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

May 24, 2023

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Hi. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to the 51st Annual J.P. Morgan TMC Conference. My name's Phil Cusick, I follow the Communications Media Space, and I'm pleased to welcome David Gandler, CEO and Founder of fuboTV. David-

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Thank you.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Thanks for joining us.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Thank you for having me.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Nice to see you. I wanted to start with the, the changes to the product in the last few months. Take us through the process to... You, you dropped AMC, you added RSNs, you've raised the prices. Just what's been the sort of the driving force behind this? Where you want to get to rather than in each individual small piece.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

You know, if you think about the history of the company... Would you like some water?

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

I'm good. Thank you.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

If you think about the history of the company, we started as a service that was $6.99 back in 2015. we've been optimizing our bundle since then. Obviously, $6.99, and I think it's $74.99 at this point. We've had to continue to optimize the programming, as well as the pricing. you know, this is part of the strategy to double down on our sort of core, you know, brand value, which is sports. I think the RSNs certainly have a place in the market. I mean, we talk about the primacy of sports all the time. I take that to another level and talk about the primacy of your local team. it just made sense from a brand perspective.

Number two, we said we wanted to achieve profitability in 2025. The intention was to lower our costs and increase our price, which was reflected in the operating leverage on our subscriber-related expense line.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Help me think about the brand for fubo is sports.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Absolutely.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Right. What sports do I get on this as a, as a lover of sports that I don't get on some of your sort of streaming peers?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Well, I think the most important piece is the Regional Sports Networks.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Yeah.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

I think people underestimate the value of regional sports. Simple example is, if you live in Boston, you probably have no interest in watching the New York Yankees. You know, if you also look at Nielsen ratings across all the RSNs, the reason why you never notice the RSNs, because ratings are typically national. When you look at DMA by DMA, I'll just use ESPN as sort of the proxy for sports on national cable. You will find that in many of the, of the Designated Market Areas, ESPN actually performs worse than the local RSN. We thought it was a very smart move to drive engagement, you know, reduce some seasonality, and having the largest baseball package in the United States.

I think it felt, like it was part of the strategy. I think, you know, as you can see in the first quarter, it's worked out very well for us.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Well, walk me through that. You took the RSNs.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yep.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

And effectively every customer's bill went up quite a bit.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yep.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

What was the impact on churn?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

We saw a very modest impact on churn. I believe we said on the earnings call it was about 91 basis points. The price hike was actually pretty significant. It was January, early January 3rd, 4th, it was a $5 price up. In, I think, first week of February, there was another, call it $11-$14 price up. You know, we talked about the pricing power that our product has, and how it resonates with younger consumers. You know, we didn't really see anything there, but we were very conservative in the first quarter, and I think we said that several times.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

There's also been a lot of sort of seasonality.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

-through the year for your business. Do you think taking the RSN sort of starts to reduce that, or is that coming down in general anyway?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

I mean, there is going to be inherent seasonality in our business when you're... everything is predicated on a sports calendar, right? You're gonna have World Cups, you're gonna have Olympics, you're gonna have, you know, NBA finals and start of the NFL season. That's gonna happen anyway. We do believe that with the RSNs, there's a way to sort of, you know, positively impact that. Having something for fans throughout the year, I think is very important.

I think the reason why you saw better numbers in the first quarter was because we were able to provide the two cohorts that we were most worried about, which I think we said was the World Cup cohort and the NFL Super Bowl cohort, something to actually watch as they were moving off of those two sports.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Okay. you dropped Turner a few years ago as well.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yes.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

You know, we've watched, Charlie Ergen at Dish sort of battle with every content company over the years.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yes.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

There's got to be a minimum amount of.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

TV you have to provide to keep the customer on.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

I've always wondered when Charlie was gonna get there. How do you think about that minimum number?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

I've always said that you need about 80% of the gross rating points to continue to grow in this environment. 'Cause you know, I think there's enough data now that shows that even in the traditional cable bundle, most consumers watch they used to watch 17 channels, and that went down to about 10-12 channels. 80% of the gross rating points allows us to do that. Now, for us, another reason why that's important is because if we only can carry 4 of the biggest players, that leaves some room for us to continue to negotiate with a fifth, right? There could continuously be some optimization.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Of four broadcasters plus Warner, let's say.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah, the new Warner, right.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Right.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Warner Bros. Discovery.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

