Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Thank you to those who are in the room, and thank you as well to the group who are listening via webcast. Welcome to the SVB MoffettNathanson first annual TMT conference and what would be the 10th MoffettNathanson Media Communications Summit.
You don't just count the ones that were MoffettNathanson enroll with it?
Well, No, 'cause there was no SVB at the beginning in those days.
Well, so-
It's all new now.
What the heck?
No, what's new is we've combined our two conferences, the software and so now it's all TMT.
Got it.
You've been here for, I was going through that 10 because you've been here for most of those 10 years.
I've been lucky enough to you, for you to invite me.
I've learned that if we dedicate one minute to each of Greg's businesses, we can almost get through in the 50 minutes we've got allotted. Greg, usually we start with cable, and I promise to the people in the room, we will talk about cable. I was down in Miami a little over a week ago for an amazingly successful F1 event. I described it to people as it was sort of like a jazz fest in New Orleans for rich people that like racing. It was just kind of a cool festival.
I'm not sure that's gonna be our marketing motto, but thank you, Craig. I like it.
it was just an extraordinary kind of festival feel to it. I thought maybe it's a cool place to start to just talk about where F1 is.
I think our partners, the Dolphins, Tom Garfinkel, did a great job. There were some criticisms of some of the hospitality and security last time, some of the track issues. They took all them to heart. I think it's a great experience, a great track. I hope if any of you other elsewhere there you had the same kind of thing, but we got very good feedback. 90,000 fans a day, 270,000 fans over the weekend, so that capacity was up substantially and prices were up substantially, so pretty good for them too.
Yeah, I mean, the gate must have been tremendous.
Their gate was up about 25%.
I wasn't kidding when I said it's a festival for rich people. It's done an extremely good job of attracting a really affluent.
Again, I'm not sure that's gonna be our marketing line.
But it's-
We appreciate the fans of all flavors who want the grand event experience or those who are looking for something broader, more accessible. We try to provide something good.
Okay. It does a very good job.
He came out of the marketing department, okay.
It does a very good job attracting a pretty affluent base that sponsors.
Yep.
Really eager to reach.
Yes.
And so I guess-
If you look at who our sponsors are, you know, people like Rolex, a beer, Heineken. We have definitely high-end sponsors who appreciate quality.
I guess it sort of leads me to a more financial question, which is sort of how do you think about the path to monetizing that asset over the next? Is this something you just wanna continue to grow and hold and? Or as the sponsorships and tickets make money or?
Well, let's start. You have been around Liberty a long time, and others have. It sits in a tracker. Is there any chance we're gonna sell this thing and incur corporate level tax? That should stop any discussion that anyone says that our friends, the Saudis, are gonna buy it next week or something like that. You just. If anybody knows us, they should know that's just not in our cards.
You've also said you never own assets, you rent them.
I don't believe I've ever said that.
I think you said that.
I doubt it.
I think I heard you say that.
Well, look, we are very enthused about where Formula 1 is now and about where it's going as well. You look at the big revenue streams there, all have good direction. Broadcasting, we have, you know, increased fans, and we have increased distributors who wanna push the product, including new digital distributors and the like. We have promoters who are our partners. I just told you how much I thought the gate was probably up in Miami. That's not unique. They're selling out everywhere, particularly the high-end experiences. As you note, the Paddock Club, all at better prices. So we are able to get upticks in what we get paid. We have been able to add a few races, and there's maybe a little more room left there. Sponsorship has grown dramatically.
We've opened up the number of global sponsors. I think we've gone from five to 12 of our biggest sponsor types. We are continue to see traction there. I think we're well set up. We have a new opportunity with what we're doing rather in Las Vegas, where we will be the promoter. We have a opportunity to learn about something and hopefully set the bar. One of the great things about having promoters now is when something goes wrong, I can sit there and say, "Those guys in XYZ screwed it up." When it goes wrong in Las Vegas, I'm gonna have to look in the mirror, and that's a problem. Hopefully we'll set a high bar.
I also think, you know, a night race down the strip is going to create a whole new level of visibility in the United States and around the globe for Formula 1. There are other places where we can continue to push on our revenue streams, hospitality, sponsorship, other kinds of.
Sorry about the disruption. With a little bit less time left, let's launch into Liberty Broadband and let's talk cable. You've seen your share of cycles. I think it's fair to say that sentiment right now in cable is pretty low. It probably lower than at any time since the early days of cord cutting. We've keep talking about the distinction between a slowdown in broadband attributable to saturation versus a slowdown in broadband due to market share loss. What's your diagnosis of what caused the slowdown?
