Good morning. Welcome, everyone, to Liberty's Investor Day. We're happy to have you here at our new venue, and for those tuning in virtually, thanks for being here. Of course, we like to start the day with the most riveting content, so I will direct you, please, to our forward-looking statement. Now, for just some tactical information, please take out your phones. Take note of our Wi-Fi for the day. We also have our hashtag, same as always. I encourage you to please keep FWONK company, and we were debating for the last one for Greg. Do we try to see if we get a grand reveal? I don't know if I can promise that yet. At Liberty, when we have press releases for Investor Day, we call it Press Release Palooza. I don't think yesterday disappointed. We were trying to potentially set a record, but with announcements come filings.
I ask for your patience, please, as we will not be able to post our slides right away. Speaking of announcements, in conjunction with the transactions we announced yesterday at both Liberty Media and Liberty Broadband, we also announced yesterday that Greg will be stepping down as Liberty's CEO at the end of the year in conjunction with his contract. It has been especially busy recently at Liberty, focusing on rationalizing our corporate structures, delivering value to shareholders. Beyond that, with Greg, it's been 19 years of innovative acquisitions, spins, splits, reattributions, rights offerings, tracking stocks, growing the equity 18 times in 19 years. For all of us that work with him, it's been a whole lot of fun. To Greg, we say thank you for your leadership.
And on behalf of all of us in the room, we say thank you for rarely giving us a dull quarter while at Liberty.
Welcome to the annual.
Turn to John.
Liberty Media Investor Conference. I wish I could be there to enjoy.
I was going to say, to build on the success for the future, while he's not here today, we do have some welcome remarks from John Malone.
Welcome to the annual Liberty Media Investor Conference. I wish I could be there to enjoy the Greg Maffei comedy hour. The original concept of Liberty Media was the rationalization of a portfolio of programming and cable investments that had been accumulated by me in the prior period of building up TCI. That early life of Liberty Media, I call it the Peter Barton period. Then it became the Dob Bennett period. That's a period characterized by lots of rationalization and investment, the growth, the rapid growth in the tech bubble period, and then the swallowing of Liberty Media by the AT&T whale. That period ended around 2005, and we hired Greg Maffei to come in and see what he could do.
We had just used some of our liquidity to buy a very large block in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which created a lot of controversy in Rupert's mind anyway. We converted that into a 38% ownership of DirecTV. Greg was heavily involved in negotiating with News Corp. We ended up swapping our stock back to News Corp for DirecTV and some other assets that made the transaction tax-efficient for both News Corp and Liberty Media. We went on then to do an amazing number of transactions. Probably the transaction in which we gained control of SiriusXM was probably the most interesting. It was probably the best business deal financially in the history of the world. Similarly, we acquired a big stake in Charter. Initially, we bought out Apollo's interest in a restructured Charter, and I think we started with 38%.
But then Greg was very busy in helping Charter grow rapidly through the acquisition of Time Warner Cable and the Newhouse Cable Properties, with us ending up as a 26% shareholder. That's particularly interesting because we just announced yesterday the agreement to merge that holding company that we created for our 26% into Charter, thereby giving our shareholders direct ownership of the Charter company. So as part of the transaction that we've announced with Charter, the Alaska communications business called GCI will be spun off to Broadband Shareholders. It's a very good business. I've been involved in it on and off, I think, for 40 years. So we have a long history of that.
It will have to be run once it's spun off by the staff at Liberty Media, and then its destiny can go from there, whether, in fact, it's used as a core asset to build another set of diversified businesses, given its very attractive tax characteristics that it will have post-spin-off, or it may turn out that somebody, some strategic, wants to buy the assets of the spun-off enterprise, and we would be considering that as an alternative, and then the redeployment of the proceeds from that transaction. The most interesting transaction, the most creative, I think, that the Liberty Media team and Greg came up with was how to take control of Formula One, make it a public company, give the private equity investors liquidity, and end up creating one of the greatest success stories, I think, in sports.
