Good morning. Welcome, everyone, to Liberty's 2023 Investor Day. I'm Shane Kleinstein, Vice President of Investor Relations for Liberty. To those online and in the room, we're happy to have you here. Quick note that the winner of the competition for the dinner theme at yesterday's yesterday evening's investor dinner, we have Barton Crockett, with a runner-up from Christy Haubegger and Brandon Ross. So congrats, you'll have to follow up on your prize. Looking quickly at the agenda for today, we have presentations from all of our companies. We'll start with Liberty Media and Atlanta Braves, then Formula One, SiriusXM, Live Nation, Qurate Retail. We're doing something a little bit different today, so we will have a panel discussion on generative AI with Greg and guests, Brad Gerstner, the founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, and Joe Inzerillo, the Chief Product and Technology Officer of SiriusXM.
We think it'll be a great discussion, so hopefully, you will, you will join us for that. We do have lunch downstairs from 12 to 1. Hopefully, many of you saw we have F1 simulators downstairs as well. They are the official simulator of the F1 Sim Racing Pro Series that launches in Sweden in two weeks. There is a sign-up. We hope it will be slightly less competitive, certainly less expensive than joining an actual F1 seat. So go test your drive. And then in the afternoon, we have Liberty TripAdvisor with TripAdvisor, Liberty Broadband, Charter, GCI, and we'll end the day with our Q&A with John Malone and Greg Maffei. A few other administrative notes. Please take note of our Wi-Fi network, so you have this for the day. Same hashtag, different platform. Whatever your platform of choice is, we hope you will tag Liberty Investor Day.
We will have slides to post and a replay available on our website. But as the slide says, we ask that you please hold your horses. It does take some time for them to get up onto the website. Yes, those are in fact, John's horses, if you were curious. We appreciate your patience with this. And finally, we had some signs downstairs that noted we are not allowing any video recording in the auditorium today, which means you will have to fight temptation not to capture this. I invite you to turn your attention to our forward-looking statement. Don't worry, there will be more of them to come throughout the day. A big thank you to the team at Liberty, including the IR team, that makes all of this happen. Thank you for all of your work.
As always, we tried to prepare some brief entertainment. We aim to be timely, somewhat creative, decently humorous, which is very difficult in this audience at 9:00 A.M. That being said, we attempted. For those on the webcast, I apologize, the comedy is only available to those here in person. This year, we debated having ChatGPT write the comedy for us, for those who always ask if we hire outside professionals. We do not. In the end, courtesy of Liberty's in-house team, and in tribute to our friends at Warner Brother Discovery, we hope you enjoy
Good morning! Just want you to notice the tie, an homage to our friends, Barbie. Since we were last here, we'd like to think we at Liberty have been busy. Done a bunch of things, starting with LSXM, simplifying our tracking stock, and delevering the balance sheet. The tracking stock's pretty simple today, just 84% stake in Sirius, some cash, and some debt. We settled our converts, our 1 and 3/8, and our 2 and 1/8 exchangeables. We settled the intergroup interest, the Batter debt for exchangeable, which has been done this week, and so it's a very simple story at Liberty SiriusXM. And with that in mind, we recently made a proposal to merge, SiriusXM and Liberty SiriusXM.
As I said, we're not gonna comment anymore on that, but the rationale for the proposal is to obviously clean up the dual stock structure, provide a more flexible and attractive currency in new series, improve the trading dynamics, better liquidity, potential for index inclusion, allow management to focus on the business, and tell a better IR story with less distractions. SiriusXM had a great brand reveal yesterday, an app relaunch with exciting new content and lots of opportunities, and one thing is clear, Kevin Hart knows how to steal a show if any of you were there. Turning to F1. We expect to close our deal on Quint by year-end. LVGP is up for next week. It's amazing how much Renee and her team have done in a year.
Stood up an entire commercial organization for inaugural race, built a 300,000 sq ft pit building. It's a massive undertaking, and it will be an enormous spectacle. We're very excited. We've also done some other things to improve the business. We refinanced our term loan B, and the spread was reduced by 100 basis points. That's about a $17 million annual interest savings, and the strength of the F1 business continues. We have multiple new deals and renewals, a new global partnership with Qatar Airways, Amex has joined us as a new regional partner in the Americas, and we've done upsells with Heineken, MSC, and Paramount+ .
Turning now to the new Liberty Live tracker, we think it clearly highlights the power of Live, and I'll talk a little bit more about it in a sec, but we issued a new 2 and 3/8 exchangeable there and repurchased the vast majority of our old exchangeables. Live Nation continues to experience record demand. For a while, we've talked about the shift to the spend on live events. COVID was a little dip, we'll fully acknowledge, but that trend continues, and no one has tapped that, perhaps, better than Live Nation, and they continue to see growth, not only in concerts, but particularly domestically, but particularly overseas. Looking at Liberty Live, why did we do it? Obviously, to simplify the tracking stock structure. It's been trading a little over three months, and out of the gates, it's a very discounted, attractive play on Live itself.
I'd note that since we initially invested in Live, it's up about 600%, and we still remain very bullish on its prospects. The composition of this tracker is likely to evolve, and we've talked about it a little in the past. You can see us add more live events, more venues, and other assets that could potentially fit well with Live Nation over time. If you look at the part on the right, the slide, of the slide, you'll note we have a history of creating these trackers, which may look uncertain and may be evolving entities, but over time, they tend to gain focus and clarity. Liberty Ventures Group acquired a stake in Liberty Broadband Charter. It acquired GCI. It spun into GCI Liberty, and it merged with Liberty Broadband, Liberty Media Group.
At one time, the largest asset was at stake in Live, and it used that tracker to acquire F1. So we have a history of doing this, and we think with pretty good result. This last year, we spun off. Since the last Investor Day, we spun off the Braves. Why did we do that? We think it'll allow us to reduce the discount to private market value. It will now enable us to have future flexibility. So far, the market's been pretty supportive. Currently, the Batter C are up about 18%, and they've been up as much as 38% since our announcement.
I'd also note that this had a positive trend on trading liquidity, with the average daily float up about 130% post-split versus the comparable pre-split period, and the Batter float itself is up about 22%, partially due to our settlement of the intergroup interest that we had. So we tend to stick our neck out at Liberty on some of these and make pronouncements about where things are going in the industry, partly to educate ourselves and hopefully tell you where things are going in our minds, because it may tell you what we are likely to do. And you've seen some of the things we've talked about, how much video, the excess of video, created a circular firing squad among those participants, one of the reasons we exited Starz.
That audio had perhaps had more upside than the eye, and most recently, we talked about how the Olympic system, those connections with customers, allow you to build super attractive binding business models. So, as I said, one of the reasons we talk about some of these things is not only to educate, but to give you a foreshadowing of where we are likely to go, and you've seen that over time. Our actions have matched our words, and this doesn't include assets that are outside of Liberty Media, like Charter, but we've tended to exit vulnerable spaces like DirecTV and Starz because we saw that video was less attractive, with content costs increasing and the saturation in video and a questionable profitability model. We also exited smaller stakes in Viacom, AT&T, iHeart, Clear Channel, and LendingTree.
But as the media landscape has evolved, we've looked for different ways to play it. We still love subscription businesses, but in many cases, those have gotten very expensive and harder to find and been bid up. Today, we really are concentrated and focused on another attractive place, which we call the premium IP ecosystem. Those assets are popular, exclusive, and leverageable. What does it mean to be, in our minds, a premium IP owner? All IP has some level of moat and some level of protection, but we think these are particularly differentiated. It's where the customers are fans first and foremost, whether it be an asset, a sport, a team, or a brand. And what's a better, stickier customer than a fan? You know, in our thought piece last year, I talked a little about the Olympic system and those connections.
You can make a durable bond when you bond emotionally to the customer, and they bond emotionally to the business, and in many cases, those companies that do that bring comfort or joy to their customers. Another element of this is that scarcity is driving demand. These premium assets, in and of themselves, are scarce, for example, sports assets. That limited supply, merged with the opportunity to have interaction with a fan or an artist, and the high demand that entails, creates great economics. That's something we all learned in Economics 101. A third element, perhaps, of this premium IP model is opportunities for expansion, the ability to leverage and extend that valuable IP into new opportunities, create new touchpoints, and again, grow the overall fan base. That flywheel has been very powerful, and we think it's very attractive. F1's a great example.
Our fan base is loyal and growing. Since 2018, excuse me, we have grown the overall fans by 40%, with 40% of the fans now female, and our fans continue to get younger. Looking at this flywheel of fan demand and stickiness, you can see, while the number of fans is, is huge, these fans also become the best customers. We've had continued sellouts despite some capacity increases, and we've seen overall engagement rise dramatically. This growth and the broader engagement among new and heritage fans is very interesting and powerful because many fans interact in new and different ways. Our linear viewership is still growing strong, but given the change in the marketplace, you can see that we've seen engagement growing across all sorts of new platforms: social media, f1.com, F1 TV, all part of the broader ecosystem.
F1 TV, for example, is up 30% year to date. Now, look at the 110 million fans that are on the slide that are visitors to f1.com. It's a stunningly large number. Even perhaps more impressive is the growth and how many have gone become registered fans. 2.5 million, up to 19 million over the same time period. We have been the fastest growing sport on social for multiple years. Perhaps most interesting is our growth in the U.S. market, a key area for focus and a key area with growth potential, we believe. We've seen huge crowds in some of the U.S. races, and the vast majority have been sellouts.
We've seen two million people turn into this year's Miami Grand Prix, and what's interesting, you see, you look against the NASCAR numbers and others, if you look at our fan base, it's younger and growing compared to many other sports, and that particularly stands out in the motorsport area. We have the largest audience for Formula One in the U.S. on YouTube and TikTok, and we've seen 60% growth in those platforms year-over-year. So it's still early in the U.S. This is the first year of our third race, but we're excited to see new distributors enter the market and potentially be people who bid on this engagement, bid on this growth in new ways, even in the traditional linear and mobile space.
One of the points about scarcity, obviously, is there's only one F1, and that high demand, meeting the scarce supply we have, has seen enormous growth in all parts of our revenue stream. Let's look at race promotion. We are limited and capped at 24 races, and we've grown that. But one of the things that happens is, because you only have the 24, cities and countries have bid against themselves, make many cases, two cities in the same country or across different geographies, and we've been able to leverage that competitive tension to grow our promotion revenue. Look at media rights.
Typically, we tend to have one major carriage partner in each territory, but as additional players have entered the landscape with interest, whether they be linear or digital, and with the growth of our overall engagement and the growth of F1 TV, we've seen massive opportunities in media rights. Turn now to sponsorship. We do maintain exclusivity and tightness of supply at various tiers, but we've been able to add new signage and new and different kinds of opportunities for sponsorship through digital signage and other product offerings, and we kept demand high in that, in that space, and that's allowed us to access the premium brand value that we bring and tap this growing fan base. And we've also seen interest and success around our new sustainability initiatives, because that's an important element for many sponsors.
Finally, looking at the other revenue streams, like hospitality, again, the paddock club, the limited supply there, even though we've been able to increase that to a degree, prices have gone up faster, demand has gone up faster, and we've been able to drive those revenue streams in an attractive fashion. One of the other things that we really love about this premium IP is the ability to expand it into new areas. We talked about the 12 commercial sponsorships, partners we've added since 2021. We look at the whole ecosystem. The team values, as much as F1 itself is up and our F1 is up, the team values are up something like five times since we became involved, and we've been able to add new and star-studded investors like Rory and Patrick Mahomes and Anthony Joshua.
But down below, you can see the way we continue to broaden the ecosystem with new series, new OEMs, F1 Arcade, F1 Exhibition. F1 Arcade had 300,000 visitors in its first year at its London venue, and they plan 21 new permanent venues in the U.S. within five years. We also look to expand in other new medias. For example, as great and successful as we've done with Drive to Survive, can't count on it forever. We've expanded into new podcasts, and we have plans for a great movie in conjunction with Apple that'll bring Brad Pitt to the screen and think bring our audiences to a whole new level. So continuing to find new ways to touch our fans is important. Part of that also is extending the reach out with the premium experiences, and that's why we bought Quint.
Quint is a premium hospitality provider to over 90 sporting events globally. We believe the transaction will be immediately EBITDA accretive, and it's a logical extension of F1 and sports more broadly. We think enhancing, for Quint, enhancing an F1 partnership and that closer relationship will allow them expand their role locations and also leverage Liberty's relationship, relationships to expand to new and live events partners. For F1, it's gonna be great to have better knowledge of our fan base, bring more efficiency to our ticketing distribution, and create better fan opportunities to do high-end things at the track. A dinner on the track, a tour, a garage tour, a track tour, potentially a hot lap. Creating those opportunities and different ways for our fans to touch, fuels demand, and is also accretive to that flywheel.
So I'm gonna turn to Vegas in a moment, but before we talk about it, I'm gonna show you a teaser from the opening ceremony. If you can't tell, we are very excited about Vegas. We think it will be iconic, the biggest event in Vegas history, and it will capitalize and further fuel our strong U.S. growth and expand opportunities and excitement worldwide. The engagement for this race has been unbelievable. Whoops, I'm on the We got to slip a slide forward. Thank you. I missed my click. 144 million social impressions. 12 million people have engaged on those impressions, and there have been over 71 million video views. We've also done great work in the community.
We know we have taxed them with our construction and road delays, but we've done great work in the community to bring local hires, investments in facilities, donations. We think it's a pilot for sustainable event initiatives that we've undertaken at F1, and we will estimate that the total economic impact we will bring to Las Vegas will be about $1.2 billion. But the significant benefits to the broader ecosystem are more than just one race. We think this is gonna impact our fans globally. The excitement of a night race down the strip will be unparalleled, and we continue to bring in and expand partnerships because of F1 in Vegas. An example I mentioned already is Amex, who is excited to bring their customers, their branding, but most of all, engage and niche activate on-site at Vegas and other races around North America.
And we're gonna use the learnings from Vegas across the race calendar, and we're gonna work with other promoters to raise the bar and continually improve the experience at our races and attempt to create a super-like, Super Bowl-like experience every weekend. We think this is all gonna be positive to grow our fan base over time, and there is more potential to grow anand optimize both the size and profitability of Vegas in years to come. A key element of both Vegas and Quint and in many of the things we're doing is trying to build deeper fan relationships. We wanna understand and prioritize what our fans want and do, and what they do, and know that in a way to serve them better. The direct-to-consumer data that we're gonna get from Vegas and Quint and other owned properties between.
At Vegas ticketing, the app that we created, the on-site spend. At Quint, with the database of leads and clients they have, which is over one million today and across 114 countries. At F1 TV, which has grown 30% year to date, as I said, and at f1.com, the app, which has grown 32% year to date over the prior year. All of those give us a huge opportunity to better understand and leverage our fan insights. We'll have greater fan outreach, improve the customer experience, allow new opportunities for content creation, and we can share this information with partners to better serve them and optimize revenue to us. All of this is important to understanding who our new fans are, and especially important in some of the growth markets, who come in.
These fans have come in for different reasons than our traditional fans or our heritage fans. It's great to have growing fans. It's even more impactful if you understand how to make them great customers. So we're super excited about the F1 business and its future opportunities and prospects, but we're not the only ones. Let me show you a quick teaser from our friends at CNBC, who are gonna talk about the business of F1 in a special that airs next Thursday night at 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time, in advance of the Vegas race.
People are really excited about the sport and where it's going. The U.S. has gone crazy and has woken up to what Formula 1 is. It's about fastest man and fastest machine wins. This is Lewis's car? This is Lewis's car, number 44. Can you put a price on the car? It cost about $50 million to develop. Our business today generates about $600 million in revenue. A CNBC documentary, Inside Track: The Business of Formula 1, premieres Thursday, November 16th, 8:00 P.M. Eastern.
So F1 is super exciting. It's a great example of leveraging premium IP, but we have another one in our portfolio, Live Nation, which is equally exciting and doing a wonderful job also of leveraging IP. There's a controlled supply of artists meeting huge demand, and Michael Rapino will talk more about this shortly. But when your fans are your strongest, most passionate customers, you have a great customer set. 92% of fans say they expect to go to the same or more shows in 2024 that they did in 2023. 67% of fans say that live concerts are among their most memorable events of the year. At Live Nation, the supply drives demand, or you could say harnesses latent demand. When favorite artists announce a concert, people say they wanna go.
They wanna go and are excited to attend, and that strong fan connection with artists is a huge opportunity for Live Nation, particularly as it grows globally. You've seen global audiences grow across TikTok, Insta, and streaming, and demand for concerts today is truly global, and the artists are able to tour a wider set of markets. You can see that particularly with the growth in the international markets. These expanding opportunities, with more growth to come, the tailwind from the shift to experiential spend, concerts being an affordable luxury that are underpriced compared to many other live experiences, are driving continued growth. I mentioned how much of it's overseas. International fan growth was 34% last year, and international acts have doubled their representation over the last five years as out of the total pie that's growing.
The pipeline for new venues and new acts remains very strong, and this expansion fuels fan growth as well. All of this is very positive in terms of creating that premium IP flywheel. SiriusXM has many of the same elements, with a strategy that emphasizes unique content in a lean-back model. It is premium IP, with fans leveraging beloved hosts and celebrities and exclusive content like sports. Sirius customers are first and foremost fans. They find community and comfort in listening to their favorite SiriusXM host. For example, the top 25 channels on SiriusXM are all hosted channels, and they build relationships with those hosts, in many cases, connecting in the car. Three-quarters of Americans drive to work alone.
That may not be believable to this New York audience, but it is the predominant method of travel to your office or your, or to your place of work. A high percentage of them actually have anxiety in driving to work, and Sirius can be an oasis. We've talked about some of those Olympic connections and providing that opportunity to bond with your customers. Sirius has that in spades. This brand, with a huge scale, with a huge, sticky customer base, attracts desirable talent, and there's a positive flywheel that flows around that as well.
It fuels that premium strategy, and one of the things you heard about, talked about yesterday at their event, and Jennifer Witz will talk about more, is continuing to leverage the strength of that content, the strength of that experience across new platforms to grow their fans as well, that positive flywheel. The last one to talk about is our friends at the Braves, who absolutely have premium IP-rich content. Scarcity of sports wins, teams rather, is a huge example of IP content that has been bid up. And it's exciting to see what's happened in baseball because of all the new rule changes, which have absolutely reinvigorated the baseball ecosystem. Shorter game times, more successful stolen bases. It's been a more exciting season with higher attendance, and interestingly, like F1, they've been able to actually draw a younger fan base.
The Braves are arguably the most successful team in the baseball ecosystem. Bleacher Report voted them as having the best on-field and off-field business performance, and you can see it. While it was disappointing, obviously, we didn't make it all the way back to the World Series like in 2021, we did manage to have an unbelievably good season, our sixth straight National League title. The Braves have the longest active division title streak in baseball since the divisions were created in 1969. In the regular season, we tied for the second-most wins in season in the franchise history. We had six finalists for the Silver Slugger, three Golden Gloves.
As you heard earlier on the Barbie tape, 8 of our players go to the MLB All-Star game, and we were the finalist for the first-ever team Silver Slugger, recognizing overall offensive excellence. Look, it's valuable sports IP. There are only 30 baseball teams, and most importantly, there's only one Braves. We'd like to think we have a history of strong returns at Liberty. We are investors, first and foremost, for the long term, and the strength of the portfolio has shown that. It almost doubled the S&P 500 since I joined in 2005. But we also think about how to make it a sustainable business for the long term, because that's good business, and we're driving meaningful impact with tangible results across our businesses.
At F1 with e-fuels and road applicability, at F1 Academy, growing the opportunity for women and girls in the sport, led by Susie Wolff, has already received support from all 10 Formula One teams. At the Braves, we have enormous high community impact with the Braves Foundation and the Henry Louis Aaron Fund, and supporting HBCUs to increase representation at the Braves at Live Nation with sustainable events and diversity across all the platforms, and at SiriusXM, showing talent with different perspectives and allowing a platform for meaningful dialogue. All of these are based on what's most important and necessary for each company and their stakeholders. So with that, I'm gonna say thank you, and we'll be back soon to talk about some other companies.
Good morning. This is what we announced last year. It happened. Just a quick reminder of what we went through. The Braves tracking stock became an asset-backed security through a split-off transaction that was completed in the middle of July. And in connection with the split-off, we recapitalized the tracking stocks and created the Liberty Live Group.
Holders of Liberty SiriusXM, Liberty Sirius and Formula One Group received shares in Liberty Live Group equal to their proportionate interest or share of net assets, and the intergroup interests were settled out, which brings us to where we are today. A simplified tracking stock structure with separate securities to track our holdings in SiriusXM, the Formula One investment, and Live Nation. Liberty SiriusXM now only tracks our investment in SIRI. We also have meaningfully reduced the debt balance here, which we'll talk about more in a minute, with still solid liquidity there, with $1.1 billion in capacity under the margin loan. The Formula One Group is primarily our investment in Formula One, along with our Vegas investments. Here on the NAV, we've conservatively included the purchase price for the Vegas land.
We've also included the Quint acquisition at the announced enterprise value and adjusted the cash balance for this pending transaction, which we expect to close later this year. The ultimate cash consideration could vary based on various closing conditions. There's private assets included here with the investment in F1 Arcade, Meyer Shank Racing, and the pit building related to the Vegas race. We've also taken attractive balance sheet actions and reduced the cost of debt since last year. More to come on that. Liberty Live Group has our Live Nation stake and various private assets. Live stake, as of yesterday, was $6.1 billion. There's also cash and liquid investments at quarter end of $417 million. We also have $400 million available on the Live Nation margin loan.
There's $380 million of private assets, which were measured as of the S4 filing date. We don't plan on giving updates to that value in the future. On the liability side, we raised a new 2.375% Live exchangeables and repurchased 93% of the existing 0.5% exchangeables. Looking at the SiriusXM, the LSXM balance sheet, the prioritization here has been simplification and deleveraging of LSXM this year. Note, this slide doesn't factor in the reduction for the Live Nation debt that was attributed to the new Live tracker, along with the Live equity stake. So since last year, we've issued a new 3.75% convert.
We used those proceeds to retire the 2.125% SIRI exchangeables and partially retire the 1.375 basket convertible before quarter end. After quarter end, the basket convert and associated bond hedge and warrants were fully retired. In total, we've reduced LSXM net debt balance by over $500 million year to date, using cash on hand, including the SIRI dividend proceeds, the F1 intergroup interest settlement that was done in connection with the reclassification. And then earlier this week, we completed the exchange of the 1.8 million Batter K shares for proceeds of $61 million, which was used to repay margin loan debt. The net debt to asset value here improved from 14.7% to 11.3% as of 9/30.
Looking at Liberty Live Group, we've capitalized Liberty Live Group with cash and monetizable holdings of $315 million in cash and 102 million of liquid ETF assets as of quarter end. There's 400 million undrawn margin loan capacity, resulting in total liquidity of $817 million. We have the ability to monetize against an attractive Live equity. Following refinancing activity earlier in the year, we have $1.2 billion principal amount of debt against 69 million shares, with a value of about $6.1 billion, as we just discussed. There's 49 million unencumbered Live shares. There's less Live shares per bond under the new exchangeable due to a 16% increase in the exchange price. The result of all this is an attractive 14% net debt to asset value.
Turning to Formula One and their profitability, we've seen impressive growth in OIBDA since 2018, with 10% CAGR through the 12 months ended 9/30. Margins have held steady as leverage in certain expense categories, such as team payments, have been reinvested to fuel continued growth in the business. In aggregate, team payment dollars have grown from a little over $900 million in 2018 to just under $1.2 billion as of last year. It's an increase of 27%, as the teams have benefited from the overall growth in the ecosystem. With that said, team payments as a percent of OIBDA have come down nearly 400 basis points during this period.
As we said at earnings, year to date, we're at 64.6 versus the 65.6 in this slide, and this reflects generally higher Q2 and Q3 team payments, which are higher than the full year amount due to the higher mix of European races, F1 is reinvesting this cost leverage on growth initiatives like the Vegas race, F1 Academy, and generally just supporting growth in the other revenue streams. The pie charts here show year-to-date 2023 to 2022. As you can see, freight costs have come down meaningfully, with a corresponding increase or decrease in revenue, but improving margins year- over- year. Hospitality and experience costs are up, driven by increased Paddock Club attendance, costs of higher quality experiences offered for our guests, and inflationary pressures.
Lastly, you can see here the impact of the F1 Academy and the LVGP investments from in the current year. As we've said before, other costs in SG&A are best viewed as a % of total revenue versus just other revenue. Some examples of other increases we've seen are higher commission costs as we've signed more commercial partners and grow F1 TV. There's also inflation and travel costs post-pandemic, and then we've also, as we mentioned last year, transitioned the F1 LTIP to a cash-based program from a stock-based. This slide should look relatively familiar. I think we went through this at least four times so far. We're here, we look at the five-year average of OIBDA free cash flow conversion for F1. F1 continues to have a very strong free cash flow conversion, despite organic investments in the Las Vegas race.