Well, I think it's a lot of the above. You have definitely seen a case where FWA has entered and taken share. I think they've also done some market expansion and opened up new areas. We have probably lost share because the territories have grown actually. I mean, the positive is you're probably further away from the saturation than you thought you were. We're actually seeing both because of new builds, but also just because of the existing territories, you're seeing an opportunity to actually upsell those people over time. Another reality is, you know, when you have a low move environment, and we're basically seeing the rate of new home sales down by somewhere between 20% and 30%, that provides less opportunity for us to sell new broadband.
You also see some case where you clearly had some amount of pull forward during COVID. How much you weight all those factors? Not sure, but I think the idea that we are not gonna grow subs again is wrong. You saw that in Q1, and I think you'll see that in the coming quarters.
I'll come back to GCI in a second. With Charter then, you are you confident that Charter keeps growing the sub number as well as price in broadband?
Yes. I mean, clearly we're going to be helped by our rural builds, I think we're going to continue to have an opportunity, even in existing territories to grow our sub count.
Everybody debates, you probably didn't see it, but Verizon this morning said, yet again, there are no capacity constraints at all to fix wireless.
I'm pretty sure that everything Verizon has said over the last five years has pretty much been right.
I would assume you guys have a house view of fixed wireless that is too big an investment to just sort of not have some real thinking and research on it.
Yeah. I think there's a lot of work that Charter has done, and I'm sure other operators like Comcast have done. The view is, look, there are clearly places where fixed wireless operates where we can't. There are places for customer sets for whom they're gonna be attractive. That probably diminishes over time just because the performance of those FWA sites is gonna decline, and it's not as attractive a product. I think also as demand goes up in terms of what you're going to want for broadband over time, that's gonna strain the capacity and what people's desires likelihood that they'll continue to. Our ability to market other products like our bundle, I think we have a very attractive mobile offering, is gonna put pressure on them as well.
I think there are a bunch of factors which are gonna bring in and make our offering more attractive over time compared to what's available with FWA.
I'm gonna come to that mobile offering in a second, but I just had one last question about the terrestrial broadband side.
Yeah.
That's, nobody has seen more fiber build cycles than you and John. I guess I'd love to just get your perspective on the fiber overbuilders and what you think of this particular flavor of the fiber overbuild cycle.
Well, I think you have gone through, as you know, many overbuild cycles. The history of overbuilders has not been a particularly attractive one in terms of returns generated. You always hear this time will be different. To some degree, you know, when you had relatively free money and access, that was true. In a period now where you're seeing some of the easiest builds have already been completed. Obviously, aerial and high density are the most attractive. You're seeing those already picked off. I think you're seeing declines not only because of the cost of capital, but also the availability of labor, the availability of some of the supplies. You're not seeing growth in fiber build outs. In fact, they look relatively flat to down. I think that's likely to occur over the next several years.
We, you know, is fiber competition, continuing nagging? Yeah, it's an issue, but I don't think it's a terminal issue by any means for Charter, particularly as we build out into new territories.
I've got to believe that when the BEAD money hits, of which you're gonna be a big player, like a lot of other people are.
We're the biggest player for BEAD.
The cost of hiring crews is gonna be astronomical.
Everything that's been done by the government to pump capital in has ramped up supply issues, ramped up labor issues. Frankly, one of the reasons why our rural build is attractive, not only do we get the BEAD money, but we're making it much more difficult for some of those competitors to get some of those supplies because we are a big customer, the biggest out there. Nobody is building more fiber in the United States than Charter right now. We're the probably front of the line for many of these on both the supply side and the labor side.
You mentioned convergence before. Let's talk about convergence. I think you and John have sort of preached the gospel of convergence longer than anybody. Really more in Europe, I guess, especially. As I think about it here, the path to convergence is different than it would be in Europe because M&A is not a realistic expectation. How do you get there in the United States? Is it sufficient for cable's wireless offering to grow organically and sort of become the converged offer?
