The two vectors that we have have different economics and different drivers.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Okay. Can you talk a bit more about those focus areas? You know, what are the key drivers to getting to double-digit growth?

Robert Park
CFO, Dolby Laboratories

There are, as any company, several paths to getting to double-digit growth. One scenario would be stability in consumer electronic device shipments. The last few years have been anything but stable. We believe if you look at the last 10 years, getting back to single-digit growth is not unreasonable. That would help on a large portion of our, particularly our foundational audio technologies. We need to continue to growth and accelerate growth within our Atmos Vision and imaging technologies. This year we're on pace to do 15%-25% growth on that alone off of a nice base. That and long term of course, over time, we believe Dolby.io can contribute to our long-term growth as well.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Okay, great. Talk about the opportunity focus areas of, you know, movies, TV, music, and automotive and kind of user-generated content.

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah, yeah. Maybe, I'll sort of dig in here a little bit. When we say about movies and TV, we're thinking about those situations where they're all about, you know, the TV shows, sports, movies that you wanna watch and where you do. That's actually a big portion of that growth that Robert was talking about last year. About, you know, we grew the Atmos Vision category about 30% and a big chunk of it was in this movies and TV, this sort of living room type of entertainment experience.

It's something that, you know, for us is where we often start the experience, because it's, you know, very premium type content and we work with those companies in the movie theater, and we can bring that into that TV landscape. Our goal is to start there and then just really drive across a very large range of content. You have to engage people with the content that they love, the shows that you wanna watch. That's what we do with our partners. We continue to expand what type of shows they can build, what type of tools they have and so forth to make it really, really easy to produce in Dolby.

Obviously you've then got to deliver that in all the ways that consumers can get that content. That's what lights up those devices. The value really for the OEM is, look at all this amazing content from all these different content suppliers. That's what makes my device shine, and that's what we're looking to build there. We're on about a quarter of 4K TVs today with those technologies, so a really good start, but also, you know, room to grow. If we talk a little bit more, let's say you mentioned music or automotive. Music for us, you know, is, you know, obviously a different type of content, something that again is incredibly emotional, compelling. People really care about music, and they care about music in their car.

You know, that's one of the things that when you buy a car, let's see what the sound system is like. That's something people care about, and we obviously can believe we can make that really, really great. We're about two years since we announced our first engagement in that space, and now we've got cars from a number of manufacturers on the road. You can go and experience it yourself and buy that car. Mercedes and Volvo are free, some of the examples that are quite familiar. In China where there's a lot of innovation in the EV space, in particular, most recently, Guangzhou Auto Company, it's one of the larger manufacturers in China, just launched with us at the Shanghai Auto Show.

You know, from that perspective, it's really about, you know, for the auto space, building off of that momentum, continuing to drive demand and, you know, working with more partners. The last focus area you mentioned, Paul, like UGC. You know, the social media, the engagement with making, you know, content ourselves, short content. You know, Dolby believes that, you know, everybody wants that most immersive, engaging content. That doesn't have to be only if you are, you know, a top movie director. You know, all of us actually make content. You know, every consumer with a phone can do that or with a PC. We want to make sure that they can do that in Dolby if they wish to do that and it has benefit for them.

User-generated content, therefore, is obviously a pretty big part of the content space and one we care about. Our technologies for Dolby Vision are inside Apple ecosystem today and across what they do. We've been expanding that out into other devices. OPPO, one of the large mobile phone companies, is one of our recent wins we've talked about. Xiaomi, Vivo, and particularly, you know, with those being Chinese-based OEMs and starting in that market, we've been able to build out that ecosystem of sharing. You know, Weibo, QQ, WeChat, Messenger, Bilibili, these are the services that people in China use to exchange their videos, share their videos, you know, be seen and so forth.

We think that, you know, consumers are really passionate about creating and sharing content, that they wanna do that in the best way that they can, and that the camera is such a key part of your phone purchase that really improving that has a lot of value for the market. That's, that's a real focus for us too, where we believe we can make a big difference.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Okay, great. Can you talk about some of the recent wins in TV?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah. TV, we have a broad base as Robert said, in that foundational category. You know, our technologies are used for a lot of the core audio capability in television. On top of that foundation, we build the Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision experience for the best immersive picture and sound. TCL announced, you know, expansion, Hisense, both rapidly growing manufacturers are perhaps ones I'd call out. The TV market is actually quite a broad market. There's a lot of different manufacturers. There's a lot of different brands. There's literally hundreds of brands globally in the TV space.