Compared to last year, we continue to see interest expense come down, driven by refinancing activity and debt reduction. Working capital has gone from nearly neutral in past years to a much more significant positive. This is largely due to timing of Q1 race fees being received in Q4, and also impacts from the Vegas race for the first time. Taxes are generally consistent, but we expect to see a modest uptick in the cash tax rate due to changes in UK rates. We expect to be a high single-digit payer as a percent of F1 adjusted OIBDA in 2024, trending towards low double digits in future years. There's been a modest uptick in F1 CapEx, driven by investments in the improved media and tech center out at Biggin Hill, which enables remote broadcast operations and enhancements in regional feeds.
These are improvements that should reduce travel costs in the future and help get us to our carbon neutral goals. Major impact to CapEx has been driven by the Vegas race-related activities, and as we've discussed before, the pit building investments are at the F1 corporate level, while the track-related CapEx is at the OpCo level. Even with these Vegas investments, you see free cash flow conversion at the F1 consolidated level is relatively consistent with the prior year at 58%, and that improves to 70% if you exclude the Vegas startup investments. We've been managing leverage at Formula 1. We've continued to reduce our leverage despite recent investments and have taken steps to reduce interest costs.
We lowered the term loan B 25 basis points from meeting certain leverage tests in early Q2, and then we completed an attractive refinancing in October to further reduce the spread another 75 basis points to 225. This will result, as Greg said, in about $17 million of annual interest savings going forward, and the liquidity picture at the Formula 1 group is still strong. With nearly $1.2 billion of cash on hand, pro forma for the Quint acquisition, and $500 million available on the F1 revolver. We've done this while investing. Since the first quarter of 2022, we've made significant investments to continue to grow the F1 ecosystem. We made the Vegas land purchase and invested in the pit building and track construction.
We announced the Quint acquisition, and we invested in the growing F1 Arcade business at both the corporate and OpCo level. The business has performed incredibly well in London and is now expanding to the U.S. The broadcast center refurbishment that we just discussed will optimize the efficiency of our broadcasting capabilities and should be margin accretive as we move forward. We've also spent over $1 billion in strategic capital structure actions, including net debt paydown of over $700 million, which is attractive in this current interest rate environment, and we also bought back the LSXMA shares from the settlement of the IGIs. We will continue to invest where we see opportunistic uses of LSXMA capital and weigh all capital return strategies.
We, as we said, still have $1.2 billion of cash in the $500 million revolver. Vegas, baby, it's next week! We're almost at the long-anticipated race weekend. It's been amazing progress by the Vegas team to get the pit building built, the track ready, and all the associated infrastructure in place 18 months from the time of our land purchase and only 1 year after breaking ground. There's been an incredible amount of new sponsors that have been brought into the Formula 1 ecosystem and Vegas in particular, as a result of the race. As Greg mentioned, Vegas is about more than the race week, and we are seeing tangential benefits to the overall ecosystem from the race. Our land and building purchases represent long-term investments in Vegas. We're expected to be racing beyond 10 years.
We believe the CapEx spend is an attractive organic investment in the business versus acquiring an existing business. And for this first year, we're especially focused on a highest quality fan experience that includes certain startup costs to ensure that experience. Examples of these costs include the opening ceremony, which you just saw, enhanced security, overprovisioning of access points, overprovisioning of food and beverage, developing our own way-finding app, and other costs. We are confident in the long-term returns and see significant opportunities for efficiencies and incremental fan engagements in year two and beyond. Despite the Braves being spun, I would be remiss if I didn't remind investors that sports assets have had attractive returns over recent years, and the scarcity of sports assets only enhances those ultimate values.
I'm not here to walk through an ad on the Braves, but the Braves have an attractive dynamic with a successful baseball team and a successful and growing mixed-use commercial development with The Battery. We would note that the private market transactions have historically been executed at a premium to the Sportico and Forbes values. Here on the slide, Sportico attempts to include a very conservative estimate for of The Battery in their valuation, but we'll just leave you with the stabilized NOI of the various Battery projects and allow you to do your own math. Lastly, looking at the Braves' capital structure. The Braves have consistently executed on a strategy to maintain strong revenue growth while investing back in the team. Through 9/30, revenue was at 11%, up 11% year-to-date, excluding the postseason, and showing an 8% adjusted OIBDA growth while growing payroll prudently.
Incremental battery development requires minimal capital outlay, which has historically been funded by the battery cash flow. The Office 3 equity investment of $20 million is complete, and the remainder is to be funded through debt. The Henry land contribution is complete. And on the debt side, since the last Investor Day, we've refinanced certain mixed-use debt facilities and entered into a new loan for the Office 3 project. We have a reasonably weighted average cost of debt of under 5% and a comfortable average maturity of 8 years. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. I'm excited to give you an update on the Formula One business. Since this time last year, Formula One has continued to go from strength to strength, with 2023 setting many new records as the sport popularity continues to grow across metrics. We are continuing to see sellout crowds at the majority of races, record attendances, and strong growth across our social and digital platforms, which continues to outperform that of other major sport leagues. 2023 will also see another record sales year for our Paddock Club premium hospitality product. Underpinning our strength is a sustained demand for high-quality, live events, with Formula One races often the largest sporting event on a host country national calendar. Our events continue to attract huge spectator numbers, driving significant economics and social benefits for the countries and city where we race.
From a sporting perspective, we congratulate Red Bull and Max Verstappen on their incredible performance this season. Max has taken his place in the esteemed company of only five drivers to win three successive titles. Congratulations on their stellar performance, and to all the Red Bull team at the races and back at the factory. On the business side, we've made excellent progress in securing new and renewed commercial deals this past year. Looking at our promotion agreement, unprecedented demand for limited calendar slot continues to drive renewals at competitive rates. Several races even renewed earlier to secure a long-term spot. We extended agreements with both Austria and Hungary beyond 2030, bringing the number of races contracted equal or beyond that date to nine events. We were also pleased to renew the Netherlands, Azerbaijan, Belgium, and Brazil.
On our media rights this past year, we signed contracts in important markets, including Mexico, Belgium, Japan, Latin America, China, Spain, and Portugal. Our broadcast partners are improving the quality of their coverage and have increased coverage hours over 10% this season compared to 2022, according to Nielsen data. We have also invested in expanding content to increase the value for our media partners, including introducing helmet cameras for all 20 drivers, new regional feeds, and our first ever F1 broadcast for kids, which aired from Hungary and Singapore, and will do so again in Abu Dhabi. Finally, new and existing sponsors are increasingly finding value in the strength of our global brand and the resonance of our ESG commitments.
Qatar Airways has been a key supplier, supporting our international air freight in recent years, and became our global airline partners at the start of the season. Following a competitive process, we recently confirmed Pirelli will continue as our global tire partner from 2025 to 2027. Pirelli have put a focus on research and development of sustainable tire solution as part of their support of the sustainability targets set by Formula One, and from 2024, all tires used in F1 events will be Forest Stewardship Council certified. We announced a multi-year regional partnership with American Express as an official payment partners for the F1 in the Americas and for the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
We also renewed an upsold agreement with Heineken, MSC Cruises, Paramount +, and Liqui Moly, and welcome Puma as our new official apparel partner, under which they will create licensed collection of apparel and footwear products beginning 2024. Looking to the future, we are capitalizing on the current momentum to drive maximum value for our sport and invest strategically for sustained economic growth. These efforts are focused across several initiatives: maximizing value across the commercial rights, augmenting our diverse and valuable fan base, investing in strategic markets, bringing world-class racing, and prioritizing sustainability in our operation with our partners. Starting with maximizing value across commercial right. We are fortunate to have multi-year contracts across our primary revenue streams, some extending as long as 15 years.
As of the third quarter, Formula One has $11 billion of contracted revenue secured in multi-year agreements, nearly double the balance at the year-end 2019. The interest from external commercial partners continues to grow. There is only one Formula One. We are able to leverage the scarcity of this asset and drive demand across revenue streams. Touching first on race promotion partners, we have announced some 24-race calendar for next year. We recognize and appreciate the effort from all our teams, the FIA, and our own personnel, that will be required to execute a calendar of this size. After reaching this milestone 24-races calendar, our priority is to increase the quality and the value of every race slot. Limited weekends and high demand from host location has created a positive competitive tension upon renewals.
We are working with our promoter partners on efforts to enhance race weekends, including through better fan experience, best practices around sustainability, improved fan access, and circuit connectivity. Moving to media rights. Broadcasters recognize the size and the loyalty of F1 audience, and its very attractive demographics. Season to date, our global TV audience are averaging nearly 70 million per race weekend, far exceeding event audiences of other large sport properties. Our F1 TV product has continued to grow, deliver an impressive 30% increase in active F1 TV Pro subscribers year-over-year through the third quarter. As an incredible sport property with 24 races across five continents in 2024, we will continue to offer unrivaled levels of global reach and recognition to our media partners. Alternative bidders for live sport, including digital players, will only increase competition for scarce rights.
On our sponsorship agreement, we are focused on optimizing our existing inventory to maximize impact, exclusivity, and value for our partners. At the same time, we are creating new tailored assets to satisfy growing demand. The Sprint and F1 Academy are just two examples of expanding our available inventory with high potential for incremental sponsorship. The other untapped category verticals we are currently focused on, including financial services, consumer electronics, and betting, to name a few. In 2023, our broadcast production team introduced a new solution to incorporate enhanced virtual signals into our programming by delivering multiple variants of our international feed to both service existing partners in a new way, and to bring in new partners on a regional basis. Our recently announced American regional deal with American Express is a great example that will leverage these capabilities. Finally, on hospitality.
We continue to enhance our F1 Paddock Club, working with our delivery partner, DO & CO, to refresh its look and feel for 2023, and to continue to deliver a best-in-class experience for our guests. At the same time, we are developing new high-end hospitality products, including the F1 Garage, which allow guests to experience the excitement of an F1 race from hospitality suite situated in the pit lane. Liberty's planned acquisition of Quint Events will enhance our ability to grow in hospitality and experience. Now, turning to our second area of focus, augmenting our diverse and valuable fan base. Our fans continue to be among our most valuable assets. To help us better understanding them, we generated an enhanced audience segmentation analysis that spans 10 global markets and aggregates feedback from over 20,000 F1 fans.
A key area of focus is understanding the attitudes and behavior of our newer fans, defined as those who started following F1 in the past four years. This group represents a third of our global fan base, and even larger share in the U.S. Newer fans skew younger, and a large share are female. According to fan survey, they are drawn to F1 for a multitude of reasons, including the global nature of the sport, the driver personality, and their story off the racetrack. We're leveraging this insight in creating efforts on and off the track to engage our fan base, both for cultivating loyal and long-standing fans, while also developing deeper relationship with newer ones. Starting with on the track, the Sprint Series is a successful example of innovating in our core product for increased fan engagement.
In 2023, we expanded from 3 to 6 sprint events, and introduced a new format that increased the level of intensity and action across the entire race weekend. We have 3 full days on-track excitement, and the Sprint is a standalone event with no bearing on the Grand Prix. The TV audience on sprint weekends have consistently surpassed comparable non-sprint weekends, with the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend viewership up to 10%, and the Belgian Grand Prix weekend up to 20% compared to 2022. Friday race attendance on sprint weekends, which includes qualifying for Sunday race, stand on average 30% higher than the Fridays of traditional race weekends. Off the track, our digital platform enable us to expand the content beyond the races momentum, and we continue to see sustained growth across our F1 website and social platform.
Apple is well into production, their highly anticipated F1 movie starring Brad Pitt. Filming has taken place at several races in 2023, including at Silverstone, where the A-list actors and their fictional team filmed on track, operated from a garage in the pits, and lined up their cars on the grid alongside the F1 teams and drivers. In the way Netflix has introduced a whole new audience to F1, we believe Apple's film will similarly boost interest in our sport among the broader audience in the U.S. and globally. Our new licensed experiential venue, F1 Arcade and F1 Exhibition, have exceeded expectations. F1 Arcade opened in London last November, and has already welcomed at least 300,000 visitors.
Their team plans to launch 20 additional F1 Arcade venues in the next 5 years, starting with the second U.K. venue in Birmingham, opening later this month, followed by new U.S. destinations in Boston and Washington, D.C., in 2024. The first F1 Exhibition opened in Madrid in April and became Spain's biggest temporary show in 2023. It will now move to Vienna as the next stop on its 10-year global tour, bringing immersive experiences and building F1 brand equity to drive fan engagement. F1 fans today access the sport through an unprecedented range of channels and platforms. New behaviors, especially those of younger digital natives, require a review of how we measure audience and engagement. For example, fans are increasingly turning to streaming and digital platforms, including F1 TV and YouTube, for content that is not captured by standard TV ratings system.
Formula One has taken a step toward more holistic measure approach that can capture our wider viewership and engagement. We are working closely with key distribution partners to integrate Nielsen measurement capabilities for capturing streaming and social audiences. This will become increasingly important as OTT platform continue to lean into live sport content. We are also measuring the quality of fan experience through ratings in addition to audience size, as complementary methods of engagement. Our capabilities around analyzing content and channel consumption by demographic have meaningfully improved, which is increasingly important as the diversity of our fan base grows. Our new approach will help us better measure how F1 fans engage with the sport, and demonstrate the value generated to our partners. We will continue to update you on our progress with a richer and more holistic set of audience metrics. Our third focus area is investing in strategic markets.
Growth markets for F1 are about far more than hosting on new races. We are constantly canvassing for strategic markets with under-monetized fan potential, where we can engage across all pillars of our business. This includes opportunity to improve the media coverage, cultivate commercial partners with strong local presence, and potentially bring new races. We believe the U.S. and Asia are both underpenetrated fan markets with an incremental growth opportunity across revenue streams. In the U.S., while our momentum has been incredible, we believe we are still early in our growth trajectory. The U.S. represent the largest market in our fan database, and our largest market on social platform, like YouTube and TikTok, with over 50% growth in social followers across U.S. social channels versus last year.
On TV viewership, we've seen growing U.S. TV audience this season to date, with average viewership per race weekend up versus 2022. Three of the four largest U.S. audiences for the F1 races are occurred during the 2023 season. I noted that in the U.S., 18 of our races are simulcasted across ESPN and ESPN +, while reported linear viewership figures do not capture ESPN + viewership. The Las Vegas Grand Prix further cement our commitment to U.S. as a strategic growth market. With only one week to go, we are confident the event will set new benchmark for our sport. It will be a spectacle like no other. Under Liberty ownership, F1 has championed turning Grand Prix weekends into multi-day spectacle to maximize value for both the fans and the host destination.
Vegas will showcase the vision in an unprecedented ways, beginning with a must-see opening ceremony on Wednesday evening that will be broadcast and feature leading music and entertainment acts. We are confident the Las Vegas Grand Prix will deliver an incredible fan experience and accrue long-lasting commercial benefit for the broader F1 ecosystem. Our next area of focus, the hallmark of sport, is bringing world-class racing. Formula One is the pinnacle of global motorsport, and the sport history dating back to 1950 centers around the thrill of racing and technological innovation. We are defining our technical sporting strategy to ensure automotive relevance for years to come. The proof of these efforts can be seen with the three new OEMs committed to enter or rejoin F1, beginning in 2026: Audi, Ford, and Honda.
This is a testament and validation of our next-generation hybrid engine strategy, as well as our 100% sustainable fuel initiative, which I'll touch on shortly. We are three years into the 2021 Concord Agreement, which amended the technical and financial regulation to provide a more sustainable economic environment for our teams. While we recognize Red Bull and Max Verstappen's dominance this season, the playing field among teams then has indeed become more level, and the 2023 season has delivered compelling racing across the rest of the grid. Season to date, over half the teams have been represented on the podiums. We have had incredible battles in qualifying rounds, especially in Hungary. The team, in particular, are benefiting from lower cost of competition following the successful introduction of the cost cap, but also from growing prize money and sponsorship income.
Surging popularity, combined with improved financial sustainability, has resulted in meaningful appreciation in the F1 team valuations. Prioritizing sustainability in our operation and with our partners. Sustainability is integrated into all facets of the F1 business. It is critical to our personnel, commercial partners, teams, fans, and ensuring longevity for our business. I'm proud of the incredible progress we have made. The sport commitment to 100% sustainable fuels and next-generation hybrid engine in 2026 has attracted more of the world largest OEM branded to enter F1. Recent discussion and view across the EU show the potential for this solution in the automotive sector for existing and new vehicles, adding further validation to have a future power unit and fuel plans. The proportion of Formula One's carbon footprint related to race cars themselves is less than 1%.
While small, our sustainable fuel initiative will have a multiplier effect. F1's advanced sustainable fuel are designed as a drop-in fuel, meaning they can go into the car without any modification needed. The societal impact could be tremendous. We have also taken a significant step to reduce our own emissions, introducing a new fleet of biofuel trucks in 2023 to support UK and European freight movements operated by our partner, DHL. With the European season now complete, we believe that the new operation has reduced our European road freight emissions by 83%. Our 24 race calendar for next year is organized with increased geographic efficiency to minimize the carbon footprint from our freight transport between races. F1 Academy launched this year, the female-only racing series led by former racing driver, Susie Wolff.
It has been established to inspire a generation of women into our sport, not just as a driver, but in other roles such as mechanics, team leaders, and strategists. I'd like to congratulate Marta García on winning the inaugural F1 Academy title this season after claiming a spectacular victory in Austin. F1 Academy will get a huge boost in 2024, with all seven races running alongside F1 race weekends, thanks to the support of our promoter partners. We are also very proud to confirm that all 10 F1 teams will be participating, as each will support one driver and allow the liveries to be used on the cars. In closing, we have much to be proud of at F1 and an exciting future ahead.
The sport popularity continues to grow and is delivering sustained commercial growth. We will continue to invest in our sport to capitalize on our momentum and deliver value to our teams, our partners, our fans, and our shareholders. We appreciate your support and hope to see you at races soon. Avanti tutta! Full speed ahead. Ciao.
Welcome to Atlanta, a city where our national pastime is all-time. The excitement around this ball club right now is as high as I can remember in a long time. It's record after record after record falling this year. Way to go, organization, making it such a wonderful time in Braves history. It's win number 104 of the year, and what a season for these Braves! He did it. A 40-70 season. Most home runs in a season in Braves history. Here it comes. Got him swinging, strike three, and the Braves are National League East champions for the sixth year in a row. What an amazing era we're in the midst of.
Good morning. Good morning. It's great to be here in New York. The Atlanta Braves always like to visit New York. Have a good time here, usually, so it's always good to be back with you. Had a good time at the investor dinner last night. Thanks for all the people that were sitting at my table. I'm joined here with the CEO of the Braves Development Company, Mike Plant, and our CFO, Jill Robinson. I think it bears some repeating of what the video just saw and what you heard from Greg and Brian about the wonderful season that we have had this year. So just going through some of the numbers, this is a season of records in so many different ways.
While we didn't win the World Series, there's so much to be proud of, for this Atlanta Braves team and all of the, other business aspects of our organization. As mentioned, we had 54 sellouts. There's 81 home games, so that's a tremendous feat unto itself, matched with Matt Olson, our first baseman's 54 home runs. We had 3.2 million tickets, as was mentioned. There's 317 home runs. That's a franchise record, and it's something that, I don't think will ever be beaten, in my opinion. The ratings, TV ratings are indicative of the fan support. We're gonna go into that in just a little bit more in just a second. But matching that is Ronald Acuña, a feat that really has never been done in the history of sport.
41 home runs and 73 stolen bases, and once again, with that record, I don't see that one ever being broken. It was really a remarkable season by Ronald Acuña, as well as the rest of the team. This year, we've had growth in our fan base. We've seen, over 20 million fans across the United States say that they are fans of the Atlanta Braves, matched with our 104 wins and our 6th straight division champions. So we are the NL division champions for six straight years. I don't have to tell you who in this room might be fans of some of the other teams in the NL. You know, a lot has been talked about, with the media side of the business, and I wanna go into a few highlights, and then I'm gonna delve into some of the opportunities.
I think the thing that I would focus in on, on this part of the presentation, and this slide in particular, is the circle graph. When the Braves are on television, we are the most watched, the highest-rated program when we're on TV. Think about that. Every time we are on TV, when we are on TV, there are more people watching a Braves game than any other program. The population in Atlanta is gonna grow, so there's more opportunity to be had. We've seen increase of ratings, and the reason why I point that out is, as most of you know, we've seen a decrease in distribution, and so when you see increase in ratings and the distribution go down, it certainly reflects that you're commanding more of the marketplace that's able to see the games.
All 162 of our games are broadcast. 146 of them this year broadcast locally or regionally, the rest national. Then of note, and I think this is worth emphasizing, is radio is not dead, certainly not in live sports. There's 173+ affiliates in our radio network. It's the highest and the strongest, the biggest radio network in any professional sports league. So let's talk a little bit more about our, our territory, specifically our home television territory. There's 27 metered markets in that territory, composed of about six states. 34 million people live in that territory, and about 14 million homes. Seven markets have a million homes. So looking at that a little bit different way, there's certainly huge opportunity for growth when we figure out some of the disruption that's happening in the broader media landscape.
So thinking about another way to measure the demand on the Atlanta Braves and how good we've got it, and one of the things that we're enjoying is we've got about 4,000 premium seats. All of them are sold out. We've got 11,000 people on our waiting list waiting to buy tickets. Our sponsorship revenue for the third straight year is the highest it's ever been, and as mentioned earlier, 95% of our total ticketing inventory was sold out this year. That's the highest percentage capacity sold out in all of Major League Baseball. The demand is enormous. Specific to tickets, we're a proud Ticketmaster partner, by the way. Our friends are represented in this room. About 3.2 million tickets, and you can see the growth since we moved. 2017 was the year that we moved into Truist Park. We've seen sustained growth.
Of course, COVID had a little bit of an interruption there of note, but as I said, huge capacity. The fans are really turning out for this environment, which is partially due to the Battery. Taking a look at just the statistics that, you know, kind of highlight the business elements of the Atlanta Braves. Ticket revenue up, sponsorship revenue up, concessions revenue up. Greg had a point in his slide where you talked about some of the rule changes in baseball. You've seen a decrease in about 25 minutes in the time of the game with the pitch clock, among a few other changes to baseball. You would think conventional wisdom would tell you that concessions and retail revenue would go down since there's few, you know, less time in the games.
We were ahead of the curve on this. We've implemented technology and all kinds of things, like just walk-out technology for concessions, a better POS system in our retail and concessions environment, all of which result in increases in our revenue on both concessions and retail. Looking at the broader sport, Greg mentioned this as well. Look, baseball is having a bit of a resurgence, and I'm not sure that's a really fair way to say it, because baseball's always been extremely strong. You know, one of the things that baseball has as a real big asset is you have 162 games, 30 teams. You're certainly the footprint of the United States has fan base everywhere.
And with the number of games, as well as the fans across all of those markets, you can see that baseball, for the first time in several years, got its total attendance above 70 million. So you add up all the other leagues in the Big Four, they don't equal the amount of people that are going to an Atlanta or to a Major League Baseball game. Huge opportunity when we all figure this out right. You know, live sports content is king, as what's been talked about. So let's transition a little bit to our real estate empire, The Battery Atlanta. We've got 37 tenants that have a long-term lease, about 10 years. There's multiple events going on in The Battery every single day. We have regional corporate headquarters with some of the finer companies in America here.
We've got our regional headquarter of Comcast, of course. Moved in recently was Papa John's and TK, Gas South, and then we've got a Truist Securities building that is being built right now. A little status update on that to come. Overall, what that represents is we got 10 million people that visit The Battery on an annual basis this past year. Putting that in the context of some of the other attractions, as you can see, we match up very nicely with all of the different things that are going on out there. Said a different way, the Atlanta Braves, Truist Park, The Battery Atlanta, they're great places to visit. You know, it's a safe, friendly community. It's a town square, if you will, and it's got a lot of room for growth. So let's think about growth. The Battery Atlanta still has opportunities for growth.
So one of the things that's going on right now, if you're visiting our campus, is you would see the construction going on for the Truist Securities Tower. Some status update photos are right there for you. It's gonna be nine stories. It'll house all of Truist Securities divisions, have about 1,000 employees working there, and creates further density that all supports all of the other business metrics that propel The Battery Atlanta to help fund all the things that we do for our operation. We still have some acreage to develop, so there's still room for growth, and we'll deploy that acreage and deploy those opportunities when we see fit, when there's opportunities. So looking at the totality of it all, again, going back to pre-Truist Park, we moved in in 2017.
You can see the enormous lift that Truist Park and The Battery gave us from 16 to 17. And again, taking away the COVID years, we've had a 12% CAGR, and we've got some nice growth still ahead. So specific to the numbers, and this year, our 2023 year to date, importantly, year to date results, we got baseball revenue up, development revenue up, total revenue obviously up, OIBDA up. So obviously, when you look at the totality of everything, the business is exceptionally strong, doing very, very well.