You need four of those over five.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yes, we've always said that. Actually, I don't even think we've ever had five, right? I think it was up until 2020, we didn't have Disney. We still managed to grow. Then we dropped Turner. We've always had four of the five.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Right. How does that play into what your target is, which is to grow margin and become profitable in 2025?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah, well, I think what we've attempted to do is ensure that the deals that we cut with the media companies are short in duration because we're growing, so it makes sense for us to constantly renew versus what a traditional company will do is they'll try and sign 5 or 10-year deals. You know.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

These are typically two or three?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Ours, yea h. I mean, two would be ideal, but, you know, typically because it's a lot of work. These guys sometimes would prefer three over two. For the most part, I would say they're two-three.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Okay. I cut you off. Sorry.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Basically, you know, we think that as we continue to scale, you know, we're gonna see better and better deals. I mean, at the end of the day, we pay out, I think last year was just south of $1 billion in fees. You know, despite everyone's talking about the demise of bundling and all of that, we pay a tremendous amount of money. I don't think it's so easy to walk away from hundreds of millions of dollars a year when you're hemorrhaging money on the streaming side, right? I think we're very well positioned to continue to grow, and I don't think it's in anybody's interest to just have one YouTube TV.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Just continuing down that path. I'm trying to think about the premium you pay-

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

for content versus, you know, Comcast and Charter are massive scale.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

DirecTV used to be massive scale. You're a similar size to some cable companies.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

You know, there's a bunch in that sort of $1 million or $2 million range. How do you think about what you're paying today versus what those guys are paying?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Okay, tough question. I would say there's two groups. There's the streaming group, then there's sort of that traditional cable group. It's tough to say relative to the streamers how much we're paying because I think that, you know, with Google being in the cloud business, you know, it's tough to say how those deals are getting done. On the traditional side, if you look historically, cable has always paid the least, then satellite came in, satellite paid a little bit more than cable, then after that, the telcos came in, they paid more than the satellite guys. The streamers now have to pay more. That's clear. You know, looking at Kagan rates, I would say depending on the network group, it could be anywhere between, you know...

Again, the bigger deals, I think on the smaller deals we're in pretty good shape, but on the bigger deals, probably about 15%.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Yeah.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

15%-20% more.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The goal is of, as the deals recycle over the next few years, how close do you think you can get there? What's the hope?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Well, we like to say at fubo, hope is not a strategy. I think that, you know, the market is deteriorate. The traditional cable market is deteriorating. you know, there are those that say between 6% and 10% per year. If that is the rate, let's just use 10 for instance. We're growing at an outsized rate. We're taking more customers than anyone else in the streaming space, growing at roughly 20%. I feel like that's really good growth. My sense is, you know, over the next few years, I think if we can continue to demonstrate our value to the ecosystem, whether it's through data or product capabilities or improving engagement for some of these players, I think we can get pretty close.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Okay. Now, you said it a minute ago, the linear ecosystem is-

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

... deteriorating. We heard from Bob Iger couple of weeks ago, from Brian Roberts last week. I would paraphrase what Brian said is, the world is going to streaming we're just gonna get on board, there's nothing to be done about it. Putting a game on Peacock only, a football game. How does that make you think about the addressable market for your service in particular?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Sorry, were you saying he was planning to put football games on Peacock only?

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

There's one NFL playoff game.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Oh, yeah, I saw that.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

that's only on Peacock, yeah.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

I mean, look, people were worried about this with Thursday Night Football. I think Amazon's a much more, a scarier player than Comcast or NBC is, for many reasons. Nothing happened. We lost Thursday Night Football, and I think the only thing that you're seeing is a significant amount of fragmentation. Only the hardcore viewers are actually taking advantage of this, and the casual viewers are just not able to access these things, without a significant amount of cognitive load. You know, I don't see this as a significant issue, but remember, I also said we only need 80% of the gross rating points.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Right.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

You know, I think we feel pretty good about where we are. The engagement hours are still over 100, despite the fact that during COVID we saw a very significant boost in viewership, as has everyone. You know, I really can't say that there's anything that we would worry about. I also think similar to the movie space where everyone thought, including some of the companies you mentioned, that they would go direct to consumer with their movies, and then everyone did an about-face and said, "Whoa, I just lost $1 billion.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

