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UBS Global Media & Communications Conference

Dec 10, 2024

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Okay. Thank you all for joining us today. I'm John Hodulik, the telecom and media analyst here at UBS. And I'm very pleased to introduce our next speaker, Jeff Hirsch, the President and CEO of Starz. Jeff, thanks for being here.

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Thanks for having us. Good to be here.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

We've got about 35 minutes for questions. As always, I've got a bunch of questions, but if anybody wants to add one to the conversation, please use the app and text me. It'll show up here on the iPad, and I'll work it into the conversation. So, Jeff, a lot going on at the company. And as we sit here today, you're just a few weeks away from being a public company. Maybe help the audience that is new to the story by doing a stock pitch on why you think Starz is poised to be a good investment.

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Okay. Great. Thanks for the question. Yeah, we're about five or six away from separating from Lionsgate and being our own publicly traded company. We'll be on NASDAQ under the ticker STRZ. Got to get that pitch in early. I think Starz is a really misunderstood asset sitting within Lionsgate. We've been pretty quiet about the success of the business over the last year because we were out raising a PIPE in the SPAC to help separation. But if you look at the Starz business today, we do about $1 billion in revenue, 20 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada. We sit around, like I said, $1 billion in revenue. Of that $1 billion in revenue, almost $1 billion is digital. I think that's a surprise to a lot of people.

So we have actually made the transition from linear to digital faster than any other linear network and more successfully. Throughout that entire last six years, revenue has been around $1.4 billion. So very durable revenue as we've replaced linear revenue with digital revenue. We sit at about a 15% profit margin today, so about $200 million of EBITDA. And we generally convert, there's a little noise in the free cash flow tail from international shutdown, but we generally convert about 70% of that profit into unlevered free cash flow. So you've got a business that's doing $1.4 billion data-driven, primarily digital in the OTT space, profitability at 15% margin that generates about 70% of our cash flow. So it's a very good business. If you think about it, as we separate, we just came through a TLA where we went out and raised a Term Loan A and a revolver.

We'll be sitting around $600 million of net debt. So think about three times leverage. The goal for us is to get down to two and a half times. We've looked at a lot of small-cap companies that trade well. Most of those companies are under 2.8 times. So you have a business, again, that's going to be, and we've got maturities out to 2029. So pricing is going to be great. Maturities out to 2029. So we've got a really good investable business. Very stable revenue on the top side, digital first, profit margin of 15%, and about 70% conversion to unlevered free cash flow. As we separate and we start to take more control of the business, you're going to see a business that really grows revenue 1%-3% in the out years.

We've got a plan to get that margin from 15%-20%, and still we'll convert about 70% unl evered free cash flow. So you've got a really good investable business. The other thing that I think makes it a really good story is that if you look at the current stock price of Lionsgate and you look at Lion, which is the SPAC, and you can actually do the math to get to what multiple we're trading at in the business today, Starz is trading at a three multiple. We don't have ads, advertising EBITDA.

EBITDA. Yeah. We don't have advertising. Our revenue is stable. We have a profit margin. We're converting free cash, and we're at three times. If you compare that to some of the peer groups sitting in the space that's trading at 4.5-5 times, which have advertising, shrinking revenue base, shrinking EBITDA base, a lot of leverage on some of those businesses, we think the business should be trading more like six or seven times. And so it's kind of a free look right now in terms of where we're valued in the business.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Is that low multiple just given the lack of visibility as part of the transaction? People have been waiting for the transaction for a while, and it's something that basically, in your mind, sort of solves itself as you become an independent company.