Absolutely. If you look what already occurred in Q1, you had 56% of all the mobile ads go to cable. That's relying on that MVNO relationships that we have. We've already renegotiated that MVNO deal once. It's a perpetual deal, but we'll get an opportunity to rebid it again, I suspect, in the future because we're going to be, between us, Charter and Comcast, pay an enormous percentage of the mobile market growth. When you lay on top of that what we both have done with CBRS spectrum, the opportunity to, in the most attractive markets, go out and get owner economics, I think is gonna take a relatively good gross margin product and make it better. That's the long-term strategy, and I don't see us having any growth issues. Let our MVNO partners build out in the least attractive markets.
We'll take advantage, and we're gonna reap owner economics in the most attractive markets.
I remember there was a time when you said that you thought that this could be a billion-dollar EBITDA opportunity. Charter doesn't report the EBITDA separately anymore.
Thank God. You can't test my prediction.
I can't test. I do think that one of the most important controversies in cable right now is whether or not this is actually a high margin business or even a decent margin business. I happen to be of the view that it's a much higher margin business than most people think.
That's why I come to your conference, Craig. No, no.
Um.
No, I think it's both a positive contribution business now, even as we are, on the gross margin basis, generating positive gross margin is we hand out a number of free lines. When you get to Q4 and Q1, as some of those free lines roll off, I think the margin's probably gonna be obviously better. I think, as I said, when you move to on the road, we get to scale and move to owner economics, I think we're gonna get better margins. Yeah, I think this is...
You look at what we're losing in video subs and think about the positive or not positive contribution margin that they currently generate and what the pressures on the gross margin are that with rising content costs, and compare that to the perpetual deal we have with the MVNO, with the opportunity to go and get the best owner economics. I like the trade. I feel pretty good about the positioning.
Yeah, Jessica has said specifically that the gross margin on wireless is higher than the gross margin on video. I guess to wrap up strategically, you mentioned owner's economics. There's another debate in the market that says owners economics are really the only viable end state to be serious about wireless, that it's not a sufficient strategy to be an MVNO or even a hybrid MNO, MVNO. What's your view?
Obviously, Charter, and, you know, we're a part of the Charter strategy, don't agree. We think we got a positive gross margin as it is with the wireless product. It will get better with scale. It will get better with our hybrid. Combine that with what we're obviously stapling with it with broadband and combine it with reduced churn for people who take multiple products. I feel great about the combination.
Last Charter question is about capital allocation because they're currently in a state where the money that they used to spend on buybacks is now being reinvested into rural markets and to some degree, their accelerated network upgrades.
Yeah, the high-split.
They're not buying back stock at the rate they were. You used to be required to sell into the buyback, so you know, to some of that's worked out. Can you talk about the trade-off in your mind between investing in rural builds versus investing in stock buybacks?
Look, I think they're both attractive, particularly at this price. I think the stock is very attractive for the long term. I mean, the free cash flow yield, you know, is yielding, I don't know, 8%-8.5%, something like that. If you look down into LBRD, it's over 10%-10.5%. Very attractive. I also think that there's the rural builds are attractive with a strategic element as well. I think the rural builds are a great future opportunity. They have defensive element in preventing other people from encroaching. I like both. You probably know that the strategic element you wanna get done now leads you to go first to the rural builds in some ways because...
The high-split because it's got a defensive element as well and creates that opportunity. The stock buyback, you know, Charter has shown its willingness to buy back stock through thick and thin. I, you know, we retired an ungodly amount percentage of the shares I've gotten. I forgot since we started this. It'll be a buyback in 15, but.
It's not that far from half. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I suspect that's what's gonna continue.
Is there any frust-?
Look, we're gonna go through a cycle of rural builds, BEAD assisted. We're gonna go through a cycle of these upgrades, I think you're gonna see free cash flow accelerate. Two, three years out, it'll be a lot larger, I think you'll see us, likelihood, Charter will be buying back a lot of stock again.
Is there any frustration that so much of the buyback happened at prices that are so much higher than it is today?
Craig, do you think I'd be happier if we bought all of it at $350 rather than $700? Yes. I will stipulate, even in Englewood, Colorado, we get that joke.
All right. Let's talk GCI. There is a very different converged offering in that they are really dominant wireless. How well do your wireless and wireline networks overlap each other first?
Over 80%-90% overlap.
And-
It's not, you know, in that case, we really are as much a wireless player as we are a mobile player.
Would you consider being an FWA seller?