I didn't say it was a good business. I said that's what they're doing.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Right. I think that eventually, all things come full circle. We've said in many of our letters that we're going from bundling to unbundling to rebundling. I think the aggregation business is really the only place where media players can really enjoy strong profits.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

On a linear basis, I can get cable, I can get satellite, sometimes I can get a TV-backed video product sometimes. There's a solid five streaming-bundled players. Is that sustainable long term? How do you think about that?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

You're talking about our space.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Your space.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Stream.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Sling.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah. Okay. I mean, listen, let's pretend the streamers weren't there. You still had DirecTV, now called Stream, in our space. You still had Dish, now called Sling, in our space. I would argue there are probably, besides the small 400+ cable companies, cable operators out there that have, you know, from 50 customers to 1 million customers, there are probably, you know, five or six major players that existed, right? You had Charter, Comcast, Dish, DirecTV, Altice, you know, Cox. There were many players. I think that the market can support, you know, three or four players for sure.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Does it make sense to combine with any of those?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

I mean, it's actually a very interesting question because for the last four years, media companies have been consolidating and distributors have not. I do think that, you know, there's probably some. Again, this is theoretical. I would assume that there are companies out there that are thinking, "Well, do we need scale?" Right? I think it makes a lot of sense.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Yeah. Not all of those are growing. Some of them seem to be somewhat stepchildren within the media company's ecosystem.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah, that is definitely true. I do think that there's probably an opportunity. Definitely there will be dialogue over the next few years with some of the major players. Not for us, I'm just saying generally speaking.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

How should we think about you making your product better in the meantime? I think there's been a couple of announcements, but talk to us about how the product is evolving.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah, I mean, we I would say we're closer to a Spotify than like a DirecTV or a Comcast. We believe in product. We have been first to market with features like 4K back in 2018 for the World Cup. We've been first to market with something we call Multiview that now some of our competitors have been talking about, including Apple, I think now. I think I saw them start posting on their homepage that they're also doing a Multiview. Product is a core component of our business, we've made some strong investments. I think going forward, what you'll see is we're gonna finish our.

We're in the process of combining the French acquisition with our own backend. We call it the Unified Platform. Beyond that, the platform's gonna be pretty robust, and we'll be focused on really improving the core product. Think about fluidity, performance. I know performance has come up in the last couple of weeks with the playoffs that, you know, a lot of folks were underwhelmed on multiple services that they weren't able to watch games the way they had anticipated. That's one area. The second area is gonna be our advanced DVR, which is probably what you're talking about. We started some beta testing there. I think that that's a really powerful tool for us. I think that, you know...

I think when all is said and done is you'll probably see some significant upgrades to the DVR that we probably haven't seen since the advent of cloud recording. It's basically taking some of the Edisn.ai technology that we have developed and think about indexing, you know, all of the videos in your DVR. You can follow a team, you can follow a player, you can follow a company, you can follow a politician, and all of this would be personalized for you. You know. That can be done in many different ways. That's sort of the power of computer vision technology. Beyond that, Again, we're focused on deeper personalization. Extracting.

Using computer vision technology and artificial intelligence through our Edisn.ai acquisition to really focus on extracting maximum amount of metadata to more accurately provide recommendations and discovery of content. On our platform, if you think about our strategy, has always been come for the sport, stay for the entertainment. It's very important for us to ensure that we are surfacing content to drive advertising sales. Those are kind of the key areas. One of the cool areas, probably further down the line I'm not gonna get into, is probably around conversational UI, which all of that is attached to computer vision. You know, think about you've DVR'd, I don't know, 10 college football games over the weekend.

You say, you know, "Hey, fubo, show me seven minutes of highlights." We should know the types of highlights you like, whether it's interceptions or sacks or whatever it is that you like, the machine should be able to really create a very efficient user experience. Those are kinda areas that I think from the product side, we're very focused on. Video quality is another one which always comes up for sports in particular. I think, I think we've made a lot of inroads there, and over the next 24 months, we will look to, like, release some of these things in beta.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Help me think about what that give me another example of the DVR innovation. You know, I've had a DVR that I never even use anymore.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah. Okay.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Why do I bother with that?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah. Okay, let's say, let's say you went away. You're on vacation out of the U.S., you can't use your cable subscription. You DVR'd, you know, 10 different things across sports for the week. You can do a couple things. You can say, "Show me, you know, every three-pointer, you know, that was shot in the last two minutes of a game with a score, you know, that, you know, that was maybe, you know, a 6-point game spread, right?" You can ask questions like that.