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

I think there's a couple of things. One is I think we've been very quiet on the Starz story, so I don't think people understand how much we've transitioned the business away from linear to digital today. And because we focused on two core demos, generally two-thirds of our customer base are women, the general female audience, and the African-American female audience. If you don't watch some of our originals, you really don't know that we have originals in what we've done. And so I think there's just a lack of understanding of how much the asset looks more like a Netflix and less like an AMCX.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

All right. Well, let's dig into some of these trends. Maybe starting with the top of the P&L, you've talked about how resilient the revenue line has been. But with just 30% of revenues coming from linear by the time you get to the end of next year, how do you expect that overall top-line trends to progress? I think you said one to three is the target. And then beyond that, how quickly is digital growing? And what's the prospects for just the digital piece of that?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Yeah. So digital is growing anywhere from 9% to 12% to 13% a year on the OTT side. But I think ultimately what you'll see is a business that's going to grow 1%-3% revenue. And I think there's three big components to that. One is rate increase. We've done two rate increases in the business. For the first time, we did it two years ago. Then this year, we'll take a year off from rate increases this year and watch. Because we're a focused small complementary service that we're not broadcast, we're not trying to serve everybody in the home, we are very complementary. And so the goal is always to be priced below the broad-based streamers out there.

As long as Netflix and WBD and everybody keeps raising their prices and Disney+, it gives us room to raise our price so that we keep that gap of complementary in the consumer's mind. So there's a lot of headroom to run on price. But I spent 15 years at Time Warner Cable living on a price increase, so I know you don't want to stay on it every year. You want to actually have growth in other ways. Bundles are another great way to grow the business. Right now, in the $1.4 billion, bundles are about less than 1% of revenue. I think as the broad-based streamers start to settle their tech stacks and look to start to ingest content, you'll see bundles becoming bigger. We'll have an announcement in a couple of weeks of a very big bundle coming out.

And as bundles become bigger, what it does is it allows you to line up their content cadence with our content cadence, which drives lifetime value and drives churn down. So you grow the top line by having lower churn and higher lifetime value. And we see that coming in the business. And then there's really, as the business has really started to change, I think a lot of these broad-based streamers have realized they're not channels, but they're platforms. And when they realize that their platform is not channels, it gives us the ability to be sold on top of their businesses. And so there's four or five folks out there that are really going to lean into the channels business in a big way. The Walmart acquisition of Vizio really helps drive the Vizio business to be a channels business. We're the fastest growing channel on Vizio today.

You put the Walmart machine behind it. You put a biller in there that's a wholesale biller, and bundles and such start to become really big on the Vizio platform. That's a real big platform there. Just did our YouTube renewal. You're going to start to see us really. YouTube and Starz really lean into growing the business there. And we think that's a huge opportunity. Hulu is a great opportunity for us. There's two sides to the Hulu business. Hulu Live is where about 20% penetrated on the Hulu SVOD, which is about 40 million subs. We're merchandised in the store, but I like to say we're behind the beer cart in the back of the supermarket. We're not by the register. And so we're working closely with them to try to start to make it easier for consumers to find Starz within the Hulu footprint.

That's 40 million subs that I think we have access to. Rate increase, more bundles. I think as these channels become platforms, it opens up kind of a second wave of distribution to really grow the subscriber base.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

In terms of the channels business, you mentioned a number of different platforms, but what about Roku? The 50%, half the market here in the U.S. and Canada, which you guys focus on, is that a potential partner they can talk about building the platform as well?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Roku is a great partner for us. They've got a great team there. We're working very closely with them right now. I think they're going to lean into the channels business as well and drive that. We have a small base there, but we think the base could be massive. 40% of our viewership comes through the Roku product every night. And so there's a real opportunity to grow our business there. That's another one of the, I call it, the second wave of distribution on the digital side that will show up in the next 12-18 months that will really help reignite subscriber growth in the space.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

So as you said, Starz targets the hard-to-reach demos of African-Americans and women. You have 20 million subscribers. How big is that market potentially for you?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

So we've done a lot of work around the TAM. We think there's somewhere between 80 and 90 million exposed domestically that fit within our demo. And so sitting around 20 million subscribers, there's a lot of opportunity to us to drive up into that demo. I think we've done a really good job of serving the African-American female audience with the Power franchises and the spinoffs and BMF and P-Valley. And we've got a lot of great stuff in development for that universe as well. The Outlander base or the general female audience, again, we have a lot of great stuff. The prequel's coming. Outlander's on right now, doing a great job in 7B right now. Prequel comes next summer, which the fan base is really excited about. But we haven't even leaned into the Latina community in the U.S. And that's a huge market for us.