And I would just tell you that when you think about this business and the opportunities, remember, we won the 2021 World Series, so obviously we're at the top on the field. I would still tell you that our business has room for growth beyond what you're seeing here. One way to put it, in the past, we've had very good years. This year was an exceptional year, and I would tell you, in the future, we still have room for growth and the future's tending to be brighter. Thank you very much.
There's a teaser of what you'll see this afternoon. We're gonna take a quick break now, so the program will start right at 10:40 A.M. There's snacks downstairs, but again, right at 10:40 A.M. Thank you.
The bottom line about doing radio, you have to have a connection with the fans. That is what this is all about. Now, you see me after my first time on concert. Oh, my God, I was just saying, I wish she would've seen me after. The job of the artist is to make the audience care about your obsessions. Greatness comes from people who need to do what they're doing. When what my soul really. It was crying out for. This is what I do. I tapped into something accidentally, a timeless thing about universal truths. If you can make somebody that happy, something tells me that's what you're supposed to be doing. I love you, man.
Human beings, at our best, are capable of doing things that are so beautiful. It changes your life when you're able to see a beautiful figure, like a princess, look like you. Being a part of a dialogue that is hunting and searching for how we can more comfortably tell the truth to one another. I can't even talk about it. It's amazing to be a part of a moment that is shifting the narrative. It's about everything else. It's about everything else on top of the themes. This was your attempt to bring your father into your music? A lot of my work, if not most of it, that's the core of it.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you, for being here today. As Greg mentioned, we had our media event yesterday, and hopefully many of you had a chance to tune in or be in the audience, and if you didn't, it will be up on our site later today. As Greg said, we had a lot of great star power there to, help us announce, many parts of our next generation of SiriusXM. And I will say it had to be pretty good because Greg was there the whole time, and it was an hour and a half. So I'll be able to recap some of that today and also, dive into some of the financials a bit more. At SiriusXM, we believe that the future of audio is one where everyone is effortlessly connected to the voices, stories, and music they love.
For most Americans, audio is a daily habit, and that's with four hours spent listening to some form of audio content each day, split between home, in-car, and beyond. But figuring out what to listen to during all this time has become very complicated. Today, there are millions of songs and shows available with a push of a button or a simple voice command, and navigating through all that noise has become overwhelming. Fundamental shifts in the marketplace have created a paradox of choice, and it resulted in growing consumer demand for human-curated audio. Today's audiophiles are seeking community and connection, as Greg talked about earlier, amongst a hyper-fragmented and overly saturated landscape, and this is where SiriusXM comes in. We have built an incredibly successful and profitable business by creating an experience centered on our premium, human-curated radio that is more relevant than ever.
So what sets us apart from other audio services? It's our human touch. It's the people who curate our channels, it's the artists, the personalities, and the content creators who drive a deep connection with their fans. SiriusXM is an ever-present companion throughout the day. We're always there with just the right mix of music, news, sports, comedy, storytelling, and podcasts. And because of this, listeners develop an emotional attachment to our content and service, and this unique and differentiated position gives us a huge opportunity for growth. So who are we trying to reach? Our core audience today represents about 25% of the audio market. They're Gen X and older. They grew up listening to radio in the car, and they represent one of the largest and most affluent consumer groups. Then you have what we see as our growth audience opportunity.
It's an additional 25% of the audio market. They're younger, more diverse, and more varied in their audio consumption. These consumers are open to subscribing to more than one audio service to meet all their needs, and they're willing to splurge for a premium experience. They're fueled by fandom and are used to listening whenever and wherever they choose. So while our growth and our core audiences represent half of the general population, they drive 84% of total audio spend, and we know what it will take to attract them. We've done a lot of research, and it confirms that our differentiators remain at the heart of our value proposition for both the core and growth audience segments. But to bring in more subscribers, we needed to address key pain points.
We need to improve in the areas of pricing, control, and discovery, all with a sleek, modern look and feel. We're doubling down on our differentiators and giving our product and programming the spotlight in our new next-generation platform. We're making it easier for consumers to immediately find what they love and go deeper. We call this the next generation of SiriusXM. As we announced yesterday, on December fourteenth, the new SiriusXM experience will begin to roll out first on streaming and then in the months and years ahead in the car. At launch, it's a platform that modernizes our entire business. It's a fundamental rebuilding of the full tech platform. We also shared that with the launch of our new streaming platform, we will be offering consumers a new, lower streaming-only price point, all of our content for $9.99 a month.
We believe this creates an extremely compelling value proposition for consumers, and it allows us to better showcase the complementary aspect of our service, priming us for growth among those who currently subscribe to an on-demand music service alone. We expect to have more to say about our in-car pricing and packaging offering early next year. Our new app creates a compelling product experience that addresses the key pain points I talked about around discovery and control, for everywhere from onboarding to search to playback. We're also focused on providing a more connected experience for our listeners across in-car and streaming devices. Yesterday, we also unveiled our refreshed brand identity, which highlights the uniqueness of what we offer, our incredible programming, iconic personalities, and a channel for every perspective. We're also bringing back our mascot with a new twist, and we're affectionately calling our new pup Stella.
At SiriusXM, we are home to the stars, the ones who are already legends and the legends in the making. This new branding provides the opportunity to give them the spotlight and to demonstrate that SiriusXM creates space for each and every one of us to get closer to the things we love. Speaking of content, we officially welcomed the newest member of the SiriusXM Talk family, James Corden. He is a legendary actor, writer, producer, and host, and we are thrilled that he chose to work with us as he makes his move from TV to audio. We are incredibly proud of the special relationships our programmers and hosts have with musical artists. We bring some of the biggest acts to smaller venues around the country, giving subscribers once-in-a-lifetime experiences. And our artist channels give creators a unique opportunity to connect directly with their super fans.
Yesterday, we announced the launch of our newest artist channel, the Kelly Clarkson Connection, along with the launch date and programming for our upcoming channel with John Mayer. This December, we'll be launching takeovers of some of our biggest channels with over 175 artists. This includes everyone from Olivia Rodrigo and Cardi B to Metallica, Tim McGraw, and many more. These new takeovers bring listeners even closer to the artists they love, with sets hand-curated by the stars. Today, we're proud to have more than 150 million SiriusXM-enabled vehicles on the road, and we are offered in more than 80% of new vehicles, as well as about 55% of pre-owned vehicles currently sold.
This means it is easier than ever when someone buys a new or pre-owned vehicle to try our service, and our best-in-class, built-for-the-road platform continues to make us the favorite premium entertainment solution for North American drivers as we hold the largest share of ear outside of AM/FM radio. This year alone, we have renewed and expanded upon agreements with Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, and Honda, and we're close to finalizing an extension with Volkswagen Audi. Yesterday, we announced a new agreement with Polestar, and I hope in the months to come, we'll have more to share on other EV partners. All of these new agreements include commitments to roll out 360L, our hybrid in-car audio platform, which combines streaming and satellite delivery, contributing to our growing 360L penetration rate.
Outside of the vehicle, we are live today with many of the biggest consumer and technology brands, ranging from T-Mobile to Walmart, with offers that bring new listeners into SiriusXM through a variety of channels. And yesterday, we announced a new collaboration with Audible to give subscribers the opportunity to experience each other's offerings through content and trial offers beginning in 2024. So as you can see, there's a lot happening all across SiriusXM. With over 34 million total subscribers today, strong relationships with the major automakers, sustained low churn at 1.6%, a diverse array of content and customer satisfaction at a 15-year high, we are building on an incredibly strong foundation. From our next tech generation technology platform, refreshed brand identity, new distribution, and new channels and shows that bring subscribers closer to what they love at a compelling new price point.
All these key levers are powering our transformation and positioning us for future growth, and we will now have the infrastructure and optionality to rapidly test, learn, and innovate across our business. We are targeting to migrate Pandora to the new platform infrastructure in late 2024. In addition to enhancing the listening experience of our 47 million monthly active users at Pandora, this will drive cost savings while also giving us the option to combine the SiriusXM and Pandora products sometime in the future. A key component of our ad business is the SiriusXM podcast network, which is home to the most shows in the top 50. The scale of our streaming, broadcast, and podcast advertising offering, combined with our advanced ad technology and depth of sales expertise, provides advertisers unmatched opportunities to connect with their target audiences. Now let's dive into the financials.
Taking a look at the trailing twelve months since we last met, we delivered solid results, including just under $9 billion in revenue. Additionally, while we have been focused on investing in our products and tech platform, we have simultaneously become even more disciplined on cost management across our organization. We grew self-pay subscription audio revenue over the past twelve months by approximately $80 million, while paid promotional revenue fell on new improved OEM relationships and national broadcast ad revenue at SiriusXM remained challenged. In our Pandora and off-platform segment, we continued to see strong monetization at Pandora, and our podcast revenue was up 28% year-over-year in the third quarter. Cash operating costs were down 2% in the trailing twelve months, even as we absorbed higher music royalties.
And our adjusted EBITDA margin remained strong at roughly 31%, and during the third quarter, we delivered our highest-ever quarter of EBITDA at $747 million. Longer term, we have demonstrated a strong track record of growing revenue and adjusted EBITDA and converting very substantial portions of that EBITDA into free cash flow. 2021's $1.8 billion of free cash flow was boosted by a one-time satellite insurance recovery and by relatively low CapEx and cash taxes. In 2023, we transitioned to become a full cash taxpayer and stepped up satellite CapEx associated with our normal 15-year fleet refresh cycle, the combination of which is driving our free cash flow guidance of approximately $1.15 billion this year.
With satellite CapEx expected to fall to near zero by 2028, plus improved working capital and taxes, we are confident the business will see a meaningful step-up in cash generation in the coming years. Our growing cash flow and strong balance sheet provides us flexibility to navigate a variety of future market conditions. We have consistently kept leverage in the low-to-mid 3x range over many years, and we think this is the right place for our business to be in the long term as well. We have a largely fixed-rate balance sheet with no bond maturities until 2026. We expect to finish this year with a completely undrawn revolver and growing cash balance, which together will provide us with approximately $2 billion of available liquidity. As you all know, Liberty Media announced a proposal regarding a potential transaction involving our companies.
The SiriusXM Special Committee of independent directors is currently reviewing the proposal, so I'm limited in what I can say. However, what I want to emphasize is that regardless of the outcome of Liberty's proposal and to any transaction hypotheticals, I am confident we can quickly delever to our communicated long-term leverage target if need be. SiriusXM has maintained this responsible leverage position while delivering sizable cash to our investors. Since we began our repurchase and dividend programs, we have delivered approximately $20 billion to our shareholders. In addition, last month, we announced another 10% hike to our recurring dividend, the seventh straight double-digit annual increase and marking a 15% CAGR since inception. This long track record of increases has pushed our dividend yield to approximately 2.2%.
While the Liberty proposal is pending, for regulatory reasons, we are out of the market for our own stock, and following any transaction, you would likely see us more focused in the near term on delivering than repurchasing stock. But we plan to continue our strong dividend payout strategy with the option of resuming opportunistic share repurchases as we move toward our long-term leverage target. In closing, we are at a key moment in our journey. We are pleased with our results, our financial stability, and our growth opportunities. As you saw today, the next generation of SiriusXM connects us even more deeply with our vision and purpose, and I could not be more excited for the future of SiriusXM. Thank you.
On the road again. Life on the road as a musician is about all I've ever known. Those moments are important to an artist. But the roads have gotten a little bumpier. For several years, we're trying to make enough gas money to get to the next gig. So whatever you can do to help a new artist, I think we should do it. They need all the help they can get. The program will impact thousands of artists and help make touring a little bit easier.
Good morning. Thankfully, we have no on sales today. Inside joke for those of you here last year. Made sure we didn't have anything today. I put that campaign program up. We're really proud of that. We wanted to make sure that we connected with the developing artists in our business. We all talk about the Beyoncés of the world, but we're gonna do 27,000 club shows this year. It's a big part of our business. So we put this program together with Willie. Every night in one of our clubs, the opening act and the support act is, gets a $1,000 gas card and a $500 card to fill up their bus with groceries.
So it's been an incredible program to invest back in this community, and been a big part of kind of the backbone of our business. We look at live in general. I've sat up here for a few years now, talking about the robustness of this industry. This is a business that's had incredible growth for the last 20 years. A lot of talk through COVID is what's the future? Are we living this pent-up demand moment, or is there structurally something going on? And when we look at the data, we absolutely believe the future's gonna be better than the past. We think the next decade has even higher growth rates, 'cause we think there's structural shifts happening with the customer on a global basis.
We look at these five drivers in the top here, and we'll talk about them in the presentation, but they're kind of the underpin on what's going on in this industry that's gonna keep this live industry growing at these rates. We look at social media. I mean, it's the gift that keeps giving to live entertainment. You think about social media, TikTok, Instagram, every night, amplifying that live show, those FOMO moments that everyone has to, you know, shoot from the sphere in the U2 show. And they're connecting with their fans and their artists direct, like, they've never been able to before. Streaming's made it accessible for every consumer in the world to listen to that song. Globalization, we'll talk about. Experience economy, we've talked about for many years.
This last one called venue infrastructure, you're seeing really come to life in our, our Venue Nation division. But in general, outside of America, there's a whole movement now, if you're a major city, to figure out, "How do I build venues so live performances can come there?" Typically, they have soccer stadiums. They don't have arenas. They don't have 5,000 seats. Been underdeveloped, underserviced most of the world, and we think that helps grow that global platform. And every day, there's a new arena built in São Paulo or Milan, stadium goes up, an artist wants to play there. So we think all of these drivers are the underpin on why there's a structural shift, and you're gonna see for the next decade, even higher growth rates than historic. When we ask the customers and the fans, they're telling us the same thing.
What, what's changed? What's new in your life around live?" All of these stats you can see there emphasize that this is all translating into a much more engaged fan with a higher purchase intent. Going to that live show has never been more important than history, and now all the ways I wanna connect and be part of this live show continue to excel. When we look at the globalization, this is just really probably the biggest shift we've seen in the last few years. There are no borders for these fans and artists. Historically, this business was made up of you toured. Artists came from America and England. That was kind of the base of what most of us grew up listening to. Today, there's no borders. These artists are global. The fans are global.
If you're a 17-year-old in Milan today with a phone, you know that Drake dropped a song, and demand's generated. If you're a young artist in Mexico, called, and you launched a song on TikTok, you're playing in the Greek Theatre in a few months. It's just incredible the way this shift has happened, and you look at some of these stats and consumers in America alone. So the globalization of the artist and the fan is gonna be a big part of why this industry is gonna excel. And we've talked about this many years, but this one just continues to give. You look at the share of wallet. The consumers are talking. Live experiences, live entertainment, specifically above sports and every other item up there, is on the rise, and consumers want more experiences.
This chart sheet kind of brings it all to life to me. It's kind of the way if you really simplify our business, and famous Jay-Z said, "I'm not a businessman. I'm a business." I mean, these artists are businesses, and this is one example. You look at Bad Bunny, he's at 150 million followers and listeners monthly. We actually only have to sell three million tickets. We have the easy part. We're the scarcity on the overall pie. So in our business, we don't actually create the demand. The demand gets created, and then we sell the demand. So generally, the artist becomes big, and then we have to sell the tickets. The great part is an example like this. When you hear a lot of questions around scarcity, are there gonna be pullback in tickets?
What's the pricing strategy? This chart kind of says it all. You have 150 million really dedicated Bad Bunny fans, and we've only got three million tickets for sale. That demand's gonna be scarce and help drive our business. And this isn't just a Bad Bunny or a AAA artist example. It's any artist. You look at the artist playing in a theater right now, they've probably got eight million followers on Instagram and monthlies, and we're selling 1,000 tickets. So kind of the funnel of the way these artists have become media empires. Unlike sports, unlike athletes, unlike actors, these are direct-to-consumer brands, right? These artists now has no gatekeeper. They've built incredible direct relationships with their fans, through TikTok, social media, Spotify, et cetera.
So this is the piece of the puzzle that's gonna continually be our great friend because they are the salesman, they are the promoter, they are building their own audiences. We're delivering the scarcity. And the great news is, as much as the demand is out there, the supply continues. Every year, there's more artists on the road, whether they're U2 and the Rolling Stones or this regenerated every year, there's new artists and the grads going to a club elevating. So we see the pie growing bigger of supply to meet that continued expansion of demand. And as I kind of referenced in my first slide, this is not just about the top end of the business. This is an industry that's growing at all levels.
While you'll see some of our press releases the odd time, and we built a club in Pittsburgh or Milan, or a theater, or a ballroom, we're seeing growth at all levels. Our business is diverse across all segments, and obviously, geographically, it's segment-diversified. But this is a business where we're seeing a boom everywhere. There was a period of 20 years where there were no live clubs. They were being replaced by EDM clubs or kind of live clubs. You look now in every city, they're rebuilding. They want that 1,000-seat venue. They want that 2,000-seat venue. We're kind of the movie theater of the business now.
If you're a developer, and you're building, you want foot traffic, you want a Fillmore, you want a comedy club, you want a 5,000-seat, as we've done successfully with the Atlanta Braves development. I think this is a really important chart because we get asked this a lot. "Okay, you're gonna grow internationally, but we see what happens to the Spotifys of the world. That customer that's gonna pay $9 in New York is gonna pay $1 in India for a subscription." That doesn't happen in the concert business. That concert ticket truly is a global currency. So when we put Coldplay in Detroit, we're still be able to charge the same ticket price or more in the Pacific Rim, Eastern Europe, Latin America. This is the reason why these artists now tour globally, and the demand is growing.
For many years, you couldn't get that same ticket price, and you couldn't make the same amount of money, so you played an extra night in Detroit. Now, the pie has grown. That artist looks at us and says, "Great, I, I wanna get everywhere." And it's all connected back to a lot of the social media we talk about, is now this, this artist knows that they have 100 million followers. Actually, they know where they are. They never knew that for for many years. The gatekeepers knew that. So we sit with an artist now, and they'll say to me, "Michael, I got 21 million followers in Brazil. I gotta go play Brazil, too, and I gotta play Latin America, and I gotta play Milan." So this is the, this is the money slide for the artists.
This says, "The global world's expanding, and we can make you as much money anywhere in the world because that concert and that stadium date still is a scarce commodity that can drive similar pricing." And as we look into 2024, thankfully, the trend's continuing. We're looking at I mean, coming off an incredible 2023, we look at 2024 double-digit growth right now in our show count. We look like we're gonna have an incredible year in 2024, and this growth will continue. And when we ask the fans to make sure we're following the latest trends and the latest news, the fans are telling us the same story. Their demand—their purchase intent for next year is higher than ever.
I love that middle slide because I always like to remind people, as big as the noise that concerts get, it's still a smaller business overall. 36% of American fans or population went to a show last year. But if you ask them, 51% say they want to go to a show, and those are incredible figures, right? Because that says, not only are you gonna get the same people that went this year, there's another 20% of customers who didn't go this year that want to go to a show. So we see this demand, FOMO moments, Instagram. I mean, you can't live on Instagram and not wanna go see U2 at the Sphere. We had 9 billion impressions since that launched for that band and that experience, so that's what's driving this business right now.
Everyone wants to make sure, are we resilient? If there, if there's a pullback, recession, this is an industry that has proven time and over time is very durable. It does become one of the last things that people do pull back on. So as they're pulling back, this is one of those ones that's still the most affordable moment, and we have not had a great effect during pullbacks. And a lot of that is this, this slide. Although, again, press loves to talk about the 9% at the very top, this is a very affordable magic moment. The average, you know, get in price of $38 to go to a show, 65% of tickets under $100. Certainly can't go to a Braves game for that, sit at the dugout.
I say that all the time because, God bless sports, it's a badge of honor to pay $25,000 to be at courtside at a Knicks game. But God damn you if you charge $400 for a Beyoncé ticket, that happens once every 4 years. So we have a pricing PR problem, not an actual problem. So it's very affordable. So all this thesis is on, is pricing pullback? Have you increased the price too much? Have we gone too far? We're nowhere close to figuring out the top end of pricing yet. Secondary is still a $10 billion category and growing well, so we know there's lots of demand, lots of pricing potential available still.
When you put those pieces together, we believe we have an incredible, great future of continued double-digit growth. We're gonna talk about this in our afternoon session at our Investor Day in more detail on these seven drivers. But today, we wanted to touch more based on the macro perspective of Live, the shifts we're seeing, and why we think on a global basis, it's an exciting time to be in the live entertainment business. And as the leader in that business space, we think we're gonna be able to compound that growth. Thank you.
You notice Rapino did not talk about the price for Maple Leaf tickets. But you have heard, before I get to Qurate, some of the same themes echoing through about IP, about scarcity, about your fan base, and about going direct. And while we didn't really coordinate all of our talks, they ring a consistent theme because they have consistent values, and they are leveraging, in many cases, at Liberty Media, some of the same consistent drivers, and that we're very excited about them. But I'm now gonna talk about how we're very excited at Qurate as well. When we were here last year and over the last year, we said that Project Athens would deliver a lot of value to Qurate, and I think you can see that's exactly what happened. The operating initiatives are on track.
At the cost margin, fulfillment has had a 220 basis point tailwind in the third quarter at QXH. Our new freight contract went into effect in July with positive results. OIBDA grew 54%, excluding Zulily in the third quarter. We've seen improved execution with a healthier inventory base. We've seen better efficiency in programming, and merchandising, and fulfillment. And we've seen growth initiatives begin to show some value, expanding our distribution on smart TVs and digital devices, streaming and other digital platforms, and we've made the important next steps for Q's trajectory. We've also taken a series of balance sheet actions over the course of the last year to improve the strength, to make sure we've got the fuel and fire power to complete the transitions of Athens.
Closed on the sale and lease back, both in the UK and Germany, monetized several non-core assets, divested Zulily, which was a cash drain, and simplified our portfolio, and received $660 million of Rocky Mountain Insurance proceeds. $280 million of those were received year to date. We also worked on our liability side. We've reduced total debt, year to date, $741 million. We repurchased a series of notes in the 2024s and 2025s at a discount. We retired the Liberty Interactive exchangeables, reduced our overall interest expense to fight the fact that we had a rising interest rate environment, and we're maintaining our long-term leverage target and close to it at the September 30 balance sheet.
You should expect that all free cash flow that we have will be applied to debt reduction in the coming months and years. And we've been successful at that with meaningful debt reduction while maintaining a strong liquidity base at Qurate. We've reduced both the revolver and the corporate bonds, total $741 million, as I said, year to date. We have $3.2 billion of liquidity across the cash and the revolver capacity, and we generated $359 million of free cash flow year to date, primarily through working capital and OIBDA improvement. Lastly, looking at the rest of the balance sheet, we have a diverse set of maturities that are staggered, and we're well-positioned to address the near-term ones with the liquidity we have.
As I've mentioned, we've addressed already a good portion of the 2024s and 2025s that are due, and we will continue to using our cash and the revolver capacity. As we noted on the earnings call last week, we're gonna continue to look to opportunistically reduce debt, in many cases, at a discount to its face. Qurate has had a long history of fears that technology would reduce its business or eliminate its business, and Qurate has successfully moved through many transactions. The transition, rather, from analog to digital, people worried about the explosion of channels, but Qurate did quite well, still holding an upper hand through excellent channel placement. e-com 1.0 made shopping on Qurate and, HSN more convenient, not less convenient, and actually was something that grew the business. e-com 2.0 continued to make it more convenient, with live stream capabilities.
In the third quarter, e-com revenue at Qurate, QVC rather, grew 58%. So we continue to see strength in growing our online revenue. And I think we're well-positioned for the next wave of streaming. We have reach on digital exceeds our linear reach. We have better economics than many other streamers because we monetize on product sales, not on a subscription or ad model. And it's an important driver of growth for new customers, and we are migrating existing customers to the next stage of multi-platform evolution. So we remain forward-looking, looking at the technology changes as we have in the past, and looking at a way to make sure we capitalize on them. There are a lot of trends out there that people are pursuing, retired products and brands, daily deals, popular programming, and a wide distribution model across both linear and streaming platforms.
Qurate really sits in the middle of that, the intersection of these industry, industries, and we're seeing convergence, and as they come together, Qurate is right where many of them wish to be. We already know what people want, and we already know how to sell it to them, and I think we will continue to move forward. And with that, I'm going to introduce David Rawlinson.
Thank you. Let me recognize first, Bill Wofford, our CFO, and Mike Fitzharris, the President of our QVC business. Those individuals have been real heroes in the business. Last year at this event, the business was admittedly in a very challenging place. We were coming off a post-pandemic decline as people stopped watching television in their living rooms and went out back into the world. We were dealing with the effects of historic disruptions in the global supply chain. Inflation was destructive and unpredictable at the time, and our business was still reeling from the largest structural fire in North Carolina history. A fire that destroyed $hundreds of millions in inventory, drove the loss of more than 1 million QVC customers, and eliminated 65% of our distribution capacity in the U.S.