Long-term growth in that is not just about the top-tier brands that are global, but also those regional partners and making sure that the regional televisions you might buy from a supermarket, for example, in Europe or are also Dolby-capable. We've been growing wins in that space as well. Maybe one I'd point out is the Indian Premier League. It's one of the most valuable sports leagues in the world. It's cricket, if I don't know if in Boston people are cricket fans. I'm doubting it. Maybe one or two. That's now in Dolby Atmos across JioCinema, one of the big, and Disney across some of the big streaming players, and it's driving into that device value.

It's driving into, you know, those purchases of TVs and so forth that people wanna make in a market like India. It's, you know, it's regional, not just global, and I think that's something to think about.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Yeah. Given that kind of, you know, trend of international content having some you know, global success, you know, how does that change your global strategy?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah, you asked that question before about, you know, 25 years. You know, 25 years ago, Hollywood made everything that we watched pretty much, and that is just no longer the case, right? There's been a seismic change in where programming is made. The streaming revolution has been a big driver for that. You know, whether it's Squid Game from Korea or Parasite or anime from Japan, you know, these shows are getting complete global access through a streaming player, and that is changing the balance of the value of content and how content is viewed from a global perspective. That's an opportunity for Dolby. I mean, our business is driven by great content.

We want that, and if we can generate great content in lots of places, that's good for us and good for our customers. It's something actually that is not new for us. The idea that valuable content comes from all over the world was something that we learned a long time ago, because although that might be newer for something like TV drama, it's not new for something like sport. You care about your home team, and that's true, you know, all over the world is, you know. If you want to create the content that people love so that when they buy their consumer electronics, you know, it's in their minds, then you have to also engage with them at a local level, and that's something we've been doing.

We have people all over the world in different markets who've been supporting that content industry for a while, and I think the transition now for us and the change is that they're now supporting maybe in a, what was a region, something that can actually now go global. That actually increases the value of the content, increases the value of the production, and ultimately, you know, comes out with a, with a better end result.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Gotcha. What's the opportunity in music kind of beyond auto that we've seen?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah. You know, I said, you know, we love to listen to music in the car, and we really do. You know, as we talk to some of the automakers, we're learning that, you know, people will sit in their cars at the end of their journey and keep listening and not go in the house. You know, like decompress after the office before they go and deal with, you know, the chaos of the, of the family, right? You know, that's such an amazing listening experience. It's by far not the only place that we listen to music. Mobile, PC are huge areas for listening to music.

You know, our growth in music with Dolby Atmos is, you know, really important to us when we look at our mobile customers, when we look at our PC customers. A lot of people, both in enterprise consumer PCs listening to music. The other is your home. You listen to music in the home. A lot of that is in growth categories like smart speakers. We just partnered with Sonos on the Era 300. That's their new wireless smart speaker. Really, you know, interested in that, and it's, you know, great experience. You know, we, you know, look to work with those types of companies to really help them create these great in-home experiences. That's a real opportunity.

A lot of that, for it to work, requires the service that you subscribe to obviously supply those devices. Like NetEase in China or Amazon, you know, are examples of companies that are continuing to expand how they serve that content into more and more device categories, so that if you subscribe, you can get the Dolby Atmos experience on all your devices. That's a big part of, like, building that ecosystem that Robert touched on at the beginning. You know, the fuel under all of it is fundamentally content, right? You just wanna find the song you love in, you know, the best it can be. The way we think about that is, you know, you've got to enable a pretty broad catalog.