The use of a tracking stock to back Formula One into being public, bringing Chase Carey in, an extremely well-respected sports management personality who had run DirecTV for us, for Rupert, and then for us, that he and Greg have built this wonderful Formula One, which is incredibly successful, but that has been probably the most noteworthy single business that Liberty's ever been involved in, so we're particularly proud of that one, and it's been a wonderful ride that we've had, almost a mind-numbing number of deals. Through it, Greg has served as either CEO, director, or chairman of up to nine of our businesses at the same time. Pretty heavy load, frankly, and he deserves a great deal of appreciation and thanks for the efforts and the value that he's created for our shareholders.
For the future of the Liberty Media entity going into its fourth generation of rebirth, we start with this wonderful 100% ownership of Formula One, potentially adding Dorna to it, assuming we get regulatory approval, a very strong operating business performing wonderfully well, probably going to have a wonderful year this year, next year, and into the future. That will be an asset-backed, normal kind of corporation owned directly by our shareholders once the livespan is accomplished. Mission accomplished for Greg. He did what he set out to do. We built a number of companies. We have delivered them to our shareholders in a very tax-efficient transfer of value. Here we are. We will probably realign our board of directors a bit to focus on two things.
One is strengthening our ability to support the management on Formula One and the growth of our involvement in the racing businesses. And number two, in looking at opportunities to put together a jigsaw puzzle that will be the future of Liberty Media, made up of whatever diversified assets we think will represent great long-term investments for our shareholders. With that, let's get on with the show.
Thank you to John. He will be here for Q&A as well, zooming in. We'll get more from him and from Greg later in the day. I just want to look at the agenda. We have a great agenda planned for today. We have Liberty Media that will present in the morning. Qurate Retail, Liberty Broadband, Liberty TripAdvisor will be in the afternoon. We have presentations from our CEOs. We also have two exciting panels today. One will be a conversation between Greg and Jerry Bruckheimer discussing the F1 film. We do have some behind-the-scenes footage of the film that we'll show before we ask that you please not record and put your phones down. It's important that that just stay to those in the room. We also will have a panel later on commercializing brand with Roger Goodell and Greg, moderated by David Faber.
So we're excited for both of those. During the breaks, I hope you go outside and get a custom hat made for yourself. We have some inspirations on the board, but feel free to get creative. And there's QR codes on all the tables if you'd like to set up your own design. One big thank you to the team at Liberty, all the companies who make this happen, specifically to my team, to Amber, Claire, and Jenny for all the work they do that goes into putting the day together. And finally, it is a day of farewells, perhaps. While there's the man on stage, there is also the magic that happens backstage. So I want to recognize somebody, Duke Hartman, who is the wizard behind the curtain who makes sure Investor Day goes seamless. He's been doing this for 28 years, and today is his last.
So I'm going to ask you guys to give a round of applause to Duke. And to Greg for your swan song, "Break a Leg." We're very excited for Investor Day, but we, of course, had to do comedy. You guys might remember that a few years ago we launched Liberty+ . It was our own streaming service. The economics have been broadly in line with other streaming platforms, so we're going to jump on the bandwagon and launch an ad-supported tier. Despite the competitive launches of many other industry ad-supported offerings, we believe that the quality of our ad inventory is incredibly robust for this very niche audience. So with that, I invite you to enjoy this ad-supported Liberty Investor Day.
Let's go streaming. Premium tier. Standard tier. One share of Altice. Ad-supported tier. Add a discount to non-ad variety NAV. I am interested in venue. Aw, shucks. Let's go with ad-supported. Why do they always make you answer questions? How did you hear about Investor Day? A friend and then I set it off on, "Hey, VJ. You, you, you. Hey, I know that mustache. And you." Great. Now we can get to the real show. An ad already? I should have paid for premium.
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To bare my skin, yeah, that's on me. Nothing in me go hand.
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It's good. This is the shit.
It's my moment, so I just got to say things are getting clearer.
Self-promoting a street race in Las Vegas that night in a city that never sleeps without disrupting local commercial opportunities? It's so easy, even a caveman could do it.
Okay, that sounds good.
Who are you on the phone with the night before Investor Day?
Oh, it's Brian from Liberty.
Who is this?
It's Brian from Liberty.
Oh, yeah, Brian from Liberty. What are you wearing?
Khakis.