You can also wait 'til the end of the season before the Super Bowl and say, "Hey, you know, show me every pass that this quarterback has thrown on Sundays in weather that was below 30 degrees." It's a really powerful way to allow you to experience content, especially in an environment where you have hundreds of channels. You know, we have tens of thousands of VOD assets. I think over time, it's gonna really be the factor's gonna be being able to sort of index all of this in a way that allows you to maximize, you know, your subscription.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Advertising is one of the things you mentioned.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Talk to me about the sort of progression of advertising at your business.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

and where this can go, especially as you get more sort of personalization and recommendations get a little better.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah. I think the good news for us is we, you know, just to sort of back up a little bit. One is we, you know, of the services in our space, I think if you look at, you know, any research report, you'll see that we tend to skew younger on persons 18- 49. We're probably, I would say around 42. That already is a very important demographic to hit, particularly when TV. I think 22% of TV viewership, like traditional TV viewership, is persons 18- 49. That's one element that I think is extremely important. The second thing is because our product is, you know, a premium product, you know, $75+ , you know, people.

As people pay for that product, advertisers will probably look to engage with customers that have discretionary income. That's sort of a second, very important element. Think about people who watch free TV don't wanna pay for TV, what do they wanna buy? They wanna buy generic products 'cause price is the key parameter for them. Those are sort of very high level, basic reasons why I think the platform starts to perform on the ad side. Then as you kind of get into all this personalization, I mean, there is a ton of data. We already collect about 2 billion data points a month, but this would really allow us to understand lots of things. What are people's political views, right? 'Cause you may say, you know, show...

'Cause we have about 40 or 50 news channels now on the platform. You could say, maybe you're not a, you know, maybe you're an independent voter and you say, "I wanna see everything on Trump," or, "I wanna see everything on Biden." You don't care what channel it's from. You just wanna see all the news. I think all this personalization allows us to actually create very rich data sets over time and allow us to charge a premium, you know, for, you know, for certain cohorts.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

I'm always waiting for my TV to be filled with bicycles and surfboards and then I would spend money, but until then, I just don't wanna buy any of that stuff.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

That's a good point.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Gaming has been something that you've sort of been in and trying to do with tougher cash environment. You've sort of pulled yourself out of it.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Talk to me about both for fubo and just the market in general.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Where does the gaming space go and tie into sports on the video side? How do you see that sort of long term?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah. It's interesting because part of the reason for getting into gaming was the whole concept of interactive television, right? The gamification of watching TV. All of these things we're doing on the advanced DVR side, not only for sports, it's just for general viewing as well. I thought that that would be a great fit for people, right? It's where you can actually, you know, play, right? I don't mean like Las Vegas play where you're, you know. We weren't looking for whales. The point was to create more engagement on the platform. You know, I think that it still makes a lot of sense.

You know, I think with the computer vision technology that we had, we thought the interesting piece would be that because you can actually track, recognize and track objects on a frame-by-frame basis, you know, if the ball is down here somewhere in the corner, there's empty space here, you can flash something for five seconds that says, "Will he score? Will he not?" Right? You know, "Will he jump? Will he fall? Will he..." It gives you a chance to kind of create some of that engagement. Again, not for everyone. Some people are passive viewers. They don't need that. I do believe that there probably is value in active participation. That also drives organic marketing.

You know, I think that when we wanted to get into gaming, I think it was around November of 2020. We were thinking about it before, you know, the cost of capital was zero. You know, we thought, okay, over time, if we invested a few hundred million dollars, you know, and we didn't have to invest that money in marketing, we could probably benefit on both ends. One, you have more engaged subscribers, you have better retention, and then you have an additional revenue stream. You know, we quickly, I would say, reacted to the market conditions and pulled out because it was not realistic to continue down that path. That doesn't mean we don't like the idea. The idea is still there.