And we've got a lot in development there. So the idea is of our eight to 10 originals, you take four of them for each of the demos we have today. You line them up so you can extend lifetime value from a 10-week show to 40 weeks by lining up those shows. Ultimately, it should keep churn down and not have you to go back to the marketplace to try to acquire and really churn the business. Another four for the other demo that we have. And then the other two are to trial to push up into that TAM. So if we put a show on for the Latina community that works, we'll put three more behind that and then continue to layer up. And so we stay focused on our demos, and we just layer up into that TAM.

We think there's a real lot of opportunity for us to grow today.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Given how big that market is, the 80 and 90 million households, why don't you think the bigger streamers like Netflix, Max, Peacock have focused on that market?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

I think they have. I think they've really tried to push into it. But we have such a head start on it. We are the destination of some of these households. We talk about scale a lot in this business, and we're small. But in the African-American household, Starz is the biggest brand. Hands down, we're the biggest brand in that marketplace. And we're small, but we don't have scale as you would define it. But in that market, we have the biggest scale. Netflix actually went out and signed Courtney Kemp, who is the creator of Power, to recreate content over there. I think she's got a show coming there. So people have tried.

But I think once you've built kind of an understanding and a loyalty and a relationship with the base that they know when you put a show on, they know it's going to speak to them, it's very hard to get into that space. And also, I think these broad-based streamers that have tried, they're trying to do a lot of things at the same time. The Chi on Showtime was a good step in for them. But the reality is they saw on The Chi what we saw when we first only had Power. Huge gains of acquisition, huge people churning out when it was over.

Instead of those guys putting two or three more shows on, you can bundle Starz in with the Showtime Paramount product and put our four or five shows next to The Chi, get the cadence in the right place in terms of content, lower everybody's churn, and take some of our economics. It's a much better method of kind of creating that stickier customer than actually spending a lot of money on content, making some bets, and having it miss. It's a better bet to do it that way, and so we think folks have tried, but we've really got a focus that they don't have. They've got to serve everybody in the home. We're serving one part of the home, and because we're doing it, it makes more sense to be complementary and bundled than it is to try to recreate it and rip off what we're doing.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Given that strategy and the way you've laid out the content, how has engagement been trending?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Engagement has been great. We are such a data-driven company right now. I get a daily report that shows gross ads and engagement from last night, and so I know when engagement overnight is over 10% with the product that we're growing. When it drops below 7%, we got a problem, and so engagement with Outlander on the air has been great. We've seen our monthly hours increase almost two to three hours every year because remember, our portfolio is 8-10 originals wrapped with the Lionsgate Pay One, so you got Wick and that universe, and then the Universal Pay Two, so as a collection of content, we have a cadence of big originals that then are supported by Pay One movies and Pay Two movies, then library from everywhere else. We have Disney and Sony in the third window from our original Pay One.

And so there's a cadence of content that's always on the air that's driving engagement. When our big originals come off, does it drop a little bit? Sure. But then we package movies together to kind of drive that engagement up. But engagement's a real key. I actually think completion rate on episodes is probably more important than engagement. They kind of ladder into each other. But we watch completion rate on every episode religiously because we know that if we get people through the episode, that they're going to watch the next episode, and they're going to come back next week.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Makes sense. You talked earlier about the pricing strategy and said that you've done a 2023 price increase and 2024, but you were going to hold off on the 2025 one this year or this coming year. So what are you seeing in terms of the receptivity within your customer base to these price increases, and what's causing you to pause for next year?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

So we saw when we did the rate increase as we guided that we had a down quarter on subs. We expected that to happen. But the churn from the rate increase was in line with exactly what we thought it would be. And I think the team did a very good job of actually managing the customer once they got the rate increase. So when you do a rate increase, there's really two pops in churn. It's on the notification. People see the notification and disconnect even though the rate hasn't changed, which I'm still trying to figure out for my mother and Cable since they still have another month before that happens. But it's consumer behavior. And the second is when the rate changes.