We don't need it because pretty much everywhere where we can offer an FWA combination, and we have the 5G spectrum there. You know, that's not the issue. Everywhere that would be, we basically have fiber there already or have coax. We don't have the issues about saying, "Hey, we're short. We need to go to FWA." Fundamentally, that hybrid, that coax or that fiber is a better offering, and there's no need to consume. Let's go back. FWA, you know, they're taking up capacity. At a cost, it's something like they're getting something like one-fortieth of what they could get on a per bit basis. That's expensive capacity. If you don't have to do FWA, you're not gonna wanna do FWA.
Are you starting to see LEO satellite competition? Is it really only just in the unserved areas?
In the unserved areas, you see LEO satellite, primarily SpaceX. Though they've had issues, they've actually filled their capacity out there.
Yeah.
They're not actually offering. It's in the far western part of Alaska, we've seen some of that competition. Pretty much the same thing happens, and fortunately is Alaska is a place where a lot of that BEAD money and other forms of, federal support and state support have gone. We've been able to roll out a lot of capacity. Only in the most remote locations is that really a more attractive offering, just because we're not gonna be there.
Right. No, no one's gonna be there. I think I saw in the last round of state subsidies in Alaska that the average cost per home pass that was being subsidized was $206,000 per home pass.
Alaska is a high-cost environment. Let's just leave it at that.
Yeah. You can burn through a lot of BEAD money fast that way, though. Last question. The FCC released their ACP and EBBP obligation.
Yeah.
It was interesting, it's a big part of, Charter is actually the biggest recipient of that money. As a percentage, it's a big part of the base at GCI. Is there any real risk to the, to those subsidies ending if Congress doesn't renew the ACP funding?
Only something like 9% of our wireless database and 6% of our broadband database or broadband group are on subsidized programs. It's, it's important, I don't wanna dismiss it, but it's not a huge percentage of our business. I think it has helped probably all operators with reduced churn on the margin, because it's those weaker customers at the end. We've seen relatively low bad default rates and the like, in, at GCI and at Charter, and I think you'd probably. It's those ones in the margin that are helped by the, by the subsidy programs.
Where's growth come from for them? you've said that bundled customers have about half of the churn rate of standalone customers. I'm assuming that is what informs your view of convergence in the lower 48.
I think you've seen that around the globe, but Alaska is in the globe. We have definitely seen their offering of a converged product, a wireless and a data product is exploding. They've moved something like 25% of their base over to that, and exactly as you would expect. You know, those are stable customers. They're that much less likely to move. They probably tend to be your better customers to begin with, but it's a very attractive offering for them and a very good offering for us.
Let's turn to SiriusXM. You have about 40 million paid subscribers. Can you talk about how your product competes with the various alternatives of everything from free radio, AM/FM services like Spotify? It's been a sort of perennial concern, and yet it just keeps chugging along.
When we got involved in 2009, it had 18 million subscribers. It was in something like 67%-68% of cars. Now we're in something like 82% or 83% of cars. The take rate, which is the number of customers who convert from those free trials to paid, self-pay net adds, SPNAs, has gone down, it's as you would expect. You've gone from a market that was a 9 million SAAR, Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate, to 17 and now backed off to something like 14.5, 15. We'll see what the 2023 number is. We've gone from deeper penetration.
We do see increased competition, but we continue to get our share of customers, particularly high-end customers, because of the ease of use of the product, the differentiated content we have that's much broader than most other offerings. Frankly, the, you know, a lot of our customers prefer, you know, if you listen to the Grateful Dead Channel or you listen to this, the mix that we offer you. If you listen to The Highway, the mix that we offer you appeals to a large customer set. Are we gonna get 100% share of new customers? No way. We're gonna get our share of people who love that experience, love the differentiated content we have, love the ease of use.
I remember when iPhone connectivity was first coming, it was the death knell for SiriusXM. It is getting easier though to connect smartphones to cars and to fully access services like Spotify. Any change in your long-term view of the runway left for SiriusXM?
Look, I think,
In the car specifically.
Yeah. There are a lot of things embedded in that. First, you've definitely seen the growth in CarPlay and Android Auto, but you've also seen now pushback, where many of the auto manufacturers, the OEMs, are taking CarPlay out. Tesla never put it in. Other people are pulling it out, BMW, because they don't wanna give that first screen away. We have a much more compatible offering for them. There is clearly increased competition, no doubt, and that partly what explains, you know, what we, what we've seen happen in our take rate from the free trial to self-pay net ad. I don't think that changes over, you know, in a minute or we're. It's a long cycle. We are in those cars, it's incredibly sticky, and we're gonna be in those cars for a long, long time.