We were also facing heavy near-term debt maturities and a meta-narrative that cord-cutting meant the end of this business model. It was, I assure you, a very fun way to start a new job. I talked last year about our transformation plan, Project Athens, a plan that drew inspiration from the creative and humane character of Athens that contrasted with their rival, the militaristic Sparta, a stand-in for so many of our depressingly sanitized competitors. Competitors that either perfected selling cheap goods in concrete boxes or perfected algorithms that exploit our natural human tendencies for profit. I believe that we had a path back if we could improve the customer experience, execute better, lower the cost to serve, clean up the portfolio, and build new businesses, and above all, build on our legacy of creating a human and connected way of shopping in an increasingly lonely world.
Today, I want to report on our progress against that vision, and I want to report on why you should be paying more attention to Qurate Retail. We are a company at a compelling inflection point. As a reminder, Qurate Retail is the largest media shopping company with 15 channels globally, delivering over 125 hours of live television each day through our video commerce brands, QVC, both U.S. and international, and HSN. Many have tried, but no one has successfully recreated a franchise anything like Qurate's. We also have Cornerstone Brands. Like our video brands, the brands within Cornerstone, Frontgate, Ballard Designs, Grandin Road, and Garnet Hill, are all about inspiration and connection with a highly attractive and loyal customer base.
We generate approximately $11 billion in revenue across these brands, $6.5 billion of which is e-commerce, and we touch over 14 million customers, reach into 200 million households, and we are the leaders in curating visual and video moments to make shopping habitual, personal, and enjoyable. Let me show you a bit of what I mean. If we could start the video. Great. So that's who we are. This is what we've done. Project Athens has been a journey of love. We've been hard at work over the last year on Project Athens, and we're encouraged that we're finally starting to see a turnaround in financial results. 2023 has been about determined focus on execution and optimization, primarily, primarily around cost, margin, and cash flow.
Our OIBDA improvement shows the result of our work on gross margins, both from addressing product and pricing with early actions and optimizations, as well as improvements on the cost as we have cycled past supply chain challenges in the macro environment, challenges that were deeply exacerbated by the fire that occurred in December 2021. As this slide shows, for the first time since Q2 2021, we grew OIBDA in the third quarter, and we grew it at 54%. Further, within our all-important video commerce businesses, we have made substantial progress in reversing the slide in revenue, down only low single digits in Q3. We have also made progress on restoring the cash-generating capacity of this business, which has historically been a strength, but was a weakness in recent years. Last year, we committed to growing cash flow in 2023.
We said the first half of the year would be fueled by working capital improvements, and the back half would be more OIBDA-driven. We've delivered exactly that. Year to date, free cash flow improved $464 million, with progressive improvement throughout the year. I already mentioned the fire. In hindsight, the fire did much greater damage to the business than we were able to fully appreciate. Our best estimates are that it affected about 1 million customers. We lost about 1 million because of the fire and over $500 million in revenue. The impact exaggerated the appearance of decline in this business, and it fed the bear case, but we have now mostly worked our way through the impacts. Delivery times, which had grown, are now better than pre-fire levels. The customer count is stabilizing. We are out of expensive excess emergency storage.
The fire was a massive exogenous shock, but we are past it. This is a reminder of the basic five pillars of Project Athens. I'll address each of these in turn. The first pillar is to improve the customer experience and grow relationships. The team's rigorous focus on the customer and continuous testing and piloting of new initiatives is slowly showing up in the customer file. QVC U.S. and HSN had 8.2 million customers on a rolling 12-month basis. Just over half of those are repeat or existing customers. Existing customers, on average, buy 30 units a year and are growing their spend year-over-year. These are some of the best customer performance stats in our industry. On a quarterly view, our efforts highlight the turning trajectory of both our total customer file and our new and reactive customers.
As we reported in Q3, new customers at QVC U.S. and HSN grew 8% in Q3, the first growth of new customers since Q1 of 2021. We have gotten refocused on our customers. A new cross-functional team is now viewing all aspects of the business through the lens of the customer. This has led to enhanced promotional capabilities and upleveled digital marketing capabilities. We are better targeting both email and messaging. One driver of the improving customer trends that we're seeing is that the prior slumps had been because we were not executing well on some of our key events. This year, paired with even stronger merchandising, programming, and marketing, we refocused on things like Christmas in July at QVC. It delivered 3% year-over-year growth this year in holiday products.
A QVC best customer buys an average of 75 units per year and spends an average of $3,800 annually. That has been growing by 5% over the last 2 years, and we have a nearly perfect retention record. These customers deserve to be rewarded, and we are, in our own way, doing more for them, like inviting select VIP customers to our studios for live shows or having them attend personalized dinners with our top-notch celebrity chefs, like HSN's Curtis Stone. While we have done many things to stabilize the customer count, we have not been focused squarely on overall customer count growth yet. Project Athens was intentionally targeted at profit and free cash flow growth, not top line and customer growth.
As we lean into growth in the post-Athens period, we have been building the capabilities to do so efficiently, and I look forward to sharing more on that over time. Pillar two Sorry, let me see. Can we go back one? Yeah, forward. Forward. All right. We'll go here. Pillar two is about rigorously executing our core processes. The real-time and often impulse-driven nature of our business means that we have to keep refreshing our assortments. We have to keep bringing new value to our customers. Year-to-date, through September, at both QVC U.S. and HSN, we've introduced over 700 new brands. For example, we've had 25% growth in the number of beauty brands just at QVC this year.
We carry many of the critical names in the category, such as Dyson and Apple and Birkenstock and Skechers and Vitamix, but our real advantage rests with our proprietary brands. At QVC, four out of five of the top-selling brands are exclusive apparel brands in our apparel segment. One example of the cross-section between new and proprietary is Firelight, our lab-grown private label diamond jewelry brand. This added new life to our diamond business. So far this year, we've sold $42 million in both real and lab-grown diamonds versus $25 million last year, and average sales price has gone up from $850 to $1,600. And when we create a new brand that we know works, we expand it into new categories.
This is what happened with Cella, which originally gained traction as a kitchenware private label brand, and this year has expanded in the home décor and storage. In fact, approximately 36% year to date of QVC sales are proprietary or exclusive. If you love it, you can only get it here. Differentiated products lead to differentiated programming, but programming is not just about inspiration. Though that is critical, it is also about flawless execution. We've scrubbed every aspect of it, from how we schedule programming to how we return urgency by making our daily specials even more special, and we are seeing the progress. Dollars per minute of airtime for our today's specials and today's special values were up 8% year to date in 2023 versus down 4% over the same period in 2022.
Our hosts, the original influencers, have also been key as demand to watch them and hear their stories continues to grow. They have helped drive a 15% increase in our total TV minutes of viewership across our five channels, and we have gotten smarter in pricing what we show. We are now fully incorporating sophisticated analytical approaches. As a result of this and our elevated merchandise assortment, QXH average sales price is up 3% year to date. I should add here that QVC International, like the U.S. businesses, is also implementing a transformational program that is focused on margin opportunities, content and broadcast strategies, as well as optimizing execution. These efforts are paying dividends there as well. QVC International grew revenue and OIBDA compared to last year, and sustained gross margin gains from Q2 and Q3. Pillar three is lowering the cost to serve.
To support our customer-facing, programming and pricing, we need an operation that delivers superior value and superior service. The supply chain team has made great progress here. $20 million in labor productivity improvements this year, and it is not just cost going down. Delivery performance is now faster than it was before the fire. On freight, we've recorded $63 million in year-over-year benefits from renegotiating lower ocean freight rates, renegotiating our last mile service contract, and lessening our detention and demurrage costs. We have now redesigned our entire approach to labor productivity in the fulfillment centers, getting better optimization with a more flexible, variable labor model. But we have not just done it there. We have been getting more efficient, even as our performance has been improving. Though difficult, we've made many hard decisions. We affected workforce reductions throughout the company.
Through September, these have created $35 million of OIBDA benefit. We expect these organizational changes to create recurring benefits of $60 million. Discipline around people have led to a 19% reduction in headcount, and we did it not simply by cutting heads, but by instead rethinking and reimagining every aspect of how we work in every single part of the business. Pillar four was about optimizing the brand portfolio. I spoke earlier about the Zulily divestiture. Greg spoke about it as well. This action eliminated one of our primary cash drains and one of the primary barriers to growth. Our other portfolio organization, the Cornerstone Brands, which I discussed earlier, are focused on bringing proprietary and exclusive design services and products in or outside of the house. Ballard and Frontgate, in particular, have a strong multi-channel presence, and retail has done very well for them.
Today, they are under-penetrated in physical retail, which represents a real opportunity. While the home market has been contracting with fewer moves and less housing being built and high interest rates, operational discipline did allow Cornerstone to report its first positive quarterly year-over-year OIBDA growth since Q1 2022 in Q3. The final pillar is building new high-growth businesses anchored in our strength. We were early in putting our channels on free, over-the-top, and ad-supported streaming services, FAST. Our reach is growing 25% year-over-year in these areas, including the launch of Vizio Smart TV and the app and on Freevee recently. We have nearly 100% penetration in vMVPD, our virtual subscription services, already today. In the streaming service, we brought a ton of new content this year.
We brought Kim of Queens, a new show starring Kim Gravel, and The Edit, which gives a modern and editorial take on our products. Collectively, these shows and many more are helping us grow minutes per household by 23% year-over-year in Q3, and we have just started scratching the surface. We are seeing multiple levels of growth and hearing from many partners who want to work with us. Perhaps most encouraging, because we monetize our service directly through product sales, and we can make volumes of new content cheaply in our studios, we arguably have the best business model in the streaming universe. Further, we believe that shopping will not just happen on the large screen streaming apps, but also on the small screen.
We believe that shopping is such a passionate activity for so many, dedicated apps and streaming services will be attractive to millions of future customers. Sales from U.S. live stream shopping are projected to more than double from 2023 to 2026, according to Coresight Research. QVC U.S. recently launched QVC Live Streams, which are pop-up live stream shopping videos on our digital platforms. These streams give existing customers extra ways to engage with their favorite brands and hosts. In Q3, we had a monthly user base of 250,000 viewers across our web streams. Likewise, QVC International has launched two new digital live experiences centered around the home garden category in the U.K. and food and culinary in Germany. Both include category experts who help field customer questions and bring the human side to shopping.
The reaction so far has been encouraging. In March of this year, we launched the beta of SUNE, our first-ever standalone mobile app, targeting a new demographic, Gen Z and millennial shoppers. SUNE is speaking to the next generation of shoppers, shoppers who like a thumbable experience and turn to influencers to make decisions. The team has created over 3,000 videos since launch and are growing downloads daily. It is a very exciting time, and if you have not done so yet, please download the SUNE app, spelled S-U-N-E. In short, as live stream shopping continues to gain momentum over the next few years, we are already there, positioned and ready to lead. Midway through Project Athens, we feel good about our progress and feel confident we can hit our goals by the end of 2024.
We reiterate our goals of stable revenue, double-digit compound annual growth rates, EBITDA, and free cash flow, and a 2.5 times long-term leverage target. We believe the achievement of Project Athens goals leaves a company that is competitively advantaged, strong, and profitable, and we believe that Q3 marked an important inflection point in this company's history. With that said, I've also heard a lot coming back at us. I hear, "What about after Athens? Sure, you can cut costs, but can you grow? Doesn't cord cutting mean the business is in a permanent state of decline? Aren't all of your customers old and dying anyway? Aren't you hamstrung from investment by all of your debt?" I want to address this outright.
First, today, we already have a business with a better operating model and better capabilities as a result of Project Athens, a business better able to drop pricing, cater to customers and target marketing, drive product extensions into new categories, and make airtime more efficient, a business better able to use its customer service and host relationships to grow, a business with a lower cost to serve that can give greater value to its customers, a streaming, a streaming TV app with near universal distribution that we have only started to unlock, and a set of early innovations in live streaming. About 22% of our sales come from international markets, where cord cutting is less of a threat. We have already been making the investments needed and building the necessary capacity while servicing our debt, and then you add the opportunity to further retail expansion by Cornerstone.
If you have a new product, there is not a better place to launch it than on QVC and HSN. That is not going away. We will emerge from 2024 a largely remade company, more nimble, more capable, and more differentiated, with more ways to grow. Second, this negative narrative misunderstands this business. Yes, it grew up through linear television, and that is its shining foundation. But with every month that goes by, we are a business more and more defined by a powerful set of consumer brands that perform well across multiple platforms. Already, most of our sales go through e-commerce.
Going forward, we will not be a business defined by our linear TV presence. We will be defined by being one of the most trusted brands for women entering perhaps their most meaningful life phase, the second half. Even in the U.S., the population of women over 50 and those over 60 is growing by 2%-4% from 2023 to 2025. The population of older Americans is growing faster than that of younger ones. This is a worldwide trend. This business will eventually be everywhere the attention of this wealthy cohort is, and we will grow with them, and we will take share because we care about them, and we understand them. The world is becoming wealthier and grayer. Are you working with that trend or against it? We are with it.
In closing, that is who we are, that is where we are, and that is the story we're continuing to write. Our 19,000 team members are still passionate because we still believe there is a better way to shop, a more human way, and that we at Qurate Retail should own it. We have lived up to the milestones we set for success last year, and we are still only getting started. I hope you will stay with us and continue to engage as we continue to try to prove that retail can have a soul. Thank you.
I'm sorry, David. I'm afraid I can't do that. The danger is that we don't understand the difference between right and wrong, true and false. Just with the technology that we have be used in some fairly destructive way. Does that keep me up at night? Absolutely. The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear weapons. I mean, I've never seen a technology that's entered the hype cycle this quickly.
Great. Normally, we try and do a think piece about where things are going and what's happening in the world, but we're not gonna need to do that anymore because generative AI is gonna do it for us. But to help in that process and to train your large language models, or at least the one related to generative AI, we brought together Brad and Joe. We'll start with a cheap shot. We asked which was a bigger hype machine, generative AI or Ozempic?
Well, I noticed you asked, you asked Bard.
Well, because a ChatGPT is a little weird, right? The 21 cutoff date, which isn't really a cutoff date i t's a little vague, and didn't seem like Ozempic was as much in the public consciousness at that point.
I guess Google needs somebody to use Bard. I would say, I think that AI will be bigger, I've said this before, than the disruptions around internet, mobile, and cloud. We certainly see some valuations in the short run, that are maybe a little bit overhyped. The valuations are being set by strategic investors, not by financial investors in OpenAI, et cetera. But if I look at the impact, right, the use cases AI is already having in corporate America among consumers, I haven't seen a step function improvement, for example, in efficiency in enterprises like this in 20 years. I haven't seen a shift in consumer behavior like this in 20 years.
So I suspect that when we're sitting here in 3 or 4 years, Greg, we'll have said that it was underhyped, not overhyped. We lived through a hype cycle in 1998, right? We dreamed of a world that might exist in 15 years. Today, we have 3 billion supercomputers in our pocket. The rate of adoption of these technologies is radically higher than it was in 2000, and so I think it will get here sooner than we think.
So I heard the big four, OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, all talk about how the convergence of chipsets, LLMs, and then the technologies themselves has done this acceleration, but there's still a lot of hype. Joe set the stage. There's been lots of talk of AI, lots of talk of generative AI, lots of talk of large language models. The core concept and the name artificial intelligence actually got created in 1955 at Dartmouth. It's been around a long time.
Dark.
Why now? Easy. Easy. You know, I had to hype the home team.
Seriously.
Why, why, why now? You know, why now? Pandora had a history of being a place for innovation with AI or machine learning, how you view it. Why now? What's different?
Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's a great point. The, you know, Pandora's Music Genome Project, which is basically the ability to analyze music and figure out how songs go together, is based upon something called transformers, which are the underlying technology used in all these large language models and things like that. So to your point, they've been around for a long time, but I think there is, there's a barrier that's gonna look like the K-T Barrier with the dinosaurs that occurred between what we've done in the past in AI, which is really, like, optimization and signal finding and things like that. You know, can I, can I see how these things are correlated together? Can I use all this computer technology to see how things are correlated?
To what we're doing right now with these large language models on the generative side, which is really much more about reasoning, and conversationalists, and improvisation, and things that we have not typically seen before. These emergent behaviors, I think, even surprised the industry as to how much of a step function it was. And the thing that's so crazy about it, it's not the underlying technology that got better, it's the scale that got massive. So it's actually technology that was relatively well understood, and then all of a sudden, you just make it, you know, many, many, many, many orders of magnitude bigger, and you get these emergent behaviors that are incredibly powerful.
So that's in part why these chipset revolutions are an important p art.
Absolutely.
It was. It's a software, hardware interface.
Yeah
And a combination that's made part of the difference.
No, a great point, I think if you look at companies like NVIDIA, and you look at Amazon and Google.
Yeah
Y ou needed to have these massive-scale data centers and massive, you know, numbers of these chips networked together in a way that was super performant to get, to get to the point where you could kind of give birth to this thing. And so it took the confluence of a bunch of different things, but I agree, what's happened now is really something other than that. Like, we've, we've transitioned into this new thing, where this emergent behavior is just like I said, I think it even shocked the people that were doing it. It was like: Wow! You know, you make it bigger and bigger and bigger, and it just keeps getting better. You know, there's downstream effects like hallucinate, hallucinations and things like that, but that'll get wrung out eventually.
We'll talk about hallucinations when people start getting hungry for lunch in a minute. But, no, we will cover I do want to talk about that. Lots of our companies at Liberty have been using this, lots of ways.
Mm-hmm.
You know, TripAdvisor creating trip recommendations using AI. F1, leveraging as an accelerant or enabler of tools, enhanced transcription, for example, on across F1 TV on multiple languages. You guys both look at the consumer space, CPTO at SiriusXM, you're an investor in these. Where do you see some of the most intriguing examples? If you could pick one of them, and we didn't process this, if you could give Liberty examples being great, that would be all the better. But if you have other good consumer examples, I'd love to hear them. What do you think? Give me a couple, Brad, you think are out there that are particularly interesting.
Well, I think that, you know, to me, and I'll ask this audience, you know, who's used ChatGPT in the last week and substituted its use for a use you would have previously had for Google? Okay, if we had asked that question 4 years ago or 3 years ago, no hands would have gone up. In 23 years, the defining metaphor, the organizing principle for all consumer internet has been 10 blue links. There was no substitute. Everybody had to play in that ecosystem. Every You and I would sit in a boardroom, we would talk about SEO and SEM, and, you know, we'd whine about Google, and they just controlled the platform, and they extracted massive rents. I think the single most important thing in the last 20 years in consumer is the top of the funnel. The glass is changing.
You know, a lot of people talk about I've been, you know, I've said, I think it's gonna be very difficult for Google to replicate the monopoly that they have in search in this new thing, right? Agents are gonna be the top of the funnel. You're gonna have a conversation, you're gonna ask questions. Answer bot, bots we have today in ChatGPT, action bots. So is this hotel available for next Wednesday? At what price? Okay, book it. That's just a simple conversation you're gonna have in your iPod or on your phone. You're not going to have to go to a different website and peck in all of that little information. So to me, I think every company that's in vertical search or horizontal search needs to be thinking about a world post-search, post-apps, you know, that really takes advantage of interfacing with these agents. Now, we're gonna have four, five, six agents competing to be the top of the funnel. It's gonna be an epic battle between Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Meta AI, Google's Bard.
Open source.
Open source.
Open source, which will drive down You talk about, we chatted a little bit about before about what's gonna happen to pricing. This is gonna be a competitive business.
For sure. So, you know, I don't want to filibuster, but that's. You know, to me, on the consumer front, I'm less focused on what are the little turns of the screw, you know, the individual companies are making, and I'm more thinking about, like, how is Zillow going to be relevant in the age of AI? Because I don't think that the metaphor of vertical search ports to the world of AI.
Yeah. Joe, you, you wanna comment on that? And we're gonna. Then we'll come back and defend poor little Zillow, which
No, I love Zillow!
We're both good friends of Zillow so we're laughing.
So, I mean, look, I totally agree with that assessment. I think that's definitely the world that search and discovery, you know, general discovery, and really, the utility side of it is going. You know, I spent most of my career in the sports and entertainment side.
Right.
So looking at it from a media lens, I do think it changes things dramatically. I mean, certainly, like customer service and some of the use cases that we've seen here today, you know, no question that already we're at a point where these agents, these intelligent agents, are not a chatbot. They're, they're as good or better, or very shortly, will be better than the human agents. Customer satisfaction going up, cost going down, really good stuff like that, so it's gonna start there. But I think if you just think about the generative side, let's just say that, you know, you could use some of this technology to make a TV episode or a movie at half the price. Well, there are going to be some companies that get there first, and they're not just going to reduce costs on that side, they're going to reinvest it.
So now they're going to have twice as much content out there, which is then going to put pressure on everybody else. And so things are going to start to shift around, but I think, you know, the use cases are going to start with the stuff that's obvious and low-hanging, but it's going to start to really accelerate. And companies that have positioned themselves for automation are going to be the ones that are able to get into this revolution first, because if you don't have the automation step, you can't really use any of this technology. So, you know, it's like a continuum from manual to automated to some level of AI, to then, oh, boom, you hit this generative hockey stick. And if you're in one of those later stages, you're going to be able to get there really quickly.
I mean, Greg, if you're not AI first, if you're in the media business, content creation business, and you're not AI first, you're going to have a really big problem. 2015, Yiming, you know, a Chinese entrepreneur, comes into my office, and he has a little business called Toutiao in China, a newsfeed, doing $1 billion in revenue, break even. And I said: "How are you going to target content to your consumers when you don't have a social graph, right? I understand how Facebook does it, but how are you going to do it?" And he waves me off immediately. He said, "Brad, AI is way more powerful than a social graph." We now know that little company, Toutiao, as TikTok, as ByteDance. It does 100 and we invest in the business, 2015.
This year, it'll do $130 billion in revenue, right? Every single piece of content they create is created by AI. All the targeting is AI, all the ad targeting is AI, and it caught Zuck off guard at Meta. It took him three years to realize that the game had totally changed. He needed to rebuild every data center he had around the GPU. He needed to get into targeting content like Reels and Instagram rather than the social feeds that he was doing, and that's the level of transformation that I think is coming to the entire media business. You know, it's got to be AI first.
But is AI a big boy game? Do you have to be OpenAI? Do you have to be ByteDance? Do you have to be Microsoft to play, or are they going to dissipate down and be competitive and be platforms in which extensions are built, which are interesting? Could it be the case that the Zillows of the world have their own extensions, their own LLMs, with specific data, specific knowledge of what customers are doing and what they want, that is the protection and the enabler for them, or are they going to get? How do you look at that protection?
Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's gonna, the landscape is gonna shift, but it's sort of like, you know, if you take a step back, let's go back to NVIDIA and Intel and everything. Everybody kind of runs the same processors. They kind of do this. They run very similar operating systems. Things have always moved up stack in technology. And, you know, if you think about the cloud revolution, you had a whole bunch of companies that were known and made their bones really on premises, data centers, and then you had this massive cloud disruption, and so the big growth wound up being in the cloud side. It's going to be the same thing with AI.
There's going to be a big boy set of tools and services that are out there, and then there'll be a rich ecosystem of folks around it that are putting them together in novel ways, creating their own sort of special sauce side of it. But, you know, to build a foundation model is, you know, $100 million, you know, to train at this point in time, to get something trained or more. So I don't think you're going to see, like, little, tiny companies, but I agree with you about open source. I think that's a really astute observation. You know, in the way that Linux is still underpinning of this, you know, the last revolution, there will be open source models that are going to empower a lot of people to do a lot of things.
Not every single task needs the biggest model you could possibly have, you know, out there. So I think, you know, these models still cost money to run, so you really want to run the model that is the right size for your use case. And in many cases, you may need a couple of models to get your use case out there. So I think there's going to be a robust ecosystem around it. The players are going to change. You know, you'll see some of the same incumbents, just like you did from the last revolution, that can catch up and get in there.
And you'll see some new folks that, like, didn't exist before, that all of a sudden show up on the map and be like: Okay, now we're here, and we're going to own this piece of the market, too. But there'll be I just think-
Yeah
T he whole ecosystem is going to be very dynamic.
If you're a content company or in the business of commerce, okay? In 2000, if you didn't have a website, you were dead, right? You had to build a website. You had to be discovered, and all your activity moved to the web. In 2010, if you didn't have a mobile app, right? Remember, Zuck was going to build HTML5, stock crater, goes to $17 a share because he said: "I don't think I need to build, you know, a native app." That changed quickly, okay? So webpages became native apps. What happens in the age of AI? So when we were talking with our great friend, Rich, at Zillow, Rich is one of the best visionaries in the business. He understands we're moving into a post-app world. So you need to get good.