We're really happy Apple just launched Apple Music Classical, for example, in Dolby Atmos, like a particular genre that, you know, some people absolutely love, so much so it's its own service. We look at a lot of things like we track things like Billboard, you know, streaming charts and things like this to make sure that our outreach to our creative partners is driving the content that matters most to the industry. That, you know, filters all the way down into those new categories like smart speakers and cars.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Gotcha. Then what's the opportunity for Atmos kinda beyond music in your view?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah, we talked about movies and TV and sport and, you know, all that. You know, when you've got an immersive sound experience and something that's really, you know, detailed and clear and has, you know, the ability to connect sort of emotionally, what you find is creators come up with all sorts of cool things they can do with that. Audible audiobooks, you can now get them in Dolby Atmos. You know, wonderful way of really engaging you in the story. Obviously a popular category. Wondery, who do a lot of podcasts, they're in Dolby Atmos, you know, a number of podcasts. Again, really trying to draw you into that engagement and part of rounding out that proposition, right? For the car, for the home and so forth.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Great. You know, there's some major shifts in the entertainment industry over time. You know, there's one kind of catalyzed by the pandemic, but, you know, how do you navigate those changes and yeah?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah. Yeah, you know, there are a lot of shifts in entertainment, right? It's, pandemic certainly accelerated some things, you know, the marketplace is always going through change. I mean, we navigate it as partners. I mean, all of you probably navigate it as, you know, investors, that's probably a question you ask quite a lot. You know, I mentioned some of those shifts way back. Just think about how far we've come in 25 years. You know, I think the first thing is those shifts are always happening somewhere. They're happening at different rates in different places, there's sometimes some slightly different drivers, there is always change. There are new players coming up, you know, creating, you know, new types of content that rise up. There are new distribution methods.

The things that really sort of catalyze big change, I think, in the marketplace are when a technology allows for a completely different way of getting the content you love. Disks to streaming, massive change, right? It completely can disrupt the industry, and players who were strong can sometimes find it difficult, and emerging can really grow, right? Those things happen, right? Whether it's, you know, massive shifts in business model from I buy it to I subscribe it, you know, to it. Similar kind of thing. The other is when the experience changes. Like, you know, your TV might've been fine, but you went out and bought a new one 'cause you wanna go from HD to 4K, right? That's that experience change, where the quality of what you are getting has jumped up.

Those changes don't happen, you know, every day, but they do happen all the time, and there's a constant quest within the industry ultimately for better content, more engaging. They wanna make it more of it and faster and cheaper, of course. They want to get it to more and more people. The technologies are always driving that. What do we do about that? Well, we have to navigate that change as Dolby. I think, you know, the way we do that is we really just dig deep with our partners. You know, the entertainment ecosystem is exactly what it says there. It's an ecosystem, you know. Someone makes the show, someone distributes the show, someone builds the TV you watch it on.

Those companies do have to all come together in some form for that experience to actually happen. When you're engaged with all those companies and you understand where they're trying to take their businesses and what the challenges are, you can get an idea of, well, who do I think is gonna do well here? Who do I think is gonna find it a little more difficult? How can we ultimately as a partner help all of them transition their business? I think one of the things that we if we can do it, and we have, and we continue to do so, really puts us in good position, is when we can be right at the forefront of those changes. Dolby Atmos Music is an example where we are a key component to that change.

You know, it's something where the industry was in a one experience, we've enabled this completely different experience, and consequently that becomes the underpinnings of that change. That, that's one way to really navigate it, is be like right in the, right in the center of it. Perhaps the other comment I'd make to sort of round it out is, from an entertainment business perspective, you know, what I think about is I wanna make sure that people can get, you know, Dolby experiences wherever they want, and that has a inherent robustness to it from a business perspective. You know, you mentioned the pandemic. In the pandemic, people couldn't go to the movie theater. The revenues that my group received from the movie theater obviously went down.

Everyone went and bought TVs to watch shows at home, and so that part of the business grew. By being diverse across the entertainment landscape, it puts us in a position to better navigate those shifts too, whether they're, you know, industry driven or whether they're external forces.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Gotcha. Then, you know, how does Dolby Cinema kinda fit into the overall strategy?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

The movie theater is the pinnacle, right, of the experience. That's something where you get the very best, right? You, you carve out time, you get in the car. It's like this is an event, right? It's a very powerful way to connect with content. For us, we want to, you know, obviously make that great for the cinema goer, but there's two other parts of it that I think are important to explain. It's a way to engage creatives. Cinema is often the place where people have the biggest budgets, the most time, and they can experiment and push the medium first. It's a place that we do that, a place where we can engage with those people. They teach us a lot. We teach them a lot.