And we know from our analytics that if you've gotten the rate increase and you go into our app and you go into the settings screen, you're probably looking to go disconnect. Because in order to disconnect, you have to hit the settings screen. So we get flags on each of those customers. And then what happens from there is we manage the customer relationship from there, depending on where you are. So if you are on a retail rate and you're an Outlander fan and you hit this, you get a series of retention offers that are designed based on your construct within our footprint. If you're on an offer, you get a different one. Because if you're $11 versus $3, it's a different offer. So we're really trying to maximize revenue retention from when we trigger that rate increase at each of those two points.

We have targets for each of those in the business. I think the team did a really good job of managing the customer base from rate increase through the next two months when it actually comes through the business and holds the customer. We've seen actually pretty good success on it. You'll see revenue coming out of this year will grow modestly. You'll see us start to grow into that 1%-3% range. The reason why we're taking the year off is I want to see what the rest of the industry does in terms of that gap that we talked about. When you do a rate increase, you actually have to think about years three, four, and five, not years one and two. Because as you all know, we're looking for growth and percentage growth.

And so if you get on this cadence of having to do it every year, it makes it really hard to stop the cadence because you just have to replace that some other way. And so I think it's good to pulse it in, take a break, pulse it in, take a break. And with this distribution wave that I think is coming, it gives us opportunity not to go back to the rate well because we can grow subscribers on a more organic basis.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Makes sense. And lastly, from a subscriber cadence standpoint, password sharing is an issue we've seen from Netflix, Disney. We talked about it yesterday with you, and now more recently Warner Bros. So is that an opportunity for you in terms of driving that 20 million subs?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

So we've looked at it. We don't have the scale that they do in terms of the sub base. And we actually have a really fundamentally different customer base. And so the big insight that's different about the Starz customer versus the broad-based streamers is more of our viewership is done on a cell phone than it's done on the 10-foot screen. Because of our base, a lot of our folks are watching it on a third shift. And so they're watching it alone. And so we don't have the amount of password sharing that I think you've seen in other places. Now, we do have it. We've looked at it, and we are going to address it this year. It's very easy to see if you give somebody four screens and they're watching the show at the same time and they're in four different zip codes, they're probably password sharing.

And so we've got a plan to address that. But it's not as big of an opportunity for upside on subs as it was for some of the bigger, more broader streamers than us.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Got it. Maybe turning to margins, you're currently in the 15% range. What's the longer-term target for the business?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

The long-term target margin is 20%. We're sitting at 15% today, and there's really kind of five ways we get there. We talked about three of them in terms of growing the upside. The other two are content spend, and so we're sitting somewhere north of $700 right now in content spend.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

$700 million a year.

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

$700 million a year. We should be somewhere between 600 and 700 in terms of the portfolio. And what's driving that is a couple of things. On our originals, there is right now the studio, because we're part of the studio, we're licensing shows back from the studio. And so there's economics that we put more on the studio side of the business because they're trading at 11 multiple, and we're trading at a 3. And so it's more profitable for the business. As we separate and we start to get more ownership of our shows on the air, that allows us to control costs better. It also allows us to offload some of that cost to international markets. And so there's probably $40 to 60 million of savings by getting ownership back on the slate, which you'll see coming in in fiscal 2027.

I think three or four of our shows out of the eight or nine will be owned by Starz and have that economics there. Then there's some windowing that we think we can do in terms of some of our Pay One and Pay Two opportunities to pull some more costs off the business there. Ultimately, those five things together allow us to get to that 20% margin coming out of fiscal 2028.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Another thing you've talked about in terms of driving margins is replacing season four of successful shows with spinoffs. Obviously, successful shows get more expensive with every season. When does that kick in? And then are you confident that that's a workable strategy given the risk of losing subscribers or audience?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Fortunately, we've had a three-year planning period for the separation. We've been hard at work at looking at how to, and the portfolio of content is really like an assembly line. You know what the cost is on season one, two, three, and four, and what that arc looks like. You actually have to plan in development when you have something that comes on to season four. If it comes out of the allowed cost in the portfolio, something that you can pop on to replace it. Every one of our shows that's on the air has two or three shows in development that are mapped to it that we watch the cost and the viewership. If viewership doesn't grow at the same amount of the cost, then we have something that we can pop on.