I think it's just a matter of building out some of these capabilities and then, you know, working with partners that are in the gaming space to see how we can sort of monetize that audience together.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Is it inevitable that gaming and sports on TV will go hand in hand?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Well, I think if you think about, just the whole ecosystem and how much money leagues make. Right now everybody is over monetizing, right. The leagues are making a tremendous amount of money. You know, the sports networks, television networks are also over monetizing, right. I think we can all agree on that. In order at some point to rationalize that you're going to need some other method, to be able to, you know, to deliver, a very effective business. I think that there's probably a very high likelihood something will happen. One might argue, a skeptic might say, "Yeah, but okay, at some point they'll wanna eat into that money too." But that's part of the game, right. I do think that those two kind of they go together.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Are there markets around the world that you think are a good sort of direction for the U.S. in terms of what that looks like?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

You know, I used to think that Sky did a good job many, many years ago before before Comcast had acquired it. Yeah, no, I thought they did well. They had a product called Sky Bet. I think they came into the market maybe five or six years after sort of it matured, and they were able to really grow very quickly. That's, that's a market that I think we look at as something interesting. Again, we're very focused on video, number one, and number two, we are extremely focused on our 2025 profitability target.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Okay, well, let's go back to advertising.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

You're building this up. Where is the market now, and what's your ability to sort of get the right inventory and monetize that?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah. I mean, the good news is, you know. My apologies. The good news is we have sports content, and it's live. You know, it's probably the type of content that most advertisers wanna be adjacent to. I think the brand awareness, you know, tied to professional sports, I think works well for everyone. You know, I don't know the last time you saw a YouTube proper, not YouTube TV, a regular YouTube ad, and you said, "Hey, I saw this Toyota ad on YouTube." Like, I don't know if people think that way. I can't remember personally any ads that I've ever seen on YouTube. I'm not sure that's a great medium.

With the sports component, I think people tend to remember, you know, and they also remember lots of things from different commercials throughout sports. Yeah, I think that that to me is probably one component that makes this whole thing very important, and it differentiates from Netflix and Disney+ and, you know, and all of these other services. Coupled with the fact that we have a strong audience and a premium priced product, I think all that bodes well for us. But I think there, the delay that we've seen is because, you know, you need scale to sell ads. So, you know, you can't sell more ads than you have users, right?

You're gonna see that ads will follow sub growth, and you've seen that. I think we've grown our ad number significantly. In 2022, I think we just barely exceeded $100 million of ad revenue. We think that that trend will continue going forward. When the macro kicks in, you know, we'll start to see that asymmetry go from like a percentage of revenue basis.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

You've been pretty open about your CPM numbers.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Where are your CPMs for a football game versus an NBC CPM for a football game?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah. Well, that's what's the exciting piece for us. Because we've had a much smaller team and, you know, I would say we're probably the most efficient company in the streaming space, and we have been for a long time. You know, we have not had the opportunity to really develop our ad sales team. We've started to do that. The way we would monetize is almost, I think it's like 95% programmatic, right? Now there's positives and negatives as it relates to programmatic. I'm talking about specifically programmatic non-guaranteed, which is probably the lowest value inventory.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Yep

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

CPM. It's typically sold on a blind basis. In order for us to scale out our advertising business, you know, that was sort of the key method of sale for us. You know, I would say our CPMs are about, I would say about 50%. There's about 50% room for us to grow those on the sports side. I would say if you're thinking about like premium football, I'll say NFL college football. You know, if you think about local markets, and you guys can probably tell me if I'm right here, I would say local markets like San Francisco, New York, Miami, Boston, you know, I think those broadcast CPMs can range anywhere from $70 to like $120.

I haven't looked at that, this year, last year, but the year before that, I think that was probably the range. You know, I think for premium sports, we're probably, when we go out to market ourselves, it's probably in the, I would say a low to high $40. Low $30s to mid-$40s.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Okay.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Somewhere in there. We have some.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

50%-70% discount.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah. Yeah, as John mentioned, I think in one of our meetings today, one of the interesting components is that, you know, for the cable nets, our CPMs are actually the same as our FAST channel CPMs, which is actually quite remarkable if you think about it. That really speaks to the quality of the audience.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Yeah

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

... when we go out and sell it. I think over time, over the next, you know, 12- 18 months, the goal is to actually go out to market, explain our product, talk about our audience, and of course, we wanna be part of the buy. Now, you may say, "Oh, but you're smaller, and you're this and you're that." That's great, but the reality is that we have, you know, some percentage of the total, you know, addressable market. If you buy YouTube TV or you buy Sling, I mean, we have audience too. If you care about reach, you're gonna have to buy us anyway. I think we're very well-positioned, but we have a lot of work to do. We're investing in technology, measurements, attribution, all of those things, and sales staff.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

We talked about the potential scaling on the content side.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yep