In addition, we are creating, we've created a new product called 360L, which really brings in the best of all of our satellite offering combined with a pull offering, all using the modem in the car, and really, I think you're gonna see increased stickiness and increased take rate in places where that's offered because it takes the best of both, our content and the capabilities to have pull and bring what you want up to the fore in the car and the ease of use. I think that's really gonna be a great competitive offering for us. I remain quite optimistic about the long run for 360.
It really is becoming much more of an out-of-vehicle experience as well. My sense is the streaming is now much more integrated into the offering for your customers.
Certainly something we're doing and more of our customers take both.
Mm.
the car product and the stream product. We are gonna come out with a new offering this fall, an improved and upgraded cycle. We brought in a team led by the group and the gentleman who did the MLBAM. Ran Disney streaming efforts. Joe has done a great job. You're gonna see our new offering in the fall. I think it's gonna be a tremendous upgrade, and I think it'll continue to be more and more competitive outside of the car as well as in the car.
I don't hear the death watch for Howard Stern leaving anymore. It sort of dropped off the radar screen. Howard's gonna be there until he's 150?
Howard has a good gig. We try and make sure it's a good gig for him. He likes his audience. He, he seems to speak very favorably about management even once in a while. I get a call-out. I'm not, you know. Better than PETA, what the heck?
Live Nation. It kind of amazing. Live Nation and Tripadvisor are obviously sort of quintessentially reopening revenge travel or revenge entertainment stories, I guess. Both are now well ahead of anything they ever had back in pre-pandemic days. Live Nation in particular, there were so many delayed concerts and things put off during the pandemic. It still sort of feels like we're not in a steady state. It makes me wonder, is this still kind of the tail end of a bubble, or have we just reached a new plateau in live entertainment?
You know, I think there has been a fundamental shift towards live. Liberty has been pushing the idea of live. If any of you can go to our Investor Day, I think it was four or five years ago, we said by the power of live, We've been investing in that, whether it be through the Braves or Formula 1 or Live Nation, all of those are leveraging that. There clearly has been a kick-off and a raise the bar with COVID and the exit trade. You know, the idea, you know, YOLO, you only live once. My joke was, it's YULO, you only unlock once. I think the reality is, what you've seen happen is appreciation for those kind of experiences has gone up.
What we're seeing in terms of people willingness to pay, platinum, willingness to pay for higher offerings, willingness to, at the venue, pay for higher per caps when they're there, all of those are positive trades. We do see, you know, bands that have been waiting to come back. That's surely helped prime the pump. I do think we've reached a new higher level for live experiences, certainly around concerts.
That new higher level, is that as cyclically at risk as maybe it used to be in the past, where a recession would significantly impact that business? Or do you think that business might be a little less recession-sensitive than other live entertainment businesses?
Look, you don't wanna say you're gonna defy all economic cycles, but I think there's new appreciation for those kind of experiences, new appreciation for willingness to pay for quality experiences. All of those are not gonna go away. Those high-end customers are not gonna be limited by a recession. You know, they are probably people with disposable income that occur regardless of what's happening to interest rates or, you know, sadly, unemployment.
My Aerosmith tickets that were so expensive are gonna fund that.
You know, they look expensive and then go look and say, "What's it cost to go courtside to a Knicks game or to a playoff game, or good seats at a playoff game?" You look and argue, those concert tickets don't look crazy when you look at the pricing of other kinds of sporting events and other kinds of live events, so.
They do potentially.
If you watch the secondary market, right?
Yeah.
That suggests there's room for pricing.
Right. Well, that does bring up an important question, right? Which is the whole Taylor Swift brouhaha sort of, for whatever reason, I guess it's not hard to figure out what the reason was. Taylor Swift sort of broke through into the public consciousness of ticket prices in a way that issue hasn't before, even though it's been hanging around for years and years.
Right.
What's the risk of Washington involvement and regulation, and what do you do to mitigate that risk? Or is it realistically this is a supply and demand business and eventually Congress understands that?