And now, what allows us to manufacture hits, I think, better than most is that we're only focusing on those two demos. So we know what works. Power franchise, for example, is a great example. We know what worked for Power. We know what the beloved characters were. And we spun off three different shows out of that. Those were season one shows that season one economics, they had cast from the original in there. And so we knew that we could pull the fan base over. And then we strung them together so that we could move the fan base from one show to the next to the next. And so we were able to do that. BMF, which was a non-Power show but Power adjacent, we like to call it, another 50 Cent show, had the same feeling and propensity of those shows that we popped out on.

That show, season one, was probably our cheapest season in terms of cost. But it actually scaled 90% of the audience of our biggest, most expensive show. And so when you make those trades, you can hold the audience and actually pull economics out of the business.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Obviously, every situation is going to be different. But is there a rule of thumb? Or what are you seeing in terms of savings going from just maybe bookend it from a season four of a successful show to a spinoff? Can you save 20%, 50%? Or what's a general?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

It ranges anywhere from 20%-70% depending on where you shoot the show, what kind of talent you have in the show, but it can be massive in terms of scale.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

You think that 90% is a realistic target in terms of keeping the audience?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Well.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Seems like a home run, right?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

It just depends on how much it's a cost audience. If the cost is, I'm making this up, 50% less and you're keeping 80% of the audience, it works. So ultimately, we're trying to serve an audience. And so the shows have to work for the audience. And if we ran the business just on cost, probably people wouldn't watch the shows. And so what's the story first? We have a show in development with 50 right now called Fightland. It's a UK-based boxing show. And the idea is it has the same feel of the Power universe. It's a little different because it's UK. So the fighting and stuff and music's a little different. We think the base is going to really like it. It has that 50 feel to it.

We probably will take some characters from the original Power and put them in it so that we know we can bring the fan base over. That's shot in the UK. The economics are fundamentally different than if we shot it here in New York.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Got it. Makes sense. So you've seen some other networks like HBO and AMC license some of their library content to Netflix, really, both for financial reasons and to broaden the distribution and maybe reinvigorate that brand or those shows. Now, that's something that Starz hasn't done. Can you talk about why you haven't done that and is that an opportunity?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Most of our, I would say 99% of all of our content is exclusive. I'm a big believer in content scarcity as a way to drive your subscription business versus content ubiquity. I don't actually think that putting your content on another platform actually accrues back to your platform. We've actually seen that with two real-world examples. Power was licensed to Hulu right after the acquisition of Lionsgate. What we saw was that people that watched Power on our app, as we talked about, is on Hulu. We didn't see people buying up to Starz to catch the current season. They were waiting for that current season to roll down to the platform where they were. Outlander has been on Netflix.

We just have not seen in the data any kind of incremental gain in terms of subscription when the new season lands on Netflix and the current season is on Starz. And so I actually think the more that folks put their shows on different networks, you lose the content associated to the brand, to the show, to acquisition. And so we're much more in the content scarcity, which is we've got great shows. We have five shows today that do anywhere between nine and 12 million eyeballs a week. Those are some of the biggest shows on television that nobody talks about. Because if you're not in the demo, you don't know what's doing.

If you took those five shows and you put them into the Netflix viewership data, three of those five shows would be in the top 1% of anything viewed on Netflix and were a third the size, and so we get an incredible amount of first title streams, which is a proxy for acquisition, even for season ones as a new season comes back on for people catching up, so to put a season one on another platform, we think that pulls away from our ability to grow our platform. We do a lot of sampling. We'll put an episode out. We put Serpent Queen season one, we put out on Amazon to try to promote up to season two, but we are promoting it to a product that's sitting on Amazon.