You know, if you were one of those companies, you need to get good at the app store. During the age of internet, you need to be good at SEM and SEO. Now, you need to get really good at being an agent because your agent is going to interact with the master agent, and the master agent's going to be Bard
Yeah
Or it's going to be ChatGPT, or it's going to be Meta AI. Behind the scenes, these agents will be having conversations. They are APIs and digital interactions, so you need to make sure that you're, you know, on the bleeding edge.
Yeah
Of making sure your agent is discovered, interacts, because they're not going to need to go to 1,000 different agents to get their questions, sub-agents.
I mean-
To get their questions answered. I'm not sure what the economics to that are going to be, but I'm pretty certain that that's going to be the new operating metaphor.
So for, for both of you, and I'm going to do this. When I was at Microsoft, Microsoft was behind, then started to get caught, had the internet tidal wave in 1995. Bill wrote a famous memo, launched internet throughout the company. He said: "Look, we're not going to create an internet division, just like we don't create an electricity division.
Right.
It's going to run through everything we do." How will AI be organized, do you think, smartly in the best companies? How are the best companies going to think about it? Are they going to have an AI effort? How are they going to embed AI in what they do? How will they roll out product roadmaps? Will they be integrated or separate verticals within their own companies? How do you, how do you think about it, Joe?
I mean, look, I love your metaphor, and I would sort of—if you took it up a level, the internet revolution was all about getting information accessible-
Yeah
Getting as much information accessible as it is. The mobile revolution was really about constraining what you did with that information into a use case that was super beneficial to the customer. So I go to this app, and I get my weather. I go to this app, and I get my other thing.
Exactly.
The next one's going to be even a further reaction-
Yeah
back down to the agent level. And I think you know, Greg, the quip that you threw out, I think, is perfectly spot on, which is companies that made a web division didn't do well.
Yeah.
Now, we don't have web divisions. We just have companies, and yes, the website is built by somebody and managed by somebody and all that sort of stuff. So I think the companies that get there back to the automation side, the companies that are already positioned with automation and everything, already have a lot of the rails to sort of take advantage of this. I saw, you know, I saw Mike, you know, presenting earlier, and, you know, we were, you know, talking about like things like tickets. Like, that's a highly automated process. They're already there.
So now, all of a sudden, the notion of grafting on some AI, for example, to take it to the next level, so everybody gets a personalized come-on for that ticket based upon all the knowledge that they have about it, is a pretty incremental step as opposed to this massive step function. So I think companies. There will be those that do it both ways. Like you said, there's a division that does this. But the companies that excel, the companies that really accelerate into this trend, are the ones that have already made the automation step and are just flooring it at this point in time to just scale it out.
You want to add anything on that, or-
No.
Okay, good.
That's good.
Let's go big picture for a sec, and then we're going to drill a little, too. So big picture, a McKinsey study thinks that generative AI could add $4 trillion of economic impact through new cases and $25 trillion, so that's really forward-looking, and $25 trillion primarily through enabled worker productivity. There's also going to be a lot of roadkill here, a lot of jobs lost, a lot of retraining required. How do you weigh this? How do you measure productivity? How much of this will be forward out, because you're focused on the consumer side in what your comments were, and how much of this will be the back end?
You know, there are what's going on at Charter is, you know, enormous opportunities in the back end around customer service, and that's true for many cases. What's going on in automated processes and driving those? How do you weigh the front and the back? How do you look at those productivity, and how do you look at the, you know, the roadkill of not the roadkill of companies, but, you know, people whose jobs are lost and how that'll be reworked?
I mean, the reason I think there's going to be a golden era, and the United States is in the lead, and I'm an American optimist when it comes to this, is that for companies, this should be expansion to bottom line and acceleration to top line. Ultimately, I mean, we've never seen anything that can make an engineer 5% more productive.
Yeah
Let alone 30%-50% more productive. Just take this stat: Meta compounded its headcount at 40% CAGR for 5 years leading up to 2021. Mark's now saying they're not gonna- they'll have net no hiring, despite 20% growth for the next 4 or 5 years. That's because they're getting incredible efficiencies out of engineering, incredible engineering out of call centers.
Wait, wait, wait. You would also, you would also argue they had 95,000 employees-
Of course
Before they started this process, and you're like, "What were all these people doing?
Yeah.
Honestly, 95,000 people who are on Facebook was nuts, right?
I wrote the letter.
Wrote the letter.
Time to get fit. You know, it was. So yes, we,
We were saying this last night at dinner. There are 95,000 people at Charter. I know what they do. They do truck rolls.
Right.
They roll out fiber. There's physical elements. What are these 95,000 on Facebook doing?
They eat sushi and drink espressos. So you know, we're seeing massive efficiencies that I think will roll through. We asked, I asked at dinner last night, Ted, when you know, when we think we'll see this show up in productivity figures for the country. It's impossible to believe that it won't.
Mm-hmm.
But-
But it has.
But-
But it has.
Technical progress is not distributed equally. It will be disruptive, right? I think more disruptive, because, you know, this year was the year of testing. Next year is the year of production.
Yeah.
2025 is when this stuff really starts rolling out. In terms of employment, it's not going to mean that we're going to, overnight, get rid of 30% of the people in the call center, but it's going to mean we're not backfilling attrition, that we're going to let the bottom 10% go at the end of the year. And so I think it will be an employment headwind, and I think a lot of those jobs will not come back. Now, listen, we're going to have a lot of jobs created. You know, I made, I talked about on CNBC yesterday, I'm doing this thing called Invest America. Follow it on Twitter, Invest America 2024.
But it's a private investment account for every child born in America, and part of the reason we have to do this is we're you know, less than 50% of people under the age of 40 believe in capitalism, and it's because they feel like the system of progress is rigged against them, right? And we're about ready to have the biggest labor displacement in the history of the country over the course of the next decade, and so we need to get in front of this. We don't want people arguing to stop progress because they're left out. We need to take everybody on the path of progress with us. So I think it's of that order of magnitude. I think it's going to be good for all your companies.
Yeah. Well, we're going to talk about our companies and how we're going to make so much money in a minute. Joe, let me throw this to you.
Yeah.
You know, there's all this disruption, there's all of these things happening, they're machine driven. Sirius is built around the idea that a human connection is meaningful. Jennifer talked about it. We've talked about it with our ecosystem brands. You know, as generative AI scales in consumer applications, what is the balance in this product between how much, you know, is automation touching your customers, how much this is touching your customers? How much of this is antithetical to the things that we believe are the ecosystem? How do you look at that tension?
Yeah, I mean, I actually see them not in conflict. And so, you know, certainly at Sirius and in my last job, as well, when you're dealing with content creators, and you're dealing with sort of this really creative side of it, which is very different than a utility side of it, computers are still really bad at taste-making. So, like, if you look at, like, some of the generative AI, for example, that makes pictures, like, the first one you see, you're like: "Oh, my God, that's amazing." You know? That's, like, Greg riding a unicorn. How did that you know, how did that work, you know, in an old Western study? You're like: "This is insane." And then you see five of them, and you're like, "Well, they all look the same." So, like, the creative part of it isn't really there.
It's exceptionally good at the sort of taking the creativity and then compositing it. So when we look at it. The human curator is still a big thing. The question is, how are you scaling that human curator or that human creator into something that's much more broad? And every time that, even with the generative stuff, anytime that we've put the two things together, it's like generative is up here, you know, people are down here. Both of them together is greater than the sum of the parts. Because when you get to the creative efforts, there's just a thing about taste-making.
And so when we look at it at Sirius, now, what we're really looking at is how do we fuse these two things together in a way that allows us to scale, in a way that would be amazing. So, like, for example, I get. You know, I'm walking around the office, I could talk to a guy that does, you know, a genre of music that I like. I'd say: "What's hot right now?" And he'll tell me. But that answer is really different for different people.
Armani White, I heard last yesterday.
That's right. Absolutely. But, you know, that answer is different for different people. So the question is: How do you take that, and then how do you scale it up to the point where now everybody can have that good of an efficacy of a conversation with an agent that is already seeded with a bunch of information, as well as the entire canon of things that are out there? And so I think about, like, you know, back to the optimism side, I think it's about how do you create human excellence with this? Because, you know, people are good, the tools are good. People with good tools are gonna be the ones that win.
Let me build on that. As humans, we have cognitive dissonance around this idea that a machine without human curation can actually do it better. But the truth of the matter is, my thirteen-year-old son is buying all this stuff off of Temu, the number one app in the United States, probably the fastest-growing e-commerce company in history. And I said, "Why are you You know, why do you get so excited about buying things on Temu?" He said, "It's fun, and they know exactly what I want." Temu is using the same resources that Yaming does at TikTok to target products to my son, Jack, because it knows that he wants to buy fake Yeezys for $7 , right? Like, it just. And this is what I'm talking about being AI first. There is no human intervention.
Right.
If you asked anybody at Temu why they're targeting this IP.
Right
T his app, user with Yeezys, they would say: "Ask the black box. We don't know." And so I think that's what, you know, where the world is quickly.
We're gonna come back and talk about. Well, I'm gonna finish with a couple more. We're gonna indulge you for holding out on lunch for a little longer. Travel.
Yeah.
Brad and I both have a long history in travel back to Expedia, TripAdvisor, all the way. Earlier this year, a bunch of investment banks listed an AI shortlist of who's gonna get hit, and TripAdvisor was top of the list. We thought it was misguided. TripAdvisor has a bunch of compelling AI initiatives. You know, generating AI powered travel inventories is very powerful. Ability to execute on that, improve capabilities, running analysis of their extensive content base, what consumer behavior. If there's something in particular you want that's unique, they're gonna know it better than certainly most people because of the Big Tech LLM that they own. In your view, how is travel positioned? How is travel moved? You talked about generating your hotel. What's the future of travel in that world of scale of AI, and, and how is poor little TripAdvisor gonna survive this?
I mean, listen, I think it's one of the. As you know, I've been an investor in lots of the online travel companies over the last decade, and started a couple myself. It's gonna have to change a lot. If you think about travel, it's really broken down into two halves. There's the utility half, which is, I know I'm coming to New York for this event, it's already in my calendar, and I just need to book the hotel. I want to get the right room, I want to get the best price, et cetera. You know, many of you probably have a personal assistant who does it for you. Now, we're gonna give that personal assistant for free in everybody's pocket, and all their utility will be as efficient as your interaction with your personal assistant.
You'll have a conversation with your, your Meta AI, right? Whichever one, you know, that, that you, you know, you migrate toward. And it's not gonna be about discovery, it's not gonna be about entertainment. That side of your travel habit, in fact, it will probably be predictive. It'll say: "I see in your calendar you've got to be in New York. Do you want me to get you the same room you always like at whatever hotel, The Edition, and do you want me to get it to you at such and such price?" Okay? And it may ask you, or it may not, may say: "Hey, do you want me to book it directly at The Edition so you get your points, or do you want me to book it through Booking.com?
Because I know you like that site." You know, but there's gonna be a fight as to how. Now, these are gonna be agents talking to sub-agents. There will be no human in the loop. And then, on the other side, I think where TripAdvisor plays is when we're dreaming, when we're discovering, when we're thinking experientially about, you know, what we want our families to do this summer. AIs will also have a role there, but I think the role and the content and the value of companies engaged in the experiential part is much more durable and sustainable and important.
That actually plays pretty well for Trip.com. I agree. Versus the OTAs, right? I totally agree. Because we're in the, we're in the thinking, developing, you know, exciting travel business, not the execution travel business.
If you, if you think about when you and I got into the travel business, right? The big market caps, Sabre. Right. Right. What happened to Sabre? They got pushed down the stack by Travelocity and Expedia. What I would be worried about if I was running Expedia or Booking today, is that you're now Sabre, and you're gonna get pushed down the stack, and now the abstraction layer is gonna be the agent, right? Now you're gonna simply be in the game of transacting a reservation, and you don't get paid 15% or 20% of the total room value if all you are is a transaction engine.
Yes. Well, I mean, just speaking of Liberty companies, I think what you guys have done with F1 is exactly on that, right? It's the same thing. 'Cause I agree, you know, in the world of the highly automated and the highly precise, the innovation side of it, that sort of flare side of it, is super important. You know, we did a piece of research, which I see as somewhat analogous to this, where we were like, you know, testing things out, and, you know, there's this thing, well, young people don't like radio. But yet, actually, when we did the actual testing, the quant testing, the younger audiences were the ones who liked the DJ more than the older audiences.
Hmm.
I was like, "Wow, that's really strange." So I was like, "Why is that? Like, is something wrong? Not a good sample," et cetera. I started reading the comments, and this one, like, nailed it for me. It was a 20-year-old woman, and she's like: "Oh, my God, this is so cool. It's like a podcast with music.
I love it. I love it.
Right? And so in this world of everything is sort of curated and all these types of things, these like flourishes, I agree with you 100% about the travel side. The experience side of it is there. And so I think, you know, like I said, like what you guys did with F1, I think is brilliant because it's that thing.
Yes.
That is going to be a precious, unique commodity.
Another place where you have some history, Joe, is in baseball.
Mm-hmm.
Baseball is a history with rich data sets. No sports captures more information for longer than baseball,
Right.
And they've been leveraging those new analytic tools very well. Alex Anthopoulos is a star at this. Statcast ingests and displays metrics.
I helped.
You helped create on player strengths and weaknesses, the sweet spot, exit velocity, projected home run distance. It's used by the coaching staff to advance training regimes, informs player acquisitions and game strategies, informs players.
Yep.
You should be doing this." It's on the business side, too. Things like wait time.
Mm-hmm.
We use it for product use, for ingress, egress, and how to master planning, how to price, all these things. But taking a broader lens on this, and you most may have a view, how is this gonna turn into not just, "Hey, you hit better on this kind of pitcher?" How is this gonna be turned into human performance and, and talent development? Obviously, that is a huge issue for Hollywood.
Yep.
We've just seen the fight that went on. There was a settlement, I have to say. You know, I've not ingested all that got agreed upon. Be interesting to know. But what do you think about applications across athletes, musicians, performers, other public figure, public-facing figures?
Yeah, I mean, you're right in my sweet spot. I mean, the first third,
That's why I asked the question.
But the first third of my career, you know, I spent with the White Sox, the Chicago Bulls, and the Blackhawks. And so I've, you know, I've been on that sort of technology coaching side in three professional sports. You know, three rings with the Bulls in the nineties. Kind of, for the folks that are fans, you know, Last Dance era, and it was all about player performance. And so the answer is, it's already doing it. Like, back then, we had to do a bunch of stuff manually. Like, I had loggers, I had three loggers during the game that were putting, like, what shot was taken, you know, where players were on the court, things like that, manually in real time during the game, that now I can just point a GoPro at and get the same data.
But it's not just that part of it. So when you talk about performance of athletes, it's like, you know, like, blood oxygenation, you know, muscle fatigue, lactic acid buildup. It's what they eat, how they train, how do you tweak these things? I mean, it is done at such an incredible level from the actual athletes themselves. Like, as great as Michael Jordan was, if Michael Jordan played today, he'd be even better because of all this technology. So it's already happening. So I think on the sports athletic side, it's already in full swing. And I know because I've been working with, you know, a couple of universities on this, like, there's a lot of work going on in taking this generative AI technology and really taking a look at these data sets and seeing what else is there, you know.
Because at some point in time, it's not just the signal finding. It's like, well, yeah, okay, this is his blood oxygen, but how do I make it better? But I think that same thing is going to apply to all, you know, regimes in there. So you start talking about actors and things like that, you know, the performance of almost anybody, when you talk about an actor or an athlete or something, you get to see the 0.1% that is the part, that is the actual performance. 99.9% of that is preparation for that one, you know, 0.1%, and that's where the machine learning and the sort of reinforcement learning and these AI things are just gonna blow it out.
You wanna add to that, Brad?
Nope.
Okay. So one of the things that is a huge legal fight, and it also applies. I'm gonna ask both a specific question and a broader question. You know, sampling in music is a huge deal, but the record companies are fighting to ensure that that is not occurring more broadly to train LLMs. There's lawsuits and threatened lawsuits that are already occurring. And Marc Andreessen has written recently about this, that if this happens, it's a huge limitation for the United States' ability to compete in AI. China, so I got a couple, about five areas to let you riff on. One is, how do you look at sampling? How do you look at this question about how to train LLMs?
How do you look at some of the legal questions which are evolving? But also, you know, China's a closed world. What are the strengths of the U.S. to compete in this space is that we are an open world. How right is Andreessen, if we shut this down, that we're gonna look more like China? China's had a lot of advances in AI, but a lot of people have forecast that they're limited because of the nature of their society, the nature of how they're gonna limit their LLMs, nature of what gets crawled. How about it?
Well, I mean, you, you and I lived through this 20 years ago, and the fair use doctrine saved the internet, and without it, there would be no internet, right? It would be a vastly, vastly different thing. And I think if you look at it today, if you apply, you know, the metaphor of music sampling, which has been legal for a long time, now, if we're producing a synthetically created song that sounds like A, B, and C, the LLM is not being trained. It's not going and crawling one person, right? That LLM is trained on millions, if not billions of inputs that allows it to create the output.
So I think the Supreme Court of the United States can be very, very hard-pressed under fair use to, you know, say that. Now, people can withdraw from the public corpus, their music, but once your music is in the public domain, I think it'll be very hard for them to enforce that this thing that is synthetically produced by an LLM was somehow, you know, expropriated from them.
Spotify got in a lot of trouble in your world.
Yeah.
In your world, Joe, for this.
Yes.
For producing near music.
Yeah.
Right? Which was a. It's a very.
But I also think, I also think that's in the eyes of the consumer. If you hold out to the consumer that you're doing something, right, if you appear that you're expropriating from an artist, their unique works, and you're in the consumer business, then I think people will say, "Hey, we don't know if we trust your brand." As you know, I'm on the board of iHeart, and, you know, this is a, this is a topic that I push hard on that board because I think, you know, for myself, there are genres of music that I want to hear. And to be perfectly honest, I don't care. As a consumer, at certain hours of the day, I just wanna hear the sound that sounds like the thing I want to hear, and I don't need to hear, you know, the head end of a particular artist. But the second part of that is just about the competitiveness of the United States.
Well, let's let Joe.
Okay.
I want to hear your view on the music. No, it's good, but I want,
I mean, look, I think that the thing that's very surprising to me is, like, we have these technological revolutions where things are radically different. Like, this is just something that has not existed before in history. And then everybody runs and says, "Well, how does this law that was written or this, you know, this thing from 50, 75 years ago inform this?" And the answer is: the law is gonna have to change, too. So I feel like if there's a little bit of like. It's gotta be a little bit of A and a little bit of column B. You know, when you have something that says. You know, artists are already using generative inside the studio, so they're making content, using it-
Yes
T hat's actually got the corpus,
I mean, the dirty little secret.
Yeah
they're using a lot of AI.
Tons.
You know, and arguably, a lot of artists, their music that you attribute to the artist-
Yeah
Is 70%-80% made by an AI themselves.
No question. So I think that the notion of, like, in the process and, like, you know, music kind of in the background and stuff like that is one sort of use case. I think it's very different if you say, "Make me a new album that sounds like Oasis." Like, if you're Oasis, you're like: "Well, wait a second. Now, there's no way that you could make a song that sounds like me if you didn't ingest me in the first place.
Yeah.
I think that we're gonna have to get into something that's not quite fair use and not quite the black and white of the copyright, where it says, like, "Look, this is the. This is the extent that you can use the source material to replicate similar source material. Here's the extent you can use it to train a model
Right
To do much more generic, foundational things.
Sure.
But the law is gonna have to catch up, and, like, we're sprinting so fast on the AI side. I think this is gonna be a very bloody four or five years of people just trying to wrap their heads around, how do we get this to work?
Well, it's usually the incumbents that run to the courts-
Yeah
that try to slow down
We've already seen that, right?
You know, all of this progress.
Yes.
You know, for me, part of the magic of this system, we know that today, You know, Xi's coming to San Francisco in a few weeks, hopefully for a mini détente with President Biden. But we know that the battle that's playing out is now being played out over chips, not over weapons.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Because national security and national economic security is about silicon and AI. It is no longer about weapon systems, right? And so
Although I'm not sure they would quite agree in Ukraine or in Gaza right now, but it's-
No, but I mean, if you look at what's flying around in Ukraine, blowing up Russian tanks, it's AI-driven drones made by companies like Anduril, right? The other countries can't replicate because they don't have the technology. So my only point is that for the United States to cede its competitiveness by getting wrapped around the litigation axle would be a huge mistake today, just like it would have been a tremendous mistake in 1999 to do that and impede the progress of the Internet.
Right. So last one. Lunch is waiting. Lots of talk about copilots playing a crucial role in enhancing productivity, but there's also a lot of talk that they're not exactly perfect. Can we run our example? Show the screen. They asked who my copilot was. Some of these people are not actually people. Gregory DiMuffe is somebody I do not know, because I am Gregory B. Maffei. Brian Roberts is a wonderful man, but he is not really my copilot. There are hallucinations everywhere. There are clearly mistakes. We've seen all the power of AI, but we've seen also the excesses and the craziness that comes out, things that are just beyond random.
How does this get to where we have? You know, everyone tells me I can drive my Tesla in an automated mode. I can't. It does not work. AI is useful for some things, but is unreliable in many other ways. How does this get fixed? How do hallucinations go away? How do you see this becoming something where we can actually rely on it?
I mean, I think there's really two things to that. Like, when you look at stuff like that, it's not like humans don't make up that stuff, too, right? So I think,
We don't trust humans already. Go ahead.
Right. But I think there is this the question of, like, what's the bar? Like, how do we get into some empiricalness about, like, how good is good enough? And so, you know, part of it is that, to the car situation, the number of bad human drivers out there is far worse than the number of AI drivers that are out there driving cars, so, But yet, when an AI does it, we're like, "Oh, my God, that's horrible," right? But I think we have to start looking at some of these things statistically and try to figure out, like, how good is good enough, and then have some real conversations about, like, resetting some of these things.
Because AI is gonna be around, and back to the notion of our competitiveness worldwide, other people are gonna have different tolerances for that, and those tolerances will allow those AIs to learn faster, which will then ultimately be a threat for us if we put the training wheels on too tight for something like that.
Yeah.
I think that's part of it. I think the second part of it, though, I think, is technologically-
Yeah
Much like in our brain, each one of these AIs almost looks like a specialized part of the human brain. Much like our brain, we have conversations with ourselves internally, and, you know, whether you call it ensemble or you call it Socratic, there's a bunch of things now that are going on where, like, AI models can talk to AI models sort of before they answer to you, and I think that's where a lot of this stuff gets pressure tested in the same way. Or your trusted, your actual trusted human friend, when you're like, "Hey, I think this," and they're like, "That's crazy. You might want to think about that differently." As soon as the models start to have more conversations like that, this stuff goes away.
You invest in this stuff. Where do you see this progressing?
Well, no, just to finish on that, just. This is really important, I think, for folks to understand. If I ask one of my analysts to go do an analysis, right, there will be mistakes. If I ask five other analysts to fact-check that analysis, the accuracy will go up.
Exactly.
What he's saying about this Socratic ensemble model is now, this is happening today, right? Agents are now fact-checking agents.
Yeah.
The problem of hallucination, I think, will be dealt with very, you know, very effectively. You know, as an investor, you know, maybe it. You know, I wrap with this: I think it's a golden era. I really, you know, I think the era of information retrieval search that defined the last 20 years unlocked trillions of dollars of productivity and value creation. I often describe Google as the largest card catalog ever created. But the reality is, we had to pull out the drawer. We had to sift between all the links. We had to go to the links, hunt and peck. We had to read what was on that page. We had to try to figure out whether it answered the question.
It took a bunch of time, and as ads took over the page, it took even more time. Now you can just have an interaction with an agent who gives you the answer. Yes, these will progress, but they're progressing very, very quickly. I think for existing businesses who get on board the train, just like people who adopted the internet early or mobile early or cloud early, right? Bringing those incumbent assets to the table and the party of this new, you know, this new disruption, I think will, you know, improve bottom lines, reaccelerate top lines. But to be clear, there's gonna be a lot of roadkill here as well.
I think as a stock picker, you know, we get paid when there's dispersion, when things go up and things go down, and we try to anthropologically figure out which is going up and which is going down. It's a really interesting time for me in that regard. You know, these ten-year periods where it's just, you know, the disruption happens, and now it's just an application of the disruption, they get pretty stable and sometimes even a little boring. It's not boring right now.
On that happy note, we took you long through lunch. I thought it was worth it. I hope you do agree. Thank you to our panelists.
Thanks for having us. Great.
Thanks.
Great job. Great job.
Great job.
Just so you know, we're gonna start back up just after 1 P.M., so we'll see you then.