The latter point maybe how to assume. They miss supply and demand on some other things. Look, we have been operating with a DOJ consent decree for over a dozen years. There is a monitor that was installed by the DOJ. If there are complaints about behavior of Live Nation, Ticketmaster competitors can call that monitor and tell them what's wrong. We've been living with that for 12 years. Nothing's changed. What has changed, you're right. Taylor Swift and other incidents, but particularly Taylor Swift concerts raised the profile. You've seen some bills in Congress. None of those bills feels particularly onerous to us. In fact, a lot of what's happened is actually pretty positive.
had a chance to go to Washington and educate lawmakers about what the market looks like, how much scalping demand is out there, what's happening, how the bots are driving a lot of this. Could we do better on the technology side? Absolutely. Do I then look and tell you that Ticketmaster has the best technology in the market? I think most people would agree with that if you compare to the competition, what's available, most venues would agree. You know, we will work through it. I believe that we will end up with a very strong business, I think actually there may be reforms which are beneficial to the consumer and to us in the process.
Our relations with talent, would you say those relationships are relatively good now or-
Yes.
stable, at least?
I think they're excellent.
Okay. I mentioned the other big reopening story is Trip, which, obviously there's been so much disruption to the travel business, but the sheer level of travel, how's the consumption of experiences changed, though, through COVID in a way that either benefits Trip or that has left Trip, sort of in the outside looking in at certain opportunities?
I think your point about people recognizing the value of experiences coming out of COVID is there, that clearly applies to travel and when they get to travel, what they do there. If you look what's happened to experiences, it feels a lot like where hoteliers were 20 years-25 years ago. I was the chairman of Expedia back from 1999 to 2003, we were just seeing the hotels come online. They have perishable inventory, a room night that's gonna go away. Expedia had traffic mostly driven around planes, increasingly monetized around hotels. That has been the dominant method for many companies, including Expedia and Tripadvisor, to monetize that interest, that traffic. In our case, you know, all of the reviews, all of the customer input and the benefit we had.
What's happened, though, is experiences are now that version, and that demand is exploding. They're coming online in a new way that they haven't before. We're bringing them traffic. They have a perishable product, that tour, that cooking class, whatever it is, that balloon ride. They wanna get it sold. We have a real opportunity. There's been enormous growth in Tripadvisor's experiences side and Viator, our two primary arms. That's a great growing market that feels like has a lot of runway. As I said, it hasn't been the consolidation. There probably won't be. You know, the hoteliers, obviously many chains gained penny power, and that's a much more balanced market than it was.
The experience market is way early down the curve, and you don't expect it's gonna have the kind of consolidation and balancing of power the way that the hotel market did.
You, like every CEO in tech and tech-adjacent businesses, have to be watching AI and wondering what happens with AI. Where is it an opportunity? Where it's a threat? One of the really big questions, I think, is, are we all going to have a chatbot personal assistant that sort of re-intermediates all of the websites or apps downstream and commoditizes everything because your chatbot is deciding how to get your travel instead of the individual websites?
It really goes to what I think a lot of companies are gonna need to do. You know, there are gonna be these, plenty of OpenAI and alternatives to find information. The question is, what information are they sorting? What large language models, and how much of that is proprietary and unique? The degree that Trip has a way of cataloging all the data it has and creating, in a protected way, something that is really valuable, I think it's a real opportunity for Trip. You know, there's a lot of searching that goes on, but it's relatively commoditized. Will you be able to show differentiation? I really wanna know about this thing. Will Trip be able to provide that differentiation for you?
I think we have the database and the information flows that we should be able to do that and really benefit from AI rather than be threatened by it.
no change in your affinity for this business and your Like, when you think about AI, do you lie awake at night thinking, "Okay, these businesses are more vulnerable. These businesses are going to be. It's gonna be pure cost advantage. These businesses." How do you think about that?
I think you're gonna see a, you know, wide variety. You know, my friends at Zillow, and I'm on the Zillow board, they think there's enormous opportunity on the, you know, software development side. I think we think that as well at Trip, but Trip's real opportunity is to try and leverage on the, you know, front-looking. Our challenge has been that, you know, a lot of the top-of-funnel work has come out from people like Google and the like. To the degree we can provide further differentiation so that it's not just a, you know, a random query. Let's be realistic. Things like Zillow are specialized search engines, right? Things like TripAdvisor. As long as you're differentiating and you have real unique data in there, that's valuable, and you can be more valuable than a generalized search.
That's why people go to Zillow. It's got a lot more information than Google does about that house or that apartment. We can do the same on TripAdvisor, and that's a real opportunity for us.
Let's talk about a more challenging asset. That's Qurate. You laid out Project Athens, the turnaround strategy last year.
Yep.
Give us an update on the KPIs that you're tracking, and where you think you are in that process. Just what's your level of optimism, or pessimism about, the progress?