And so I just don't think if we put something on a platform where we're not there, we're going to see that. I think it takes away from our ability to grow the subscriber base.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Makes sense. Another way to monetize the platform is through advertising. And obviously, similar to licensing, a lot of not just the big guys, but some of the smaller guys are moving down that path. Is that an opportunity for Starz as you look ahead, especially given the engagement you're talking about?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Yeah. Look, our current content is very R-rated and very adult, which limits the ability for us to go to the advertising community and put. I don't think Procter & Gamble is going to advertise a lot on Starz. I think we could get hospitality and gambling and Vegas and such. And we love their content portfolio. It's great. And we're also 20 million subscribers. And so I think the mistake that people have thought about when they launched the ad tier was they were competing against linear advertising dollars. But the minute you go into the digital world, you're competing against linear TV dollars. But you're also competing against Instagram and Facebook and all these monsters. And so scale really matters in that space. So I don't think you'll see Starz ever pivot from being SVOD to AVOD.

I do think there's an opportunity, though, within our demos, and we'll probably talk about this later. If you look at the disruption going on in the business today, there's a lot of linear networks or ad-supported networks that serve the demos that we serve today that are part of our larger companies that aren't getting the focus that they deserve. These are great brands that served women for decades that are just sitting in a bunch of different groups of portfolios of channels that aren't getting the focus that we could provide them. I do think there's an opportunity once we separate, once we have our own balance sheet and a currency to go out and acquire some of those linear assets that I don't view as linear assets.

But I view them as ad-supported content that sits at our demo that's surrounded by linear costs that I already have. So I do think there's an opportunity to expand the revenue base away from SVOD to have an AVOD and an SVOD that focuses on the demos that we have through a little bit of an M&A.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Yeah. How do you see the landscape in the traditional media world here or traditional ad streaming world changing over the next several years? Do you expect the U.S. to go through a period of consolidation?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

I think first you'll see some divestitures. I think people will figure out what they're good at, what they're not good at, what they can focus on, what they can't focus on. And I think there will be some people shedding assets to set their businesses up to be successful, which is the real opportunity. Starz is in that space because we built our own app. We have our own data stack. We actually have a platform that is as good as anything else that's out there in the business that we can build around. And so I do think people will shed assets first before they consolidate. They'll figure out what their strength is. They'll shed those things that they don't want to focus on. And then they'll consolidate around the things that they are focused on. I think it's really hard. This is a hard business.

It's even harder today based on the disruption, and it's very hard to do 100 things well, and so things that you can't focus on that you made are actually great opportunities for us that we are focused on.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Yeah. I mean, how could Starz participate in that? Especially maybe we'll start with the balance sheet. You said it'll be about three times when you come out. You talked about cash flow conversion and then the longer-term target. How quickly can you get to the leverage target that you've laid out?

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Scott's going to kill me for saying this. But I think pretty quickly we'll be sitting at three times leverage. We obviously convert a good amount of unleveraged free cash flow. If you look at where the TLA and the revolver are coming in, I think that service will be somewhere between $30-$40 million a year. We've got NOLs. So we're not going to be a cash taxpayer for a couple of years. And so other than a very small amount of CapEx, we really convert a lot of our profit into free cash flow. I think we'll have a currency and we'll have scale and we'll have a platform to build around. So I do think we're committed to getting below that 2.8 times pretty quickly. We've done a lot of work around small-cap companies. Anything that's under 2.8 times leverage trades pretty well.

I'm happy to have the debate about being small. I don't want to have the debate about being small and having too much leverage. So Scott and I are very committed to paying that down pretty quickly. And we'll see. But I do think there's a real opportunity based on having a currency and a balance sheet and the size that we are to really participate in building a bigger business with what's going on in the space right now.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

And do you think that that's focused just on those demos? Or do you think there could be opportunities to expand beyond your existing? You mentioned the Latin American market, which I don't think is part of the 80-90 million households you target, which would be.