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

... of costs. What about on SG&A?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

and the rest of the cost of running the business? I know John has been doing a lot of work on this in the last year, but how much more is there to go?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

There's always more. You know that. We all know that there's more. I think, well, if you look at our, I don't know if we had a graphic in the in our letter. I think we did. Our operating expenses, if you look at every single line, I think we've improved on every line actually. We've improved on, I think our subscriber-related expense line, don't quote me on this, was 101%, came down to about 93%.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Yeah.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

I think our marketing, sales and marketing line went from 18%-13%. Think about that. It went from 18%-13% of revenue and, you know, I think we exceeded guidance fairly easily. If we just had that same budget, think about where those numbers may have gone. Sales and marketing. Technology, I think that's also come down significantly. I believe that there's more room.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

There's more room to come down on a dollar basis, not just as a % of revenue as you scale.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

I would say in some cases, both. you know, I think one area where there's real opportunity is the SaaS space. I think if you know. We were a startup for the last, you know, until 2020 when we went public. What's interesting is that nobody ever looked at cost. You know, when you start a company, Amazon, Microsoft, they Google, they all throw credits at you. When you get all these credits, it's free money, no one looks at like compute and all of these different costs. People are, you know, when you start to spec out what you're gonna build, one of the variables is never like efficiency. How efficient are you architecting your platform?

I think with this push towards profitability and everyone's focus on EBITDA, you know, companies are now gonna start looking at cloud costs. You know, they're gonna look at all of their SaaS services. Do I really need all these SaaS services? Many companies probably haven't renewed their contracts, I'll raise my hand here, for two-three years because who cares? We're growing, we're moving, things are going well. As you start to kind of look through all of the deals, all the SaaS services that you've subscribed to, you start to realize, wow, that volume back then was like 1/20th of what it is today. I think that, you know, John and the finance team has been very focused on continuing to review those, and I think there's more room there.

This gives us a little bit more room for error, right? If we miss something somewhere, I think that on the cost side, I think there's probably some good room. I mean, we spend a lot of money, right? I mean, it's a pretty big platform with thousands of channels. You know, I think we're millions, tens of millions of transactions. There's room for us to continue to improve these deals.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Real quick, I had one.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

... come in. You're building your own data center. What should we expect in terms of the cost to do that?

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

You know, I just want to remind everyone, we have over 2,000 feeds, so I'm not saying it makes sense for everybody. I think we've seen two things. One is we've seen cloud costs also decline again because we're being proactive about it. At the same time, I think that there's probably room for. Through 2025, there's going to be a good eight-figure savings out of that. It doesn't take a lot of people to run that. It's basically we're taking that same team and now saying, "We need you to do some additional work." We have like EPL games, and we have all kinds of content that, you know. Again, our business is video. Like if anything, you should own something, you should own your video infrastructure.

If you don't believe me, just again, look at the NBA playoffs and how many issues you saw from multiple services being able to deliver those games, directly.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Right. I wanna finish it up. We're over time.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Really quick, your confidence in having enough cash to get to break even, you've talked about in 2025.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yeah. Look, I've said I'm confident. The reason why I'm confident is, one, you've already seen a significant improvement in cash usage year-over-year. That's just, that's 1 data point. I get it. We have many levers to pull. I still believe we have pricing power, number one. Our ad business has a lot of room for growth, so that's just on the revenue side. Then on the cost side, you know, as John will tell you, we have every single team now, one of the key variables as to whether we or how we architect is the efficiency of the architecture. Every day we find tens of thousands of dollars daily of cost savings in the tech stack.

Again, you have cost levers, you have marketing lever, you have the advertising piece and pricing power, and you've seen that work out. I think that we don't have to pull all those levers. We can pull some of them. Retention improvements. You know, all of these things I think will lead to. Then renegotiating some of these deals. In some cases, there could be more content drops. And also the discovery of the FAST channels on the platform, that has also led to increased ad inventory. You know, there's just too many levers here for us not to be able to get there. Of course, we have to be diligent. We have to execute well. But I'm confident. I believe the others are confident as well.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Good

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

that we'll be able to deliver that number.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

That's a great place to leave it.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Yep.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Thanks, David.

David Gandler
CEO and Founder, fuboTV

Thanks.

Phil Cusick
Head of U.S. Telecom Services and Communications Infrastructure Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Thanks, everybody.

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