Fundamentally, that creates a pipeline of content for the entire industry. That's a big piece of how cinema, it serves, you know, a broader entertainment business for Dolby. Of course, it generates revenue. That's another good reason to be there. Then it's also a great way to engage the consumer. I've told you about our experiences. That's nothing compared to experiencing them. If you go and sit in a movie theater and get a two-hour Dolby experience, that's an incredibly powerful consumer connection opportunity and helps us tell our story that can then flow into other places that people, you know, buy equipment or, you know, get entertainment.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Yeah. You know, the Dolby Live experience was quite cool. Can you just touch on that?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

How that brings in creators as well?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah. Dolby Live is a venue in Las Vegas. It's part of the Park MGM. It's a concert venue. It has residences. I believe Maroon 5 and Usher are in there right now. It's had Aerosmith and so forth. We worked to make that a Dolby Atmos live experience, and we did that for very similar reasons. I mean, it's a remarkable experience. If you're in Las Vegas, I absolutely recommend you check it out. What it does is it allows the creatives to really engage with the technology. You know, if they do something in the recording studio, they absolutely wanna do it live too because their fans have heard the recordings, so of course they want that experience live. They want the proposition rounded out, and we wanted to do that too.

Again, it's a tremendous way to engage the consumer. You know, imagine that concert that you love in the best experience possible. That has a lifelong impact on you. That's something that's so emotional and powerful, it's just a real strength.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Can you guys touch on Dolby.io and the strategy there, and, when can that become more material?

Robert Park
CFO, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah. Dolby.io, you know, right now we're focused on real-time streaming, live events and webinars. We believe that will democratize some of our technologies to a new set of users that didn't have access to our licensing technologies. These are developers. We can get earlier in the process, in the creative process, and also as well as the consumer experience process. The goal for Dolby.io is to have access to some of our technologies in an easier way than our typical licensing structure.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Gotcha. I'll open the floor up for questions, but I do have some financial questions I'll go through with you, Robert. Put you through the wringer. I guess, you know, very.

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

We have one.

Paul Chung
Analyst, JPMorgan

Oh.

Speaker 4

It seems like the. Yeah, that's a little loud. Dolby Atmos here.

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah, I was gonna say It's immersive.

Speaker 4

It seems like your primary competitor to new adoption of these new technologies is good enough, right? That the prior technologies are good enough.

Can you talk about, you know, how you solve for that in the go-to-market, and how much of it is a push versus a pull? Like Dolby Live and things like educating consumers, but how does that actually work with, you know, getting OEMs to adopt these technologies?

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Yeah, it's a great question. We do have competition. It's not just, you know, Dolby or, hey, I'll just stay as is, which is definitely for some people a question when we're in the sales cycle. We do have competition. There are different companies. In fact, some of our largest customers are very capable technology companies and, you know, look to also, you know, create technologies themselves, right? You know, we definitely have that environment, and to be honest, I think that's good 'cause it all pushes us to create, you know, better outcomes. In terms of, you know, how we manage that, there's a cycle to adoption, right?

Generally what we find is that we can get strong adoption at the premium end, whether that's a premium piece of content, a premium device, for, you know, a couple of reasons. One is that it's the part of the market that cares the most about creating the best, so value proposition obviously fits quite quickly there. The other is it's the place that, to be honest, in premium, there's a little more money, right, available. When we start with a technology, it's generally a little more complicated or expensive to actually do the integration. That might be true if you're, you know, making a TV show. Hey, the equipment's a little new. You gotta train your people. Takes longer. But it also might be true if you're making a television.

You know, the chip is brand new, it's a little bit more expensive, things like that. As we progress within the market, we have quite a lot of effort with our partners to actually reduce the friction and the cost of the solution, right? Because when you're building a device, a phone, a tablet, a PC, a car with Dolby, it's not just our software component, right? It's all the stuff that you need in order to make that experience strong. If you look at, I'll just give a simple example of a straight audio product, the soundbar, right? The first soundbars that came out had lots and lots of speakers in them, lots and lots of amplifiers. They were Dolby Atmos. They cost, you know, $1,000 and above.