Well, let's start with the challenges. I mean, I, you know, we're the negative beneficiaries of cord cutting, right? Our primary promotion vehicle is the television. We have a great series of videos you can watch, a great series of programming. There are other ways to distribute that, but the historical method has been across television. Cord cutting's a negative. On top of that, we've had changes that went through COVID, where you had increased cost of shipments in, and we had massive issues where we had a warehouse fire last year at our biggest warehouse. Business disruption caused Net Promoter Score to decline. We had return issues. It was kind of the perfect storm of things go wrong. We have a relatively new CEO in David Rawlinson. He's been with us now about 18 months.
I think he's doing the right things. Project Athens is among them. Project Athens is really two parts. It's both cost cutting and right-sizing the business and revenue enhancement. Probably 2/3 of it is cost cutting and 1/3 is revenue driven. Frankly, most of the cost cutting is a 2023 event, any revenue side is really 2024 and beyond. I think we've seen already a bunch of those cuts come to pass. In Q1, they were sort of the impact was taken. We're starting to see some of that impact in Q2, as we go into Q3 and Q4, we'll see more of that impact. It is frustrating that most of that real benefit is backloaded for the year. I'm optimistic that we're gonna be able to go out and make a huge difference, but on both sides.
Because the other part of, as I said, you know, right-sizing the business and getting the distribution correct, getting the Net Promoter Scores up and eventually, you know, serving our customers better, I think we'll be more nimble and better at it as a more efficient vehicle. I think that's where we actually have some revenue opportunities on the other side as a part of Project Athens.
I'm always struck when I see data and hear you talk about that business, just how dependent you are on a small set of core customers. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is that, I mean, on the one hand, it's great to monetize your best customers. On the other hand, it sort of leaves you very exposed to what is ultimately a pretty small, intensely loyal, but also relatively old customer base.
Look, I think we have a core group of customers called avids and elites in our parlance, who are very important to us. Some of them purchase as many as 50x a year. Literally every week, they're buying something from us. You know, we're affordable luxuries for them. This thing they want, that story that was told to them, why this friend on television made this appealing to them. They're important. I don't think, you know, a lot of businesses have that where a core group is really the high profit for them. The positive for that is they're highly motivated. They're highly connected. They're less likely to be the cord cutters because they wanna get that experience on television. They wanna get to us.
Yeah, anytime you see a concentration, you worry, but it's been a long-lived experience. It's really been in this business, which is over 30 years old now, we've had this going on. I don't look at it as a fleeting kind of experience. It's been what's the nature of the business.
Bottom line for that business, as you think about. You probably read our incredibly bearish cord cutting note.
I did.
Yeah, I think Michael added a, "And have a nice weekend" at the end because it was so depressing.
Qurate is aware of it. It's not new news. Your report was particularly painful, but it was not a new thought. You know, look, we have gone out both with reaching customers in, you know, the new formats, whether it be Roku, where we are prevalent, or whether it be, you know, YouTube, but also building our own apps. Like, we just launched a new one in beta called Sune, which is doing more of our own line and taking advantage of the fact we're a content generation farm. We produce large amounts of video content, and our customers like it, and we just need to make sure where they are, we are producing and giving it to them. We're reaching out and finding new ways to distribute that video content to them.
Is it fair to assume that that is, that everyone involved is being forced to do that faster? Cord cutting is certainly faster than we would've expected a couple of years ago, where we kept thinking we're getting close to a floor because of sports, or we're getting close to a floor because of news. None of those floors seem to be very firm floors.
We are not betting on the fact that we're gonna have a bottoming out.
That there's a floor. Yeah.
That's the floor. We're acting on the premise that it's gonna be the continued decline, and we need to move and adjust our customers and find them where they are. We create shopping experiences they like. We sell product and merchandise that they want. We just need to make sure we make it available to them.
I always end these conversations with the fun part of talking about where you and John see opportunities. I'm gonna get to that in just a second.
Don't I usually avoid answering the question? Go ahead.
No, sometimes. You actually have some. We've had some good conversations about that. Before, I just wanna sort of wrap up on your kind of thoughts of the portfolio. As you kind of step back and think about the portfolio of assets that you've got, just given all the changes in the world over the last couple of years of pandemic and then reopening, are there things that you would like to do? Now rising interest rates.
Yep.
That sort of thing. Are there things that you say, "I'd like to readjust the portfolio in some way to have more exposure to X or less exposure to Y, or.