So we will have Liberty TripAdvisor and TripAdvisor, then Liberty Broadband with Charter and GCI, and we will end with our Q&A with John Malone and Greg Maffei. Just a note on Q&A, we will have mics being passed around, so we have some pre-submitted questions, but we'll take some from the group here. Please wait for a mic to get to you before asking the question. And for your viewing pleasure, please watch an additional FLS. Finally, we do have a bit more entertainment for you. It would not be Liberty Comedy if we did not offer some musical entertainment. So without further ado, please enjoy!
Liberty's continued ability to make fools of ourselves remains strong. I'm here to talk about Liberty Trip and a little bit about Trip. Trip has a very attractive portfolio of travel brands. Just for emphasis. With three distinct assets, TripAdvisor Core was an example of high-quality data. So if you're a light sleeper, we can recommend a hotel and perhaps even a room based on the noise level. At Viator, we're improving customer economics even as we invest in the business. We're very excited about the growth prospects for Viator. If you look at how its nearest comp was recently valued at $2 billion, you've got to think it's not clear it's being recognized inside the TripAdvisor brand and stock. And finally, The Fork. The leader in European dining, we expect to be profitable by the end of 2023.
Many on the street look at TripAdvisor on a DCF basis and/or an EBITDA multiple basis, and you really don't get the full value because two of these brands are not profitable today, but expect to be profitable in 2024. And particularly Viator, with enormous growth, I don't think is being recognized fully on that kind of DCF or EBITDA basis. The sum of the parts would be a far better method, and we believe on that basis, it's quite attractively priced, which is why, one of the reasons why they recently just instituted a stock buyback program. One of the ways that TripAdvisor is unique is both the content and the quality of the data it has. The scale is huge, and much of it is proprietary, and much of it is highly valuable.
Those click streams, the intent of consumers, the history of consumers, all of those are elements that go into making the LLM for TripAdvisor quite valuable. The ability to provide a holistic travel guide, Brad Gerstner touched on this in our session on AI, is really where some of that opportunity exists, and the ability to bridge that scale of data with also combined with a trusted brand name and the quality of perception that TripAdvisor had, we think is unique. Gen AI is gonna bring a lot of that together and we believe, create a lot of opportunities for us to leverage all of these assets in a very interesting way. You can see this beginning in the TripAdvisor Planner, the planning tool we're working on. Now, there are a number of players out there with AI planning tools.
Certainly, we're not unique, but not all of them have this data, have this interface, have this trusted brand on top of the things that the AI interface provides, and we're the only one that can match planning with direct booking, so you should go check it out. Please do look at what we can do for your next trip. And with that, I'm gonna introduce Matt Goldberg.
Thank you, Greg. Thanks, Greg. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Matt Goldberg. I'm CEO. What did Maffei call us? Poor Little TripAdvisor? Today, I'd like to talk to you about the progress we've been making across the group since we were here last year, and how each of our segments has become more efficient and more effective in executing on their respective strategies. Quickly remind you, safe harbor. Across the group, our vision is to be the world's most trusted source for travel and experiences. We believe we're better positioned than anyone else in the world to achieve this, thanks to our global scale, our trusted brands, our strong partner relationships across all categories. As a reminder, at TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel guidance platform, over 300 million users come to us every month, and this includes, importantly, more than 130 million active members.
Our strategy is around, designed around, first and foremost, to super serve these high-value users through engagement that leads to higher levels of monetization. At Viator, we're accelerating our leadership position in experiences by connecting travelers to the world's largest supply of high-quality, online, bookable experiences. We're driving high revenue growth, approximately 57% year to date, with significant upside in a large and fast-growing market with low online penetration. Finally, at The Fork, we're the leading restaurant booking platform in Europe, connecting millions of diners to restaurants in 12 countries and offering a variety of services to our restaurant partners to help them grow their businesses. I'll start today with our TripAdvisor Core segment. With the strategy we launched earlier this year, putting travelers at the heart of everything we do has been our guiding principle. The question was, how do we do that?
By building on our heritage of trust and shifting to a model that encourages a deeper, more persistent relationship with those travelers. To answer that, I'd like to outline some of the progress we've made and why we have conviction about the path ahead. The first part of our strategy is to deliver product innovation around world-class guidance. Now, good advice is hard to find, and we're in a privileged position as the brand that travelers trust. But we can take it further by driving innovation around our product. One example is the recent launch of our beta trip planning tool that Greg just mentioned. Now, with this product, travelers can generate a personalized itinerary in just a few seconds, powered by generative AI. We've seen incredibly strong, early traveler feedback that indicates we have early product-market fit.
I want to reinforce some of the data that we shared in our earnings this week. The product is driving repeat visits. Members who create itineraries have returned to engage with us at much higher rates in the following month than members who didn't create an itinerary. This will help us drive monetization. Those same members who build an itinerary also generate three times higher revenue than the average TripAdvisor member, or thirty times higher revenue than the average non-member. We're gonna keep iterating and improving on this product, adding more features for trip planning and deeply integrating hotels and experiences that can be monetized directly. In the coming month, we'll roll out the trip planning and itinerary product in our mobile app, where we're creating a differentiated experience for our best users. Now, we really like our global scale.
It's hundreds of millions of users, but the second part of our strategy is to put even more focus on driving growth among a group of highly engaged, high-value users. A traveler who reads our reviews and then leaves doesn't monetize as well as a traveler who builds an itinerary, books an experience in the app, and returns to write a review. So how are we building a deeper relationship with our highest-value users? The short answer, data. So we stick with the trip planning example. We recently added a For You feature that leverages our first-party, proprietary data to deliver personalized hotel and experience recommendations based on what you've already added to your trip and what travelers like you recommend. It's easy to imagine this approach leveraging our vast data asset with personalized recommendations that drive higher conversion, scaling across the entire traveler journey.
We're also building ways to incentivize members for their loyalty and contributions to our community, including badging, that recognize the top contributors, and other rewards. Finally, we've rolled out a test on hotel pages that uses generative AI and our traveler data to summarize reviews and deliver unique insights on key quality attributes. So we can provide that clear signal about the noise level of a particular hotel, and even on the fifteenth floor last night, I heard Times Square. I'll have to add that to the review.
And because trust is the most important reason people come to us, we actually provide the underlying reviews from members of our community that were used to generate each insight and provide a direct path to travelers to go deeper on what matters most to them, whether it's the atmosphere, the location, or the value of a particular location. Ah, maybe back one. Forward. I think we're missing one there. Yep. Well, we'll talk about monetization for a minute. Let's go, let's go back one. I, yep. Finally, when we do improve this engagement, we create more opportunities for monetization. We've historically focused revenue opportunities on our siloed offerings, and most of you know us for Hotel Meta.
Now, Meta is a compelling business and we believe it will be for a long time to come, but it's not necessarily the growth driver for us. So we're leaning hard into growing both our marketplace and media businesses, taking advantage of our scale to accelerate the diversification that's already underway. In the marketplace, the growth and experiences exemplifies how we can participate in transaction-based economics by connecting our traveler demand with the best supply, in this case, powered by Viator. And given the demand we have today, we see meaningful opportunities to add other bookable supply into new categories and geographies, which will drive value for travelers and partners alike.
In our media business, we're broadening our value proposition from, for brands beyond our legacy display business to leverage data, new formats, native ad integrations, and custom solutions for both endemic and non-endemic partners. All this adds up to a healthier, more diversified revenue mix for TripAdvisor, and we're excited about our path forward and well-positioned to carry the momentum into 2024. Now on to Viator, where we're on a journey to bring more wonder into the world through amazing travel experiences. Globally, we're the market leader in travel's fastest-growing category. More than $3 billion in bookings will pass through our platform this year. By year-end, that'll be about 2.5 times 2019. And we do this by connecting travelers with the world's biggest and best online catalog of experiences. We offer more than 300,000 products for more than 55,000 operators.
This is everything from pasta making in Tuscany, to glow worm spotting in New Zealand, historic tours in London, and skip-the-line tickets to the Colosseum. Our market leadership is why technology and travel giants rely on us to power their experiences' storefronts. We have more than 4,000 distribution partners, including the likes of Uber, Amazon, Expedia, Booking, and nearly every other major name in travel. And of course, this also includes direct access to TripAdvisor's global audience. Well, that was the slide we needed before. We will pass that one up. But what's so exciting about Viator isn't what we've already accomplished, it's the enormous opportunity ahead.
The total addressable market for the category will be nearly $300 billion in GBV in the next few years, and amazingly, still in 2023, 80% of it is offline, and I think the opportunity is best summed up by these two numbers. For 94% of travelers, when you describe an online booking platform for experiences, they'll tell you it sounds compelling, that they'd use it, but 70% of them still think no such product exists. We see this in the way that people book experiences today. They're doing it in high-friction, fragmented, unsatisfying ways, offline, maybe talking to a concierge at a hotel and without price comparison, reviews, and sort orders. This isn't how people wanna shop for experiences, it's just the only way they know how to do it today. So what does that tell us?
We need to build awareness because we have strong product-market fit and untapped demand that's currently largely unmet, and there are $10s of billions of addressable opportunity if we get it right. This year, we've started on that journey. We've launched a national brand campaign in the U.S., telling travelers that a better solution exists, and it's called Viator. The campaign has reached hundreds of millions of travelers, and we've seen significant growth in our brand health and awareness, with benefits like rising brand search and direct traffic. Let's have a look at one of those spots.
We were on a guided museum tour in New York. Now, I'm not an art person. At least I wasn't an art person. But then I found something that spoke to me. One app, over 300,000 travel experiences you'll remember. Do more with Viator.
But that, of course, isn't all we're doing. We're turning that new audience into a loyal one, and we're doing this by improving our user experience, by easing search, enhancing the app, optimizing our checkout experience, and in hundreds of other large and small ways. We're creating clear reasons to come back with programs and incentives that drive loyalty, and collectively, this is driving compelling economics for us. Our most loyal users are our fastest-growing, highest-spending, and least costly of all our users, and they're growing 3.5 times the number of new users. We're also earning loyalty with the other side of our marketplace, our operators. We're focusing on the operator experience, driving more bookings, and doing that seamlessly. And our success here shows up as higher retention rates, with suppliers generating meaningfully more business through Viator the longer they stay on the platform.
Adoption of Accelerate, our operator marketing platform. More than half of the eligible products are now opted into the program, with operators choosing to exchange a higher commission for increased exposure on our platform. Both sides of the marketplace are working together to provide a compelling proposition for travelers, helping us convert new users into repeat users and improve our unit economics. This positions us well to deliver full-year profitability in 2024, with margin expansion as we continue to scale. Finally, at The Fork. Our focus here is to drive healthy growth with significant margin improvement this year. The opportunity in Europe is large and underpenetrated, with markets that are early in the transition to online restaurant booking relative to the U.S.
In our top five markets alone, there are 500,000 restaurants, and we're in just over 10% of them, so there's still a meaningful supply opportunity. As we drive the economics of the business, we have the advantage of increased focus and previous investments we've made to leverage. We've rationalized our footprint to focus on priority European markets. We've modernized our tech platform to drive speed of product innovation, and we've launched new products and services that enable diner payments, restaurant yield management, and underpin a value-based pricing model that continues to drive growth for us. On the diner side, we've invested in our mobile app, which helps us generate 75% of our bookings from repeat customers with higher LTVs and better retention. And on the restaurant side, we've migrated to a single software reservation system, which will really help drive growth in our B2B business.
We've done all of this as we realign our fixed cost base to deliver further leverage going forward. This puts us on track to deliver on our commitment to exit the year at break-even profitability and deliver EBITDA contribution in 2024. Before we close, let me share some of the financial highlights of the group. That's timely because we just did earnings yesterday or the day before, so we'll be able to share a little more. In Q3, we grew revenue 16% year-over-year, by more than 40% growth at Viator, as well as better-than-expected performance at TripAdvisor Core. On a year-to-date basis, revenue grew 23% year-over-year, with Viator growing 57%, The Fork 24%, and TripAdvisor Core grew 9%.
Our adjusted EBITDA trajectory is strong and reflects disciplined cost management with a balanced approach, even as we continue to drive investment across our segments. Here you can see our operating cash flow over the last five years. We're a low capital-intensive business with very little CapEx, and generate healthy free cash flow that's been growing since 2020. In fiscal 2023, we expect stable cash flow year-over-year, considering some of the one-time COVID and tax-related adjustments in each of the periods being compared. And we believe we can continue to deliver attractive free cash flow as The Fork and Viator move to become more profitable next year. Finally, at the end of the third quarter, we had $1.6 billion in available liquidity.
It's a good position to be in, with a balance sheet that will provide us with optionality, whether for organic investment, as we've been doing in Viator in particular, or for M&A in support of our strategy or other uses of cash. And, of course, Greg just mentioned we recently received board authorization for share repurchases of up to $250 million, which we will execute opportunistically. So in summary, we sit in an attractive market. We're leaning into the strength of a diverse set of assets. We're executing more efficiently and effectively to reinvigorate TripAdvisor's core, to extend Viator's leadership position in experiences, and deliver long-term sustainable growth and profitability across the portfolio. Thank you.
Jesus, that looks awkward! Okay, I think I hopefully hit it better than that. That's really bad. All right. So I'm here to talk about Liberty Broadband. Since we last spoke, Charter has made a series of very meaningful investments. They continue to make progress on their rural build, which will be the largest rural build in history. They've initiated an upgrade to their network, providing symmetrical and multi-gig across the entire footprint. They've entered the marketplace with a disruptive converged offering, Spectrum One, which offers incredibly attractive mobile pricing. And they've launched a next-gen IPTV platform, Xumo, amid an evolving MVPD backdrop. And they've reinforced their operating advantages by continuing to invest in the workforce. All of these have been expensive.
All of these are delaying free cash flow, which can be applied to share repurchase, but all of them are attractive investments that we are fully behind. Starting with rural. As I said, this will be the nation's largest and fastest-growing rural provider. Nobody has done a rollout of this scale. We're capitalizing on the attractive subsidies, the BEAD, and other grant programs previously before that, but BEAD is the new one that's in front of us. We think there are compelling unit economics on these invested capital. We'll have approximately 300,000 new subsidized rural passings this year. And twelve months in, we're achieving greater than 50% penetration, which was better than the underwritten business case. And all of these are contributing to mobile growth, which is outpacing the industry.
Second thing we're doing is upgrading and securing our network advantage. The coax hybrid fiber footprint we have is incredibly flexible and incredibly powerful, but upgrading it to ensure that we have extra capacity, both direct—bi-directional capacity, is highly attractive, and particularly in a world where you're gonna see more streaming, and I'll talk a little bit more of this about streaming data, and particularly around sports, which we think is gonna be a capacity constraint for FWA, which does not make it a long-term viable option. Brian Roberts said on his call recently, on Thursday night, Amazon is streaming football in the NFL, and that's consuming something like 25% of all the bandwidth of the internet. You know, we've gone from a world of highly efficient streams. The most efficient way to deliver linear video was satellite.
Cable is pretty efficient, and we've gone to where we're making it highly inefficient by doing each stream individually. The only upside to that is it's gonna consume a hell of a lot more bandwidth, and I don't think it's a sustainable condition for FWA in many cases. It is interesting to watch that some of the largest FWA players, like T-Mo, are investing in fiber, which must make some statement about their belief in that, too. But the execution and capital costs for this network upgrade are on path. The high split is working at a cost of less than $100 per passing, and it's dramatically lower than what the competition is spending. Mobile is our next attractive growth lever. We are offering a combined gigabit wired and wireless service across our 57 million passings.
We think it's a structural advantage, and we're getting great traction with Spectrum One, our converged offering. It's an industry-leading value for customers, and it's providing great, sticky customer relationships. Now, we gave them an early free period of mobile, and we're beginning to see that roll off and become paying in Q3 and into Q4, and we're seeing good relationship on those, what the test cohorts or how they're performing on, say, in terms of churn. Charter added 1.9 million lines year to date. That is the second highest pace paid growth in the industry, and when you consider the size of our footprint, it's far and away the highest growth in a comparable size footprint.
The MVNO deal we have with Verizon, as we've said, offers attractive economics, and we have an opportunity with using our CBRS spectrum to get owner economics where there's sufficient scale, and it becomes attractive. All of these, we believe, are very compelling, and mobile is a higher gross margin and more attractive product than video. So as we lose video revenue, and we gain mobile revenue, we believe it's gonna be highly accretive. So back in 2017, we made one of our pronouncements. We thought we showed the slide that the bundle would probably break down, but there would be likely a new bundle, and that is what has come to pass. We've seen the bundle change, but consumer preferences in video have caused them to rebundle in many cases, and you saw the efforts that we did with Disney.
Streamers were supposed to be a solution for expensive paid TV by breaking the bundle, but that really hasn't happened. It's ended up being more expensive and arguably still a bundle as we've merged streaming business now into the linear, but it's given us a path to work with the content providers together to provide some choice and flexibility for consumers about what they want and improve their consumer experience. We think the next thing that will integrate linear and streaming well is Xumo, our product, that we and Comcast are rolling out, and we think that's gonna have a major impact on the industry. The other place where the final place where I want to talk about where Charter is invested, Chris Winfrey will come up and give you lots more details as well, is in the workforce.
Over the last several quarters, we've increased pay and benefits to create a more stable and more skilled workforce with a lot higher tenure and lower churn, and we believe these investments are gonna lead to further efficiencies and cost to service customers. You begin to see that kick in, in the last few quarters, where we peaked out in Q1 2023. But we think long term, there are gonna be enormous efficiencies and benefits, and we think this will accrue to the benefit of all, including the shareholders. We are spending a lot on CapEx, but we have a lot of EBITDA for which to do that, and you can see here how large the EBITDA stream has grown over the last several years and where we're investing.
We believe all of these are attractive, including the free cash flow that goes for share repurchase, but we also think that the ones we're spending on line extension, on CapEx for rural, are all attractive investments as well. Charter can afford it, and it's creating a long-term, stronger juggernaut. So let me turn now briefly to GCI, our Alaskan friend. It was a successful year, solid growth, driven primarily by data. Much like Spectrum One, GCI+ is a converged offering, which is highly successful. GCI + customers have a 50% lower churn than standalone customers, and it's been enormously helpful in driving our share in mobile, combined with the strength of our 5G network.
We've also seen great strength in business data, driven by sales to the rural health, healthcare, and we were lucky to settle our rural healthcare litigation with the FCC in May 2023 with a positive result. So good year all in, all in for GCI. Solid business that we have a lot of confidence in, that is generating free cash flow to the benefit of Liberty Broadband. We still do have this pesky little discount at LBRD, but again, if you take the long view, the free cash flow that GCI is generating and the share repurchases we get from Charter create the opportunity to allow us to capitalize on that.
We were held up for a period because we were below the 26% cap because of the investments that Charter was making in receiving proceeds through their buyback of our stock. But we have started again in October, and we intend to use the substantial majority of those shares to repurchase LBRD shares at this attractive discount. With that, I'm gonna introduce Chris Winfrey and let him tell you a lot more about Charter, and then you'll have GCI.
Spectrum. Our success is built on our forward-thinking approach, evolving to meet the moment, changing the game, and pushing boundaries, all to make the customer experience better, expanding our network to provide service to unserved and underserved areas, because access for all means opportunity for everyone and executing superior service through our dedicated workforce and through the investments we've made in technology that can anticipate potential service issues before they affect customers. Evolution, expansion, execution.
These are the tenets we live by, and we hold true to them. Part of what's shaped us into one of America's most trustworthy companies. Spectrum Internet is built on that trust. From big cities to small towns, we're delivering the most reliable internet speeds, extending our network, making us the number one rural internet provider in the nation, and we're quickly deploying symmetrical speeds everywhere we operate, so uploads are as fast as downloads. Spectrum Mobile, celebrating its fifth anniversary, continues to be the fastest growing mobile provider in the nation, offering the fastest wireless speeds.
It's like speed on top of speed, on top of speed. Spectrum One brings seamless connectivity, internet, advanced Wi-Fi, and mobile, all working together with state-of-the-art security. Spectrum One gets it done! We're building off Spectrum One's success. Introducing Spectrum One Stream, featuring the all-new Xumo Stream Box. Everything you want to watch, all in one place. Distributing the simplifier. Spectrum Business is delivering fast and reliable services to connect small businesses. I never miss a beat. Spectrum Enterprise is a leading network and communication solutions provider to America's largest businesses, and Spectrum Reach continues to be the trusted advertising expert. This has been a pivotal year in laying the foundation for future success through evolution, expansion, and execution. We're Spectrum, and we're leading the way forward. We can't wait to show you what comes next.
I'm a Florida Gator. I'm not a Miami Dolphins fan, but I'll still take it. It looked good. Good afternoon. One of the things that, you know, I spend a lot of time when I'm talking to our employees, just reminding them of is, you know, we talk about cable, and people say cable, and that's what they mean. They mean cable. I say, "No, not cable." Tell me another industry, essentially the same company that's been around since the 1950s, that's had the ability to continue to reinvent itself time and time again from the 1950s until now, through a combination of investment and then reaping that investment through growth. And when you think about that, for our employees, it's great from a career perspective, but for shareholders, it's equally important. So Charter, there's no better place to do it at Charter.
We have significant scale. We have 860,000 network miles of plant, and that passes 57 million residences and businesses. We have 32 million customers just today. We're the largest rural builder. We have 500 million connected devices to our network every single day, and we have gigabit service everywhere we operate. That's unique. Our competitors don't do that. They redline. We have gigabit services everywhere. We also have the best product, the fastest internet, fastest Wi-Fi, fastest mobile. We're the fastest growing mobile provider inside of our footprint, and we get to do that while saving customers significant amounts of money. Now, you tie that all together with a commitment to invest in service, which, you know, really means you can have all these things, but if you don't have great service, customers won't stay.
So Charter's always had a philosophy of investing in its customer service, and it starts with investing in our employees by making sure that we have onshore, in-house employees, that when you call or you have a trouble call, that's the type of person that you're going to get. Somebody that was hired by us, trained by us, mentored by us, has a career with us, and actually cares because they're going to be there. So we invest in that, invest in our employees through both, you know, pay, benefits, training, career opportunities, and then finally, digitization of service, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. So all these things, and yet Charter is growing today at a slightly slower rate than where it had been before. A slower rate, call it what it is. The reasons are a couple.
One is that we're coming out of a period where we had a massive pull forward of broadband demand post-COVID. The second is that we have continued ongoing fiber overbuild, but that's really been going on for over a decade, so nothing really new there. Then in addition to that, we have a temporary impact of a new competitor in the marketplace with fixed wireless access, which is kind of nibbling away at the lower end of the market. The reality there is that the product doesn't have the capacity, as Greg mentioned, to go where the market's going to go. And so that problem, I think, does take care of itself over time. It is the new DSL, and I've called it in the past, a parking lot for future customer acquisition, particularly as demands increase and the speeds of our network increases.
So we have a bunch of investments. Greg highlighted a few of those, but even without that, prior to that, we have a structural advantage. You know, if I'd asked you 15 years ago, "Go test the speed of your internet," what would you have done? You would have gone to the back of the computer in your kitchen, and you would have tested, and you would have said, "That's my speed." Today, you expect that full Wi-Fi or other type of connectivity speed to take place on your porch, in your lawn, and if I asked you, "Hey, when you're pulling out of the driveway, who's your provider?" Your answer would be, "I don't know. I don't care.
It has to be fast." And if that's your definition of broadband, and I think it is, there's only one provider inside of our footprint who can do that, and it's Charter, because we have a wireline footprint everywhere, we have Wi-Fi footprint everywhere, and we have mobile everywhere that we provide service. Even somebody as large as AT&T, think about AT&T, covers 100% of the country with, with mobile. But it's a fraction of that footprint where they can provide wireline, and it's wireline, and it's a fraction of that, that is upgraded or will be upgraded. So they can't offer seamless connectivity, gigabit wireless, the broadband service, which I think is the connectivity that customers really demand. If you go down the line, Verizon has less wireline footprint. If you think about Frontier, they don't have a mobile product.
If you think about T-Mobile, they don't have a wireline footprint, so they can't provide the product that I'm describing to you. How's it going? This is our net adds, net additions of mobile inside of our footprint. So we are by far, 7.1 million net adds over the past four years. We're by far the fastest grower of mobile inside of our footprint. That's prior to some of the investments that I'm gonna take you through. How and why? Well, it's the fastest mobile product inside of our footprint, and that drives MNOs crazy, I'm sure. But the reason is because 87% of that traffic is going over our network, over our Wi-Fi gigabit-enabled network everywhere we operate. The second reason is we save customers a tremendous amount of money. In a typical two-line household, $60 with Spectrum. Pick on AT&T.
You know, on this chart, it shows $840. It's almost $1,000 of savings, you know, that we can provide every year just by taking a better mobile product. So throughout the year, we've been talking about our growth initiatives, which is to reaccelerate broadband growth. We've already got tremendous mobile growth. We're growing mobile in our existing footprint, as well as the rural footprint. Evolution, as I go through the three Es: evolution, expansion, and execution. So evolution is our fixed wireline network evolution. It's seamless connectivity, which I was just talking about, video transformation. Expansion is the expansion of our existing footprint into rural footprint into those markets, as well as existing markets that, frankly, we realized could have been built out further.