As we work with the ecosystem, okay, we simplified the algorithm. We found ways to reduce the number of speakers. We found ways to improve the sound performance on lower cost, you know, BOM structures. Now you can get soundbars under $200 with Dolby Atmos inside. That's the system cost. Now, you know, we didn't change our economics, but we changed the economics for the entire marketplace in terms of working with them to make those solutions easier to integrate and broader to integrate. That's one big factor, right? You've gotta remove the friction in the marketplace in order to ultimately, you know, make it very easy for people to adopt. The other is you have to, you know, expand the base of content, right?

You've gotta create a situation where from the OEM's perspective as they look to build their device, they have a choice to make, which is, "Can I sell my device, you know, with or without this feature?" It might be Dolby, it might be all sorts of things. You know, how do I think it's going to go? You know, as you look in the marketplace and you're making that decision, you look as an OEM, "Well, what are other people doing?" You know, if I go to buy a television at the mainstream price point, so I go to Walmart or I go to Tesco in the U.K., I'll go to MediaMarkt in Germany, there is not a TV switched on in that store. There are boxes in rows on shelves.

You are selling at that point against, you know, web reviews and logos on the box. You know, you have a decision to make of, "Well, if I'm positioned up against all these other TVs, and these have Dolby and this and that, and I don't, how's that gonna play out for me?" There's a lot of dynamics for them as they're making the decision. You know, is the content there for the experience to be real? Is the technology easy enough for me to adopt? You know, by the time you're getting to very low price points, the engineering available for the OEM is not particularly significant. If you're building a product for pennies, you know, margin, you don't have big engineering teams finessing it. You can't afford that. It's gotta be turnkey. You know, is the friction there?

Ultimately, how does it stack up in a competitive marketplace? Do I have a competitive product? We're trying to move all of those levers, make sure the experience is strong, make sure the content is strong. The content is huge, you know, value to the consumer, but it's also a value to how the consumer understands. You know, the show I watch has got the Dolby logo in it, or, you know, we talked about the Indian cricket. They talk on air about this being in Dolby. You as a consumer, you understand what you're trying to get, and that's how you educate that. All those, watching the clock. We could go on.

Speaker 4

Yeah.

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Cause you're literally at the heart of the business, right? You're at the heart of, what are we doing here? We're trying to, you know, build these fantastic experiences, which at the start are always at the pinnacle. At the end, you're trying to get them to everybody. Not everybody can drive, you know, this car. They might have this. You know, not everyone can buy this TV. They might be able to just afford that, you know? Or this subscription, maybe I have to, you know, I prefer to have this ad-supported channel, right? You've really gotta, if your quest is to get it for everybody, and I think that is a laudable quest, we have markets where our penetration is very strong, then you have to move all those levers and evolve them as you're going through that process.

Speaker 4

Okay, it looks like we have less than a minute left.

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Oh, I'm sorry. You know, you got me on the thing that, you know, I really care about.

Speaker 4

I can't tell. Yeah. Okay, thanks for that. If you wanna leave us what makes you exci--. You already sound excited.

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4

What makes you sound excited about the story? If you guys wanna leave us with that.

Robert Park
CFO, Dolby Laboratories

A couple things. One, as John said, there's real momentum in the marketplace for these experiences, and it's never been an easier time for consumers to engage with Dolby technologies. As John just said, it's very obvious in the marketplace and the consumers that we can provide these great immersive experiences and, you know, we're very excited about the reaction we're getting to it. From a financial perspective, we're very happy with the start to the year given this uncertain environment. High, high cash flow. I know you're very happy with the cash flow in Q2. It's still an uncertain environment, but we're continuing to execute on our growth areas despite the uncertainty in the market in terms of unit shipments. Continue to do what John just talked about in gaining momentum and commercial success. That'll drive growth beyond just the choppiness of the unit volume.

Speaker 4

Well, thank you guys. Appreciate it.

John Couling
SVP of Entertainment, Dolby Laboratories

Thank you all.

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