Look, we've been in, you know, If you look, take a longer term, we've been moving out of some of the traditional media businesses. We sold Starz. We've gotten rid of many of what were the traditional, linear channels. We've been doing that for a while. We got out of that. We invested in things with more of a live profile, whether it be Live Nation, Formula 1, the Braves. We've had that movement for a while. We have generally tended to do better on finding opportunities. We've invested basically nothing in the last three or four years, which is probably smart. We tend to do better when it's a bad market. Most of our best deals have come in bad markets, and that's where opportunity is created. We hope that we find some of those.
We have been smarter about selling. All of the sales we did in the last few years look great. You know, we wish we'd only done more of them, but the things that we did look wonderful. You know, we got out of LendingTree at almost 10x where the stock is. We got out of, you know, like two years ago, we got out of, you know, our stake in iHeart and our stake in Clear Channel. You know, things change, markets change, and some of those things can start to be attractive again. We'll look for opportunities that are stressed, that fit our portfolio or fit the kind of things we think we know something about, whether it be live or subscription businesses, things where we have some experience.
I'd love to just get your perspective on businesses that are adjacent. You're not directly in the RSN business, but you obviously pay a lot of attention with the Braves.
Yeah.
What's your view of the future of sports on TV and the RSN business?
It'll be interesting to see. It's funny to watch, interesting to watch, educational to watch. What's happening is some of these people have broken away and gone back to broadcast where they think the RSN is not meeting their needs. In many cases, you can understand that. We're on the other side of it in L.A., where we pay a very high fee to the Dodgers that was inherited from the Time Warner deal. The Dodgers make a lot of money, but they have a problem. They're only seen by something like 35% of the market. There's gonna be this tension between how much do I get paid and how broadly is my product distributed and known.
I think you'll see some of that move back where they may be taking less money, but they'll either be broader opportunities around broadcast, and then you'll see people doing much more digital. The traditional, "Hey, this is where I find my sports," is obviously gonna break. Will it re-aggregate? That's gonna take a while. Maybe there's the, you know, the ESPN+ of the world. Will that be done on a regional basis? I think that's, you know, that's a ways off. We're gonna go through a period of fragmentation where the high-end pay and the broadcast are tension, and we'll see how that plays out.
It's always been this relatively obvious linkage between TV contracts and player salaries. Let's leave aside the NFL and what Josh Harris and company are paying for the Commanders for a second. The first half of that is broken. The TV contracts aren't generating money for the RSN or the regionally delivered teams, and yet the player salaries have kept going up. Is that a temporary lagging issue, and that ultimately, player salaries are gonna have to come down?
Well, really depends on the sport. I mean, you put aside the NFL because, you know, the NFL has a hard salary cap, and they're definitely tied to the TV revenues. Baseball is not. I think, you know, we've seen owners, particularly one in here in New York, happy to spend well beyond what the team earns, and that's true in a lot of cases. These are based on a multiple of revenue and not a multiple of income. The Braves make money. We make money every year. No one would know in the valuations when you look at what Sportico or Forbes, how they value these things. That's almost irrelevant. It's just in our nature. Liberty, we probably would have a hard time writing a check every year into the team, and we haven't had to.
We have a great on-field product and a great business experience, that's wonderful. I don't know if it's quite as correlated. It is over the long term, perhaps, that, yeah, the TV revenues will drive this. In the short term, doesn't seem to be a high correlation.
It hasn't yet. I always like to wrap up on this question. Tell me when you and John are talking, where whether it is a geography, whether it is a sector, what where do you see opportunity that you say I'm... Or where are you putting your personal investments?
Look, I think outside our portfolio, again, the things that we know well or better than we know other things are now about live events. We have some credibility in sports with what's gone on in Formula 1. We're looking for those kind of alternatives. We're looking for things, and those of a lot of cases have been chased up, so not just a team, but you know, something where we can make a difference. We are looking at things that are over-levered, that are fundamentally good businesses and trying to raise, you know, capital in a bad market. That's probably where the easiest opportunities are. Again, subscriptions are something we have a long history of, from TCI to DirecTV to Starz to Sirius to Charter. We have a long history around subscription businesses, so those feel familiar.
It is always a pleasure to do this conversation with you every year. I look forward to doing it, for a lot more years to come.
Thanks, Greg.
I learn something every time. Thank you for being here.
Thank you, everybody.