And then finally, execution, Greg hit on it as well, remaining committed to our operating strategy and investing in the customer service experience. So network evolution. Network evolution is the ability to take our service today, gigabit service everywhere we operate, and make it symmetrical and multi-gig speed everywhere we operate. That is unique. It's already unique that we're gigabit everywhere. The fact that we're gonna do an upgrade, and we'll do it everywhere, and we'll do it at the lowest cost, at $100 per passing. That's a fraction of the cost that it'll take a telco, and we can do it at a faster pace. We also have the ability on the increment to do what we call fiber on demand, which is then to drop 25, 50, 100 gig symmetrical services to any individual customer who wants it.
We're already doing that with Enterprise today. We'll have the faster pace to upgrade, we'll do it ubiquitously, and we'll do it at a dramatically lower cost, and then we'll couple convergence with it, which is where Greg referenced the Spectrum One. Spectrum One is a essentially, it's a $49.99 service, a promotion, that includes internet, includes Wi-Fi, and it includes mobile for free for the first year. Now, those lines are sticking. Why? Because they're used the same way as a regular paying line. They're ported it the same way that a regular line is ported, and when it rolls off to a $30 price point, you can't match that price anywhere else in the marketplace. And so it sticks, and that's happening today. Spectrum One is working well. It's our first foray into convergence.
The biggest challenge here is, you know, educating customers and trying to make them understand that this can be an entirely separate category and new way of buying broadband. In any event, it's a great product, it works better together, and it saves customers lots of money. Xumo is our IP set-top box and television at retail platform, and to put it, you know, simply, it's a joint venture between us and Comcast, so it has national scale, but it is the platform that you'd like to have on all your TV sets. You know, how many times are you saying, "Where's Mrs. Maisel? You know, where's this different content asset?" This puts all of your linear and all of your streaming together, and we're deploying that on the increment to all of our video customers.
Even if at some point you don't take our linear video service, it integrates the linear, linear video services and all of your streaming services and makes it easy to find with unified search and discovery and a voice-activated remote. You have an award-winning voice-activated remote, which came from Comcast, as well as Spectrum TV app, which is the award-winning, winning IP streaming app from Charter. To go back to converged connectivity, you know, one of the things that people often ask me is, "Chris, where's the growth gonna come from? How are you gonna get it? You're, you know, highly penetrated in internet." My answer to that is we're not highly penetrated in internet. We have 54% penetration in our footprint.
About half of our footprint has overbuild today, but the reality is that we're gonna be faster everywhere we operate across our entire footprint. So I think we can grow the 54%, and that grows. The bigger point is that's the old definition of broadband. Remember what I said, converged, seamless connectivity, gigabit wireless, and if that's the definition of broadband, and I would argue that it is, we're only 7% penetrated today when you have the combination of mobile and our wireline internet service. So whether you take a look at it as a percentage of passings, or you take a look at it as market share dollars, which is the bar chart on the right, you know, we have a big growth opportunity in front of us. Expansion. So the second E that I mentioned.
Expansion is, you know, started out with the rural build-out, and we kind of came about this a little bit serendipitously. When we acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House, we were asked politely to upgrade 145,000 homes in upstate New York. Governor Cuomo politely asked us to do that, and we did. What we found out was that actually, at scale, we could do it faster, cheaper than what we expected, and we could get faster and higher penetrations than what we expected. So when the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund came along, we knew we had an operation that was already ready to scale, that we could do well with this, and so we became the largest bidder and winner in RDOF.
We've extended that through ARPA, and if the regulatory environment is correct, state by state, we'll do the same thing with what's called BEAD, which is the $42.5 billion infrastructure fund from the U.S. government. Now, the returns are really good. They're high teens IRRs, and that's not including the fact that a lot of these will lead to future extensions over time, so it has the ability to continue to grow. And in a lot of these markets, think about Texas, think about Florida, think about the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, what is rural today will ultimately end up being suburban. So we'll pick up free passings that were never part of the math and will continue to grow, and it creates a very long-term tail for growth.
If you think about it from just a corporate finance perspective, the long cash-on-cash payback. The value payback is even faster. It's cable math. Within a few years, you have EBITDA and EBITDA multiple, you know, it's a payback. The other thing it's forced us to do is really rethink all of our construction throughout the company by going through in a very, very disciplined way, on project by project, on our investment returns and where's the cutoff threshold? What we did is we identified there were pockets of our footprint from legacy TWC and legacy Charter, in particular, where the companies may have been capital-constrained at a point in time, and entire neighborhoods weren't built out or a strip mall wasn't built out.
We were waiting for a requisite number of people to ask at one particular point in time before we'd build it, and that's not how it works. So we're going back and we're building these areas, and we're getting very good returns there as well. The third E is execution, 'cause as I said, you can have the fastest, best network fully deployed. You can have the best products, you can have the best pricing and packaging. You can save customers tons of money. But at the end of the day, if you don't have great service, nobody's gonna stay with you. So execution matters. It's always mattered at Charter. We talk a little bit about digitization of service. A lot of people think, "Oh, that means the My Spectrum app. That means chat. That means artificial intelligence." And yes, it does.
We're doing all of those things, machine learning, conversational IVR. But the other piece is investing in the digitization of our systems for our frontline employees. Remember, I already talked about raising the pay, having insourced employees, having competitive pay, benefits, so that you get tenure, so that you get higher quality service. But the quality of the job matters, too. And if you imagine being a call center agent or the person who's doing a trouble call to your house, having the front-end tools be seamless, to have, you know, machine learning and conversational, you know, we call it Tech GPT, that we're developing now, to be able to help the agent or the technician along the way, makes the job. Not only does it make the job more interesting, but it actually makes the employee more effective.
They solve the issue, the customer issue, faster. They get trained additionally along the way. They go home a little bit more relaxed. They come to work the next day, they progress with the company, they get more tenure, they enhance their craft. You have less, less repeats, and you have better service, and you have better churn. And when you have better churn in a cable system, that's the real value because the sales and marketing dollars that you would have taken before to go acquire a customer to replace the one that you just lost, now gets to be used to go acquire net new customers. So you end up growing faster, which we all like. But you also have more customers on a fixed plan, which means you're lower- you have a lower cost to operate per customer when you have growth across the footprint.
So this is still a volume-driven strategy. We do have rate increases when we need to, but by driving volume, you actually increase your margin per customer. The final one on this slide is proactive maintenance, which is right in the middle. Everybody knows it. You have, you know, an outage, whether it's with a telco or cable, you have to call in and say, "I've got an outage." In the past, nobody knew. Now, at least we know. But we've gone past that in the past year and a half, where we know through machine learning and our telemetry on our network, we know where an impairment exists. We know. Now, you may not have an outage yet already, but we know you're going to.
What we started last year with about 600,000 proactive trouble calls, proactive maintenance, and this year we're gonna do over 1 million of those, where we call customers and say, "You don't have a problem yet. Your video is working fine, your internet is working fine, but it's not going to." We can see that there's an impairment. With 90%-95% accuracy, we know whether it's in the drop, whether it's in the in-building wiring, or it's with the customer premise equipment. We schedule the call, we take care of it. It's a fundamentally different way of providing service into these markets.
The biggest issue we have is customers say, "It can't be Spectrum, it can't be the cable company who's calling me in advance of a problem." And so we're getting them to pick up the phone and know that it's not a phishing attempt. That's been the biggest struggle that we've had. And, and I'm not kidding, it's really hard work so that they know that it's real. It really is us, the cable company is doing this. But that's what we aspire to be. We're leading the charge on this. I'm not aware of any of our peers or competitors who are yet doing this, and I think it is not only the right thing to do, and it reduces future trouble calls and future churn, but I think it's a competitive advantage, and we're willing to invest in it. I think that sets us apart.
So, investment thesis at Charter. You know, we have valuable network assets that can't be replicated. We're fully deployed across our entire footprint. Gigabit today, symmetrical, multi-gig, everywhere we operate within the next three years. We have an advantage in seamless connectivity, gigabit, wireless, convergence, however you wanna call it. We can offer our mobile, you know, is about 13% of our mobile traffic, the actual 5G radio or 4G radio. So 87% of the traffic goes over our network. The other 13% is going over 5G. 5G is essentially the slowest radio for our converged service product. Think about that, because the other 87% is going over gigabit Wi-Fi. So we have a structural advantage because people can't replicate that. We have a successful operating model, which puts the customer first all the time.
Consumer-friendly operating model, designed to drive additional penetration across a fixed network, designed to drive additional PSUs into the household, and designed to provide great service, lower transactions, save churn, and allow you to grow faster. I think, and despite the lower temporary growth that we have right now, through the investments that we're making and the structural advantage that we have, we have a really large growth opportunity. We're 7% penetrated for internet. I think we've got a tremendous option value on video, to be able to use that to drive connectivity services. The combination of the platform with Xumo, call it a new paradigm for the programming agreements that we have, enables us to create utility for customers and to give them something of value, which is the first time that we've had that in video, really, in the past 15 years.
So, you know, we've got opportunities to develop new products. You know, once we deploy this fully deployed, upgraded network across our entire footprint, the thing to keep in mind is some people say, "Chris, what am I gonna use 2 gig, 5 gig, 10 gig for?" And I say, "I don't know." But I'll tell you, when we were offered 20 gig. I was in Switzerland, we were gonna offer a 25 Mb service, and we all snickered and said, "Who would ever use that? What's it gonna be used for?" When you build a network, and cable does that ubiquitously across the footprint, when it's fully deployed and when cable is moving the way it is today, which we are, you create a network that then people can develop products and services that take advantage of that bandwidth.
That's the way cable's always been, and that's what we're all doing now. All the MSOs are rolling out and developing a 10G strategy so that it's consistent across the footprint. And it's what's regained our competitive advantage, and it's also what distances ourselves from people like fixed wireless access. And the combination of that and convergence is really powerful. I got excited about it, and it went more than I wanted to, so I'm gonna finish this up here. Proven capital allocation model. Since I got to Charter in 2010, it actually hasn't changed. The capital allocation waterfall is very simple, which is, one, to the extent you have high ROI projects inside the business, everything else that comes afterward works better if you're investing in high ROI projects in the business.
Two, if you can acquire companies that are accretive, more accretive than buying back your own stock, you do M&A. 3, you buy back your own stock. And 4, if you have nowhere else to go, you have—and you've really got nowhere else to go, then I don't want to be at that company, and you have to go get dividends. And, so that's been our capital allocation. We would do it, just don't get me wrong, but we've always had. It's where I started the conversation. Since the 1950s, the ability to continue to reinvent ourselves, to continue to create new products and services, to develop applications for these networks that distance us and put us apart, and because we're ubiquitous, it creates this major advantage. And that's what we have. That's what we're gonna continue to do.
The value of our buybacks, by having gone through network evolution, network expansion, and going through convergence, and going through video transformation, and through investing in the customer service, the value of the buybacks that we're still doing, they'll be more valuable. So with that, I'll wrap it up and look forward to any Q&A that comes later. Thank you.
Good afternoon. I'm Ron Duncan, Co-Founder and CEO of GCI, Alaska's largest telecommunications provider. Those who have seen my presentations in past years know that Alaska is the biggest state in the nation, with one of the smallest populations. For reference, Alaska is about one-fifth the size of the entire Lower 48, but has a population of just 730,000 people. My friends at Live Nation tell me that's just about the average size of an audience at a Taylor Swift concert. Connecting customers across this vast and rugged landscape is challenging. It's a long-term commitment that requires significant investment. It's not for the faint of heart. But after 40 years of delivering broadband, wireless, video, and landline service across the last frontier, we've built a company of innovative, experienced telecommunications professionals who thrive on this kind of challenge.
It's that deep bench of specialists that gives GCI a competitive edge, even as new players try to take advantage of the flood of federal funding for Alaska broadband projects. As the telecom market in Alaska becomes more competitive, GCI is focused on growing our customer base by building major middle-mile fiber projects, by accelerating the pace of our network upgrades on our march to 10 gig, by making strategic upgrades to our wireless network, and of course, with sales of our flagship product, GCI+. Our wireless growth has been fantastic, the best ever, with 14 consecutive quarters of postpaid growth. Though our broadband subs are essentially flat this year, the summary number hides what's happening beneath the surface.
Subscribers are stable in our legacy urban footprint and are growing in our expansion areas, but some of that growth was offset this year by the loss of rural subscribers to Starlink. The transition to Starlink in rural communities was driven by two factors. First, was a three-month-long middle-mile fiber outage by a third-party provider. The outage impacted GCI customers in two major rural communities in northwest Alaska. During that outage, a material number of consumers switched to Starlink for their internet. After the fiber was repaired and GCI 2.5 gig service was restored in September, we turned up 5G wireless service for the first time in both communities. GCI's 5G and fiber data plans are a powerful combination, especially in rural Alaska markets. Since then, in those communities, like in our other fiber markets, Starlink hasn't been much of a threat.
The second factor in Starlink growth is that in rural areas where we are bandwidth constrained because we don't yet have fiber, Starlink simply provides a better service at a lower price. As we build out fiber to much of the rest of rural Alaska, we expect to win those customers back. One of our newest markets, Dutch Harbor, Unalaska, is an excellent example of what happens when we take fiber to a community previously served only by satellite. When we completed our new 800-mile undersea fiber to Unalaska this year, we turned up both 2.5 gig data service and 5G wireless service. The new speeds are a major upgrade from the 10 Mb satellite internet that was previously available. The consumer response has been fantastic, with almost 50% of addressable homes signed up for the service in the first nine months.
Wireless is driving all the products at GCI. Our hometown 5G network, with speeds more than twice those of the competition, transformed Alaskans' view of GCI Wireless. You can't ignore 14 quarters of postpaid growth. GCI +, a product that combines 5G with our 2.5 gig unlimited internet plans, has driven both wireless and data sales. The value proposition for GCI + is compelling, saving consumers up to $1,000 per year compared to our competitors' prices and service. Now, almost a quarter of our data subscribers and half of our wireless subscribers are on GCI+ . Churn for those customers is almost 50% lower. GCI + is a powerful product with real staying power. It's clearly our platform for future growth and profitability. Like many others in the industry, our video platform is in decline.
In 2023, GCI completed the transition from QAM to IP. We've lost most of our video customers, and the business is no longer significant, but we will continue to provide the service for the remaining customers who want it. The transition to IP freed up significant capacity on our network that has enabled GCI to continue our march to 10 gig, even in advance of DOCSIS 4.0. As we march to 10 gig in Alaska, GCI's networks dominate the landscape. We've been building out our fiber middle mile network for decades and investing in upgrades for our last mile facilities. We're on a path to DOCSIS 4.0 and 10 gig speeds, with incremental speed increases of up to 8 gigs along the way. It's a major competitive advantage.
In 2021, I visited the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus to announce that GCI would use DOCSIS technologies to bring 2 gig broadband speeds to 77% of the state in 2022 and ten gig speeds by 2026. It was a pretty bold claim. We made good on that claim, launching 2 gig in 2022 and 2.5 gig in 2023. Now, more than 80% of Alaskans have access to those speeds, and we just turned up 5 gig service at the University of Alaska campus last month. Our goal is to turn up GCI's 10 gig service by 2026 or 2027, depending on the availability of DOCSIS 4 equipment. As we work to expand and upgrade our fiber network, we've also launched an aggressive wireless expansion project to push 5G service out across the state.
Our goal is to deliver statewide 5G service. Over the next 5 years, we'll upgrade more than 300 rural sites across the state. It's one of the most ambitious projects in our company's history. When you realize our state is twice the size of Texas and that most communities aren't connected by roads, you can better appreciate the magnitude of the undertaking. We're making fast and very real progress on the march to 10G and 5G everywhere. While some might move at a tempered pace for such a long march like this, GCI prefers to sprint. That's why, by the time you see this, I'll be recovering from knee surgery. I'm getting a new one so that I can keep up with the team of aggressive sprinters who like to be first to the finish line just as much as I do.
I've spoken before about the massive infusion of federal funding to support broadband deployment all across the country. On a dollars per capita basis, Alaska will lead all the states, but that makes sense since we have the smallest population in the most remote and difficult-to-serve locations. More than $1 billion has already been awarded for Alaska projects, and another $1 billion has been reserved for Alaska under the BEAD program. In all likelihood, there will be even more funding available through nationwide programs. This flood of grant money will stimulate competition, in many cases, from applicants with little to no experience building, operating, and maintaining networks in rural Alaska, and often, it seems, from those without a sustainable business plan. GCI has focused our grant applications on the areas of most importance to our customers, and we've had great success so far.
With our tribal partners, GCI has applied for and been awarded five fiber project grants to push GCI's fiber network further into rural Alaska to help narrow the digital divide. The communities we connect are some of the most remote in the nation. They are also home to some of our most important health and education customers, who rely on connectivity for telemedicine and distance learning programs. That's why we've been very strategic in our approach to expanding our fiber network throughout rural Alaska, including our iHub network. We recently received $35 million to launch phase three of the iHub network to connect more customers in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region of Alaska. It will bring significantly improved connectivity to an important market in an area of the state where the population continues to grow.
In total, we're leveraging funds from our private capital to build out what ultimately will be 10 gig wired service and 5G wireless in 27 remote communities. When I say remote, I mean remote. In some cases, these communities will have gig internet before they have running water. It's truly transformational. But you don't have to take my word for it. You can hear it directly from someone who grew up in rural Alaska.
Let's start with, can you tell me your name and your role at GCI? My name is Jennifer Nelson, and my role at GCI is Director of Rural Affairs. I am from the community of King Cove, which is located at the end of the Alaska Peninsula. It is a community of about 900 to 1,000 people, depending on what season it is. Coastal community, fishing community, community that is rich in Aleut or Unangan culture, and it's a little windy spot where I grew up. So my grand had 18 children, and just really one of those pillar families in the community. My grandmother was one of the first health aides in the community and one of the first health aides in the state of Alaska. And really just a normal person who got some training and, and, you know, would help out the community for all their needs.
Her mother was a midwife of sorts, and so they did everything from deliver babies to help administer medicine, and it was hard to connect with the doctors here in Anchorage or somebody else. When I was born, I was born here in Anchorage, but back home, there was only one landline telephone in the entire community. So they were just, like, basically waiting around for the call to come in, and I think it was a day later. But it's kind of ironic now that I'm involved in this huge project, in this AU- Aleutians Fiber project, to bring broadband connectivity to not only my community, but the communities in the region. My grandma would be so excited about this AU- Aleutians Fiber Project.
I think she would just be blown away in how this will impact how people receive care and the access that people will have to better medical services. And who knows? You know, maybe she could have been a, a cool, TikTok star or influencer. When I think about the most important thing that my grandma taught me, the value of sharing and giving back and just that sense of community, the we are one.
While we're mindful of the market's timelines and costs, it's also important to remember the impact these projects have on the communities we serve. With booming wireless sales and network upgrades, the positive results from our GCI + product and success in securing federal funds, GCI is growing our bottom line while making good on our commitment to narrow the digital divide throughout Alaska.
Hi, John.
Hi, Greg.
You were sick of my singing, I think. You were saying good thing we made it. Didn't have to listen anymore. All right, we got some Q&A.
We have Q&A. So we have a few that we received in advance. We'll go through some of those, and we'll also take questions from the room. Again, there's mics throughout, so please just put your hand up and wait for a mic to come to you. So we're gonna start with what we got in advance for both John and Greg, and then Chris, if you want to chime in as well. How do you see the future of the linear TV ecosystem? Streaming has proven to be a bad business for all but Netflix. Even Disney streaming platform is unprofitable. I know we spoke about this a bit today. Major content companies depend upon linear for profit. What needs to change to stop linear churn and turn it into a growing business, or is it beyond repair?
John, you want to go first?
Yeah. I'd say, first of all, try and distinguish library connectivity to a live event real time, because they are quite a bit different in terms of the technology to transport them and the impact. Netflix clearly took the lead early on library random access services. It's a great consumer service, and it gives access, essentially, to massive amount of library and/or new entertainment programming that isn't time sensitive. When net neutrality became the rule of the land, it opened the back door for essentially no-cost transport for new entrants, particularly big tech. And they've begun essentially acquiring live sports at pretty healthy prices.
They're producing this streaming alternative to linear, which is very inefficient from a network point of view and very disruptive to the broadcast industry. So it's kind of an interesting evolution. Now, to me, the deal that Charter cut with Disney was the right way to go. It was kind of a win-win. It makes for a smoother transition and gives both sides continuity, rather than sudden disruption to see what the public ultimately wants and how they want to receive things. The obvious benefit of streaming sports is you can sell advertising on an advanced basis, on an individual customer basis.
The downside is, of course, as I think Greg mentioned, it takes a huge chunk out of internet capacity, which may be beneficial for the broadband companies that have upgraded, but, but it's, it's pretty inefficient from a technological point of view. So I do see a smooth transition now that we're starting to see bundles of streaming services with linear services. I don't believe streaming can be profitable unless it consolidates, and you have fewer players, and you have players who are potentially focusing on different segments, so that the combination of streams might end up being a better consumer service and less expensive for the collective providers.
I'll just add, I think, you know, when we talked about this in the past, why we thought video was a tough business, I think we were looking at 600 new shows on the streaming side in scripted content, and up to about $150 billion of investment in content. And just, there's not enough dollars to get a return. And particularly as linear, which is the high, relatively higher paid, higher priced, and lower churn, product or service is disconnected, and people move to the more expensive to deliver, easier to sign off, therefore, higher churn. That's a bad proposition. It's not a good winning proposition for content companies, and the only way that this eventually works is there's a hell of a lot less invested in it, and it's a hell of a lot less competitive.
So I think the piece I would add is from a consumer perspective, you know, it's very unwieldy. You have all of this content out there, you don't know where to find it, and not only that, it's not even cheaper. So the idea was, you know, all of the programmers. When you think about the DTC business, the direct-to-consumer business, it obviously worked for Netflix because they, you know, bamboozled a lot of library out, and they got it, and they did a great job. Good for them. But if you have an existing linear business, the idea that a direct-to-consumer business is somehow gonna be completely different and apart, that's, it's never gonna work. It's never gonna be profitable. Even if you look at it on a standalone basis, I don't, personally, I don't think they'll be profitable.
But certainly, if you put it together with what you're doing to your bread and butter, your cash flow engine with the linear business, I don't think it ever, you know, has a chance of being profitable. So really, what we did with the deal with Disney and what we're doing now on the increment with all of our deals going forward, is saying: Look, our customers already paid for that content. You siphoned off the dollars. You put investment somewhere else. You stripped out the asset. Not to pick on anybody, but everybody's been watching football. I saw Paramount+ advertising South Park, exclusive on Paramount +, and I said: "Oh, my goodness! What's left on Comedy Central that we're still paying for?" So our customers paid for it already. They need to have access to it. They need to get it.
The ability to have that fully authenticated through a device like Xumo brings utility back to the customer. If it's made available to us for free, to them for free, you actually put more value back into the linear business through combining with the direct-to-consumer businesses. It is one business. Now, over time, I think the question is, how much of the viewership is gonna take place in a traditional guide, inside of an IP set-top box, versus through search and discovery of library assets?
And I think it'll be, you know, yes, will be the answer. It'll be for an older generation, it'll still be for a guide for a long time, and for other people, it'll be more moving into the app environment. I think it provides a glide path for the programmers to go where they need to go, and I think it provides a glide path for us, and more importantly, for the customers in a way that economically and from a utility standpoint, makes sense.
I mean, just one last thought. If you're putting the same piece of content on, you're broadcasting all at the same time, it is much more efficient to use satellite or cable than it is to stream it. That's just a fact. You do get some benefits if you're a customer who wants to go back and on demand, draw that up. That makes a ton of sense why streaming or some version of that may make sense. But as a general proposition, you're trading a more efficient distribution technique for a less efficient distribution technique that consumes a hell of a lot more bandwidth and will take a lot more capital. It's not a good model, particularly when we're being asked to pay for it with Net Neutrality.
Rich, right there.
Who do we pick?
I think I see Rich.
Didn't we already give Rich a pre-question? This is unfair. Rich gets to-
He switched, I believe, to an in-the-room question.
Okay.
I switched it because I figured I wanted to ask it to you directly.
Great.
This follows up perfectly on the last question, so that's why I really wanted to ask it now.
Yeah, because I think you asked the first question. Go ahead.
John, you've said that sports is the glue that holds the bundle together. And obviously, as you talked about in the last answers, you know, the bundle is shrinking, but can sports be the glue that holds the streaming services together? And how does that impact the future of sports team and league values, you're thinking about the Braves and beyond. And then sort of related to that, you know, Iger, I heard you on CNBC this morning talking with David Faber. Iger is clearly taking ESPN over the top and not selling it to private equity, as you've been talking about for 10 years. Just curious what you think about an ESPN $30 a month service, picking that price point just randomly out of the air. Let's just say a $30 a month ESPN direct-to-consumer, what does that mean to your assets?