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

The Latino community is in that 80-100 million market.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

It is. Okay. Got it. Got it.

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

We just have to get some content on there to serve that audience, and I specifically use that because it's women, so I think we'll still stay very focused on our demos. I think the minute we try to do something outside of what we know, what we're good at, and I think we're going to stick to our knitting. I think there's a lot of opportunity with a lot of great brands that serve our two demos in a different kind of content portfolio to build around to kind of complete the content loop from scripted to unscripted to reality to made for TV movies. There's a lot of portfolio out there that fits within our focus, and the one thing I think we've learned over the last six years is that in a very disruptive time, focus is a key asset to being successful.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

Got it. And before we wrap, maybe we can talk about the content slate. You've mentioned, obviously, you have Big Hits, Power, Outlander. What are you excited about as you look out into 2025? And maybe talk a little bit about how that contrasts with 2024 and 2023.

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Yeah. I mean, 2023, 2024 were tough years because we were coming out of two strikes, so this year we've only had three tentpoles on the air, so we only had three really big shows. We took our biggest show, Ghost, and split it into two parts to kind of manufacture a fourth tentpole. This year coming, we'll have five tentpoles. We're back to the strong content cadence that we have, and we're out of kind of the two-strike-related disruption. You see that in a little bit of the cash flow kind of wonkiness as well, and so I'm really excited about it. We've got Spartacus coming back. We're remaking Spartacus. That's been shot in New Zealand. That's coming back. That'll be a great addition back to the footprint.

We've actually added some characters that really make it fit the demo better than the original did from 10 years ago. Outlander is currently on with 7B, getting great reviews. We have the Outlander prequel coming. That show is the story behind how Jamie and Claire's parents met and fell in love. It is back to Scotland. It's 30 years before the first season of Outlander. You're back in real clan lore. It's really great. It's two love stories, not one. There's things in there that you have never seen in the original Outlander for the base. The casting is just amazing. I think it's going to be a huge hit for us.

Hunting Wives, which is a show, it's off a book about four Texas housewives that start a hunting club because they're bored and crazy stuff happens and a murder happens, is a really. It's coming on the air. That's pretty exciting about that. We've got more Power coming this year. Raising Kanan's coming back. Force is coming back. We've got our big shows coming back. And then in development, I talked about Fightland. I think is going to be a really great show. And there's a couple of other shows that are there that I don't want to give trade secrets out because I don't want them to be revealed. But I do believe there's a lot of great stories that we see out there today that we believe that can be done through the eyes of female agency and female point of view.

And so we have a few of those in development that are pretty excited about. So I think the content slate is as strong as it's ever been. And again, they're all aligned specifically to shows on the air. We've got P-Valley coming back, which is a massive hit for us and such a unique show. We have two shows that have the feel of P-Valley. One's based on Black family-owned rodeos in Houston, which is a real big thing that I don't think the world has had a view into. Same thing with roller rinks in Atlanta. So there's a lot of different things that we have that feel similar to the shows that we have on the air that are unique looks in. And they're all. The biggest challenge is in the portfolio where we only have 8 to 10 on the air.

How do you greenlight all of them? But I'm excited about that.

We're bringing it full circle. Give us again the timing and maybe the steps that still need to take place in terms of the full separation, Starz being a public company that we can all.

We turn the revised S-4 back to the SEC Tuesday or Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We're waiting comments. We should get comments this week. We'll probably turn that back hopefully within a couple of days. Hopefully, it's a light response. Then we've got to go out to do a 30-day mailer to the shareholder base. Then we have to have a shareholder vote. Then we're off and running.

John Hodulik
Telecom and Media Analyst, UBS

January, February?

My sense, mid-January. It's got to be before the end of January as the financials go stale. So we're thinking mid-January. So it's an exciting time. And I'm excited about how we've transitioned this asset and what's to come. And there's a lot of opportunity for us to grow this business.

Yeah. Looking forward to it. Jeff, thanks for being here.

Jeffrey A. Hirsch
President and CEO, Starz

Thank you.

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