Well, it remains to be seen what kind of penetration service is gonna get at $30 when it's a subset of a lot of sports. And particularly, given that sports costs continue to rise as big tech essentially cannibalizes broadcast for important sporting events, whether it's Thursday Night Football or whatever. We've never felt that a premium sports service at those kind of pricing levels would be economically viable. The other impact, of course, is on localism, because as sports becomes national rather than regional or local, the role of the local broadcaster, I think, comes into question.
And so this whole issue about retrans fees and localism, I remember when we had DirecTV, we had to import all the local broadcast signals into Denver so that we could then offer localism as part of the service. I think a big question is gonna be: What happens to localism as everything goes national packages and, and bundles on a streaming basis?
Well,
You know, I don't know. I think the market will dictate what people are willing to pay for sports. A lot of people have bought a lot of sports rights and lost a lot of money in recent years, trying for premium sports positioning.
Well, and if you don't have ubiquity, and you don't have an ability to have complete reach, there is going to be a challenge how sports put that together and get the highest value. You are seeing people who are still using that engine. John, great to point out the example of Turner buying Sunday Night Football to get their engine, renting that engine, and you still see that with Amazon, but there are a few people who have that reach, who are gonna be able to use that engine as effectively. So there is this tension, there's no doubt, and what that will be in terms of revenues. You know, we're lucky. You ask about our products.
F1 is on the right side of the curve, and F1, as you've seen, even though we have a modest amount of linear in the United States for F1, because we're seeing such growing demand, we're able to play through this, and you're seeing the growth by other kinds of engagement. We'll find ways to get monetized. And the U.S. is, you know, substantially less than 10% of our total broadcast revenue. Braves, relatively unique as well, because certainly at risk with regional sports networks, but relatively protected, given size of the territory, strength of the offering, relatively middle-of-the-road RSN and fee, so we're not that exposed. But we're lucky. We have two really well-placed sports assets. I think the larger question is certainly an interesting one.
Doesn't it cut two ways also, that, that the cable bundle and competition amongst distributors created perhaps a higher value to sports rights from the structure than would be generated by the consumer, given an à la carte option?
Go to Barton.
Barton.
Okay, I wanted to shift gears and ask about one point that's come up a couple of times with Formula One, and it was mentioned briefly today in Stefano's presentation, and that is that the work on the clean biofuels. And, I'm interested in this because, you know, it's, you know, it's certainly not something I think this audience thinks about a lot, but it's provocative if it's real. And, you know, John, you know, we got you here in the room, and you've got a history in technology, maybe not this type of technology as much, but how real is this? I mean, is this something that you think is gonna be a consumer reality at some point in the future? And if so, you know, would you be shorting Tesla here?
No. I think. Look, the total system in terms of what you're talking about, carbon, the total system of carbon, nobody really has a pretty good handle yet on what a total transportation system would and should look like when you take, you know, all the costs into place. So, certainly, biofuel could be something as straightforward as hydrogen, for instance. It'd be one way to store energy from solar and wind, to give you a storage capacity, an energy storage capacity that could then be utilized in a hybrid engine. We really don't, I don't think the race has not been won yet, and principally because an all-electric solution requires some kind of cost-effective generation. Right now, of course, America has a hybrid solution that ranges from old nuclear plants that are far and away the most cost-effective and non-polluting, to, in some places, they're still burning imported oil.
Or coal.
Or coal.
We saw substantial coal in Colorado.
Yeah. I mean, Wyoming ships an awful lot of coal down to West Texas and New Mexico to be burned in electric plants that then send their electricity either to Texas or on to Southern California. I mean, we don't have a very efficient total system, and I don't see much planning right now of taking a hard look at where that's going. But the idea that you're developing hybrid vehicles is good R&D and if you can develop biofuels that are efficient, that may be part of the equation.
The F1 has always had the benefit of being a laboratory for these sort of technologies, and a high pressure, but not necessarily scale opportunity to test. We, as a country, have spent an enormous amount subsidizing electric vehicles. I'm on my second Tesla. Love it. I am far from clear that that's the right solution for decarbonizing the U.S. auto industry. We have something like 250-275 million cars in the United States, 200 million run. Look at the penetration rate on electric, and how long it will take to make a meaningful impact. GM says they're gonna get to 1 million cars. This year, they did 100,000. How long will it take to eat into that 200 million that are running?
If we had invested a commensurate amount in looking at things like biofuels, we could be much further down the road because you're talking about a much bigger TAM, Total Available Market, to attack. We have looked at investing in a hydrogen capacity at- as a test case in Formula One. Difficult still, but I think John's right. You wanna test these new technologies, and F1 is the kind of place where it gets done.
Maybe even touch on what it means to be a drop-in fuel. What F1 is doing that's different in terms of road relevance?
F1 is leveraging what others are doing, too. I just read recently that the Indonesian national airline flew the first flight with sustainable jet fuel. People, there are things you can do to build sustainable, recycled biofuels and the like. Either recycled or biofuels, both. There are a couple of paths. The reality is none of them are at scale, none of them are cost-effective today, but F1 is not about cost-effective. F1 is about testing the high end, and when you find out what works, you then go and try and build it at scale. My point being, if you put a commensurate amount of investment, as we have in electric and subsidization, in about other technologies, I suspect we could be much further down the road because it's a much bigger available market.
Okay, we're gonna pivot to another pre-submitted question over at Liberty SiriusXM, Liberty Media. If Liberty SiriusXM and SiriusXM do combine, that only leaves Formula One Group and Liberty Live as the tracking stocks. You touched on this earlier, but what do you think about longer term plans for Liberty Live and the broader structure?
Well, you know, tracking stocks have been a great thing for Liberty, but they've also been things that have evolved over time, and we've had many companies move from tracking stocks to being asset-backed securities. Go back to, you know, Expedia and go back to DirecTV, effectively spinning our interests out, or look at what we've done with, most recently with the Braves. Certainly, that potential exists down the road. No plan or intent today, but looking at what we're gonna do with Liberty Live, it's an evolving question. I think I mentioned it. We will certainly look to find assets that are attractive, but also ones that will be synergistic with Live Nation.
There are things that we might be able to do that Live Nation can't, just because of the nature of how they report earnings or how they're looked at in the marketplace, where we could be a helpful counterparty or a helpful partner. And we've talked about some of those ideas around venues, other real estate kind of projects, other kinds of projects that service their customers and service music venues and service music events. All those are on the table, and we'll see. John, you wanna add anything?
No, I think it's just a very interesting heavily discounted by the market holding right at the moment, which we really separated out of Sirius more to make Sirius a pure play than with a near-term aspiration for separating Live. I think Live is an appropriate development situation. And as Greg says, being a companion to its 30% held entity can perhaps be quite synergistic for both.
Go to Ben over there.
Thanks. I wanted to ask you guys about the rise in interest rates the last couple of years, and sort of what it means for Liberty. I'm thinking a couple of different angles. One is: how do you think about leverage for your portfolio companies now? Not to put Chris on the spot here, but I know how he feels about 4.5 times leverage. But why, why is that the right leverage level still? Thinking Warner Bros. Discovery, I think they wanna be at 2.5-3. Why is that the right level? And related to all this, when you think about acquisition opportunities, I think, John, you've said this in the past, like, the public markets don't like companies that don't grow.
I think we can see that all over the place, but there's a lot of cash flow out there, particularly in the media sector. Is there anything you think Liberty should do there? Are there interesting opportunities as private assets to take your business in a different way than we've seen it in the past? Thanks.
John?
Well, obviously, if you play a leverage, balance sheet game, which we've always done in the capital-intensive businesses we've been in, in order to get, equity returns to be, you know, better than normal. Valuations will come down, just on the discount of future cash flows, and if you don't have a growth rate that offsets that discount factor, you're gonna trade at a substantially lower level based upon nothing other than arithmetic. So we're all experiencing that, just a higher discount rate on future cash flows. We're also experiencing, in many of the businesses, maturation, reaching, you know, pretty heavy penetration. So, you know, that slowdown, that absence of predictable monetizable growth and that higher discount rate all lead you to lower current market valuations. So the question is, strategically, how do you play the game?
Well, you know, if you issued 2% debt for 40 years, maybe you look at how it's trading, and you buy it back, because that may be the cheapest way to get profitability and to delever. You constantly look for growth, you constantly look for synergistic green shoots, let's call them, that you can allocate some of your capital allocation to, if they show up. So it's like Chris was saying, you always put the highest priority on stuff that has a high IRR and constitutes growth. When you don't find those kinds of projects, then you go down that. You tick down that list of what else could I do with the cash flow?
At some point, you know, buying stock back, particularly if you think it's undervalued for one reason or another, becomes a fairly attractive capital allocation. Also, I think we're headed, we are headed to a period of distress. The streaming conversion or disruption, the fact that rates are now high, that a lot of maturities are approaching. There will be opportunities presented by distress, and companies that have got dry powder or some kind of currency, you know, will find opportunities, synergistic consolidation opportunities in that distress. We clearly see it, by the way, arriving in the broadband business.
You know, we see, Mr. Drahi being pretty levered on both sides of the Atlantic now and probably facing some serious distress. He's just one of many that it probably didn't anticipate the sudden rise in rates or the blowout of the spreads or, or essentially the difficulties of competition and now find themselves under near-term financial pressure. And I, I look at Greg, I remember how opportunistic Liberty was when Sirius got in financial trouble. We had, we had some cash, and other people didn't at that particular point in time, and it led to a very opportunistic acquisition. So I would say it's always wise to have dry powder when you're going through down cycles.
In the spirit of asking what has come into the inbox, I will ask this one: Can you envision Charter buying Altice, Greg, and what conditions would be necessary for a deal like that to happen?
I don't have to answer that. I have the CEO in the room to answer that for me.
I don't think there's any cable company out there that at the right price, we wouldn't be willing to acquire. That being said, it'd have to be at the right price. There are certain assets, I'm not picking on one, but you take a look and say: Do I have to write down the revenue? Is the pricing too high? Do I have to reinvest in OpEx to get service? Do I have to recapitalize the network? Do we have to recapitalize simple things like trucks and tools and test equipment, and, you know, outfit the labor force and all that? You have to factor that in. And so, you know, there are certain I think we can turn around any cable system in the U.S., but in order to make a return on it, it'd have to be at the right price, and sometimes that's less than the value of the debt, so.
Not that he's referring to any specific cable company, is he? No, go ahead.
Look, you know, in a prior life, I used to do cable restructurings. I've seen this show before. I know how it goes, and I know how, you know, at the right time, you know, all cable is good if run properly and purchased at the right place and financed the right way. Sorry.
Yeah. What's a little different this time is we see some of old media that is also facing balance sheet challenges.
I see Ben. I thought, is this who it is? Thanks, Victoria.
John, in a different form, you've talked about tasking Greg to shrink the discounts on all entities over your lifetime. Given comments earlier on Live, it's hard to envision that discount shrinking as it becomes more complex. Can you share your thoughts on balancing those two that are somewhat mutually exclusive?
Sure. Yeah, I think I think that the spin of the Braves, the offer which Greg has made on our behalf to Sirius, my willingness in that offer to yield my control position are indications that we're serious about going after this structural discount. Now, Live is a brand-new project for Greg. And, you know, the idea of being able to spin it off requires a whole bunch of tax conditions to be met, and it's gonna take a little while for Greg to figure that out in a way that enhances the value of live.
Now you know I'm regular.
Rather than suppresses it. But I would say the only equity that I've bought this year in the media business was actually Liberty Live when it first got spun off. So I do see a dramatic undervaluation, and I don't expect to die that soon.
I'm gonna pivot us, if I may, really quickly, to travel, Greg and Matt. What progress do you believe has been made at TripAdvisor Core that perhaps is not evident from the financials you report? And then as a follow-up, just ask it now: Do you believe the market, you touched upon this, is properly valuing Viator? If not, what could you do to help with that?
Well, I'll touch on it, and then I'll let Matt give the real answer. I think there's been enormous progress at Trip in, first, management really understanding who their customer is, what they want, understanding the quality of just the reviews, and refreshing and investing in the core. And also investing in understanding how to make the business through ROAS, return on what we're spending, far more effective. And all those are really beginning to see, along with cost cutting, impact on the Trip core. Viator has been on a roll. It is a huge growth animal that I don't think is fully reflected. It could be made profitable in a big hurry. We've been in a market share grab, which I think is a smart, profitable market share grab, long-term profitable, but has interim costs.
And finally, we're about ready to flip from a loss position at TheFork to a profit position. All of those give me a lot of confidence in the progress that management has made, and all of those makes me think, particularly given what Viator could be worth, that the stock is undervalued. Matt?
Yeah, thanks, Greg. You know, at TripAdvisor, it's just important to remember that we are early in a journey of transforming this core business. And we've said all along that it's gonna be about transforming our operating model, realigning the organization, bringing in new talent, streamlining the teams, delivering an integrated product roadmap, really, and of course, delivering flexibility in the fixed cost base as well. You know, we're seeing it. We're seeing it operationally in our integrated product roadmap, and the way that we're starting to launch new products that are meaningful. We're seeing it across trip planning, enhanced content, the way that we're leveraging data, and of course, we like the early innovation of generative AI.
You know, our approach is to deliver early proof points that turn into leading indicators that we can then scale, and we've been quarter by quarter articulating how we're doing that. You're seeing stronger pricing in the auction that we've delivered through product and data. You're seeing a media business that's outperforming the category as a whole. And of course, on the marketplace side, you are seeing what we can do with experiences, and that's already delivering to our P&L, and we believe we can extend that into both new categories and new geographies. So it's early. Quarter by quarter, we're making progress. There's a lot going on underneath the hood, and we're excited about 2024.
So Craig, over there. Go back to cable.
Hi, thanks. A question about wireless, as long as we're on the topic of distressed assets. You and Chris talked a lot about the offload opportunity in wireless and the economic benefit of that. Is there a scenario where you would want to take that to macro cells with your own mid-band spectrum, if a certain company had spectrum that was suddenly distressed and available?
Well, it's clearly distressed, but I'll let Chris say about our plan.
You know, It may have been a baited question, but I agree with your research, which is that I think we've got the best model, which is a hybrid model. Traditionally, the building out of macro cell towers and the acquisition of very expensive spectrum, it hasn't. I don't think it's a great business on a standalone basis. The reason that it works well for us is because we are able, we have an existing wireline infrastructure that has fairly unlimited capacity, that can do, you know, upwards of 90% and potentially more of the offload.
We have the ability to lease at what we think is an attractive rate, to lease the stuff that costs the most to produce, you know, from a unit production cost, and lease it in the places where we need it the most, and we get the benefit of our existing wireline network that can offload that traffic at really no cost for the 90%. So I think we've got the best of both worlds. Now, you know, we have purchased CBRS spectrum, and so I think the you know, shared license spectrum, the acquisition of certain spectrum that lends itself to small cells, which is more localized offload, where we have power rights of way and fiber throughout in our entire footprint, we can deploy that at a relatively low rate.
I think that's interesting to us, and we've spent a lot of time with the FCC, and we're very serious about that. But the macro cell tower business, very expensive, and it's not where the traffic is ultimately occurring. So driving up and down 95, you know, it's just a small portion of the traffic. It's the most expensive to provide, and it's not really where most of the data is being consumed, and we like the relationship that we have. And I should say, I think, you know, because of who they are, and they've got that infrastructure already, I think we're good for Verizon as well. So I never say never, but I don't see that as something that we've been able to create a great business case for yet.
Well, the incremental nature of the CBRS, where you have, you know, for relatively low cost, because some of the elements are in place, and you have the volume already there, and you do it on an incremental basis, it's, that's pretty darn attractive. Pick and choose.
Go to the end.
Thank you for your time today. Regarding the Formula One Vegas race, could you give us more details about your plans for the Sphere in Vegas, inside, outside, or the Exosphere?
Sorry, for our plans in Vegas for this year or for going forward?
For this year, regarding the Sphere.
Regarding the Sphere, this year, we have a, we have a relationship where we've leased, effectively, the Sphere, both internally and externally. The race will be around the Sphere, so we're utilizing their property. We will own all the advertising on the Sphere for the duration of the race for a fixed fee. We have bundled that into some deals and also sold advertising directly to parties during the race, which will defray part of our cost. It was a necessary cost for us to, because we need to be on their land, but in addition, it was a, it's a revenue opportunity for us to lease, as I said, or sublease the time on that on the Sphere.
In addition, we're gonna have a recovery brunch, and you will need to recover on Sunday morning in the Sphere, and we will be showing highlights of the race internally. In future years, and we have a long-term relationship with the Sphere, I think we will have more programming in place. Partly 'cause we didn't know if the Sphere would be done, and partly we were hustling to get ourselves done. That combination made it hard to program for this year, but I think in future years, we'll have a lot more going on. So even though people said, "Why isn't U2 there this weekend?" It's because we didn't know what would happen, so.
Thank you. I have a follow-up question on Live. You talked about certain tax considerations to be able to spin it. I was curious if you could expand on what those are. You know, back nine or 10 years ago, when Broadband came out of it originally was going to be a tracker and then, you know, changed about a month and a half, two months later to a SpinCo . What was present there that's not here? Is it just that you own true position Skyhook, or, or is there something else as well?
Well, in every case, to create and spin away, you need an ATB, an active trade or business. Probably has to be a meaningful percentage, not maybe not double digits, but a meaningful percentage of the business that's. And that active trade or business probably has to be something you've owned for five years, or you can show it's a business expansion in a logical way that is defensible. And at the moment, we really don't have either of those at Live. We were able to, for example, do that with GCI, with our stake coming out of the charter stake we had that sat inside of Liberty Interactive. That allowed us to do spin that away with GCI.
There are, you know, certainly other cases where we've had ATBs when we I think the ATB, when we spun out and bought the Braves, you know, we had ATBs that were. When we took it in, we had ATBs for the Direct TV piece, which were those RSNs. We've always had that, and that's a necessary precondition. One up here.
Good afternoon. Thank you for this afternoon and this morning. When you think about the next 3-5 years, and you think about the cost of capital, what are you thinking about the equity premium? Is it finally coming back, or is it still going to stay quite low, the way it's been for the last 15+ years?
John, do you wanna-
In other words, when you do your own valuation before you make serious commitments, what do you use internally?
John, do you wanna talk about that, or I'm happy to take a shot?
Take a shot, Greg.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, look, there are, as you know, there are, you know, you can calculate using the, you know, weighted average cost of capital. You can look and say Treasuries have gone up substantially, measured by volatility. The equity premium has gone up as well. So there's, you know, there's how we get to a cap and capital asset pricing model, and look at it that way. But in addition, you know, that is a, that's a, a rule that probably leads you astray to take it blindly. I think we look and say that's a great, way to think about it, and it's, it causes us, obviously, to look at what the alternatives are, and that's what it's weighing.
But when you think about risk, you know, you really try and figure out what is the asset likely to do, and what are the things that can go right and wrong with this asset? And in some cases, you know, there may be more risk, and there may be cases where we have synergies which actually reduce the operating risk and take risk out of an equity business. So I don't think there's a rule of thumb, but I certainly agree with your premise that, you know, we've lived in a time when money was virtually free, and people were willing to, you know, suspend disbelief. Is that the right literary expression? And we probably are not in that phase now.
In fact, people are probably mostly the other way, unless you're one of the Big Seven, that, you know, everything's wrong. So you, you try and balance and take some perspective, and tacking against the trend and making the bet when people are not believing is probably a good sign, but also being cautious when everybody is believing is a good sign. So CAPM is interesting. I don't think it's this positive.
John?
Do you want to add anything, John?
Yeah, I would just say, you know, in many cases, you're in a business, especially a business that's maturing but generating cash, because it gives you the ability to diversify into something that does look like it has growth in the future, and would have higher returns. So, a lot of it is strategy over time. I mean, you look at Warren Buffett, he's sitting on a monstrous pile of cash right now. So he must be expecting opportunities to show up. And, so a lot of times you're in business, not because you like the business you're in. You inherited it in one way or another, and you're trying to use it as a vehicle for ultimate diversification or synergistic combination with something that you like a lot better.
So, there's just an awful lot of ways of looking at it. It's very hard, you know, to take sort of a philosophical view about equity premiums, because if you're running a business, you're heavily invested in a business that you've been with for years, you're always kind of looking incremental, tactically around you. You have to try and figure out what. If your goal is to create shareholder wealth, which mine has always been, you're always looking for that other thing that's gonna. If you could get into it, if you could edge your way into it, if you could, you know, somehow or other back into it, sort of the way Greg backed into Formula One. Your strategies are much,
Is that how we describe it? Okay.
Much more opportunistic and tactical than some kind of, you know, investment philosophy, as if you were and had full liquidity to move your money whenever you want. So when you're inside the enterprise, you know, you don't really have the discretion to say, "I should stay in this and get out of that one," 'cause you're part of it. If you want to maximize long-term returns, you probably shouldn't be part of it. You should be on the outside, willing to say that the store is open every day, and I'd sell almost anything on any day. But I don't believe that that's practical in these kind of enterprises. So you're always looking for a tax-efficient transition or expansion or shrink that generally has to do with tactics. You're looking at specific assets, what can you do with them?
How can you enhance them? And so I, I guess you'd say, you know, you kind of are where you are, and you got to figure out what you can do about it.
Well, John, you've always said, "Look, the highest current value for any business in the short term is sell it.
Yeah.
If you do it in a tax-efficient manner, that limit-
That's usually true of any public company-
Yeah
I would say.
Yeah, but that limits your future opportunities, and hopefully, there's a core of talent and a core of future earning potential with that team that, you know, suggests, well, that may be short term, and there may be benefits to hanging around the hoop and figuring things out, like Formula One. Maybe last question,
One guy told me at one point, "You don't want to tread water in business because then the sharks will get you." It's just you need growth or growth potential. You need a strategy that moves you forward in your goal of creating wealth. And treading water is not a good place to be. It would be better to try and build flexibility, so you can take advantage of opportunity when it shows up. But just treading water, I think, is pretty hard to defend in any business.
Can I ask a question over here, maybe?
Excuse me. I'm sorry. I have a really important question. A major sponsor has ties to the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, and yet Liberty Media continues to sponsor this. So my question to you is, when will Liberty Media stop sponsoring the deadly Iditarod Dog Sled-
Could we hand the mic over here, please?
More than 150 dogs have died. More than 150 dogs have died.
Not to her.
Sometimes they die by choking on their own vomit. Why? Excuse me. Why does Liberty Media continue to sponsor this deadly Iditarod Dog Sled Race?
Hello? Can you hear me?
Now, stop!
We're ready for the question whenever. Thank you.
Sponsoring the dogs.
We were talking about-
Your friends left. Could you go, too?
Sponsoring the dogs-
We're just talking about opportunities, maybe a little bit.
Shame on you, please.
We'll repeat it. It's okay.
Talking about opportunities closer to home within Qurate Retail.
Shame on you! Shame on you.
Thank you for your input.
Just talking about opportunities a little bit, a little bit closer to home with Qurate Retail.
Shame on me! Shame on me.
She can't even pronounce my name. It'd be nice. Go ahead. Sorry, could you be a little louder? Thank you.
It's on.
On?
Is it on?
Yeah.
Okay, great. Thanks. Just talking about opportunities to create shareholder value, looking at Qurate Retail and, you know, the stock trade is like a deep out of the money call option. You've got distressed long-term maturities. Is there an opportunity at hand here, given your liquidity, the normalization of the business, and maybe, who knows? Maybe it'll even grow again one day. I think you're on the right path to that. To create an enormous amount of equity value by buying back opportunistically, the long part or the longer part of the, of the capital structure.
I think it's a great question. I think you heard David outline a thoughtful plan on how to bring back growth. You've already seen part of that plan in Athens, bring back profitability and improve basis and more with more to come. Look, we've husbanded cash and husbanded liquidity. We have paid down some debt, but we've husbanded the liquidity to ensure that we have the runway. And so you're always balancing how long a runway do I need to complete the plan, and how much opportunity do I have to take in liabilities at less than face and create equity value? And we are weighing those alternatives. We've done some modest discounts from purchases of the 2024s and 2025s, which are the near-term maturities. But your point is right.
A lot of the longer maturities are trading at larger discounts, particularly ones that are not, you know, longer term and either at the OpCo or even more at some of the HoldCos. So we certainly weigh that and are looking at the runway path and confidence in our plan and weighing what opportunities are out there. So, David, if you want to add anything, all on board? Well, thank you very much, everyone, for joining us. Appreciate you coming for another Liberty Investor Day, and I hope to see you next year, if not sooner. Thank you.
Very good. Very good.