Hi, I'm your overactive finance department. There's a lot going on around here. We like flexibility. Otherwise, we could end up unhedged or exposed. I'm here to navigate the unexpected and jump over hurdles. I just moved all the QVC debt to 2029. I just bought EUR 2.7 billion to pay for Dorna. Deal contingent. With Liberty, make money and be protected from downside. Hey, Greg, like the scholar?
Greg Maffei, the President and CEO of Liberty Media. Stephanie?
Media.
But anyway.
It's all right.
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
Formula One is racing.
All in no context.
Talking down the inside.
The crowd is living. This is why we love Formula One.
Can we be there? Oh, just think of the times. All in love so strange, said you'd never know. But I try my best, hey, cover our eyes. It's a cold and lame complaining lies the truth. I know the tunnel's there. Matters little bit. Oh, but come on and mean it to me. I need it so bad. I need it to try. Need it to burn I need it in love. I'm burning away. Am I aging? Am I getting younger? Taking my time. Oh, just standing in the rain. Mean what you said. Oh, and mean it to me. I need it to try. Need it to burn. I need it in love. I'm burning away. I need to never get old. I said I need it to try. Need it to burn. I need it. I need it in love. I'm burning away.
I need to never get old.
Good morning and welcome to Liberty Investor Day. As we usually do, we start out with updates since what happened last time you were here and what we've done since. And looking, beginning with the operating companies in Formula One, we've made enormous progress in the commercial area. The hallmark being our LVMH deal, which included activations with Louis Vuitton, Moët, and TAG. We added Santander as a new official partner. The deal includes their new Openbank app, an opportunity which they really were attracted by the growth of F1 in the United States, particularly among younger audiences. We did a deal with Hot Wheels and LEGO in licensing. We're also recognizing our younger fan base. And we refinanced our debt to SOFR + 200 versus the 225 basis points we were paying previously. And we expect that to step down to 175 basis points after the MotoGP acquisition.
Looking briefly at Live Nation, 2024 was a light stadium year. Still, revenue was up 4% and AOI was up 14%. In the third quarter, concerts experienced the highest profitability margins they've had yet, up 230 basis points. And we saw a double-digit increase in onsite spend per fan at festivals this year. 2025 is going to be an enormous stadium, arena, and amphitheater year. The pipeline is great. Over 20 million tickets sold already for 2025 concerts. And recent on-sale sites include Coldplay, which was a double-digit growth over what the show grosses on prior tours. At corporate, we've also seen a ton of action. Let's take a step back and look at the structural changes we've had since 2006. Now, you may not be able to read this or track it, but a lot has happened.
I won't go through all of them, but we've had many spinoffs, split-offs, of course, a number of tracking stocks, acquisitions, divestitures. So this app, map rather, is either an analyst nightmare, a hedges heaven, or how I got paid. Now, let's fast forward to let me get through this. Let's fast forward to today. As John mentioned and as hopefully you've seen in our press releases, we've been executing on structural simplification in the last 18 months. We've continued that progress with the split of the Braves. They transitioned to services agreement, which was the next step in their standalone public company evolution. We reclassified our tracking stocks and set up the combination with LSXMA and Sirius XM. We bolstered our live entertainment portfolio with the acquisition of Quint and the announced acquisition of MotoGP.
Just on MotoGP for a moment, we did file this morning with the EC for regulatory approval. We expect to be on track to receive that by year-end. We completed the acquisition of SiriusXM. And just yesterday, we announced the split-off of LLYV. So a pretty busy 18 months. So on the LLYV split-off, the Liberty Live Group will become a separate public company. We'll structurally simplify our structure, rather, at LMC. We aim to reduce the NAV discount and increase liquidity for both stocks, LMC and LLYV. And we set Liberty Live up for future rationalizations of structure. Quint will be reattributed to Liberty Live from FWONK in this process. The operating businesses at Liberty Live coupled with our live stake will be the primary things inside Liberty Live. We expect the final asset composition will be determined based on valuations.
We'll see where they are when we do that process in a fair way for both parties. We expect to complete this split-off in the second half of 2025. And we will be left with a portfolio of premium IP assets, two public companies comprised of that. What are the attributes when we think about premium IP? Fans are customers. There's high demand for the product. There's strong brand identity. You're able to extend and to do things and opportunities alongside like F1 Arcade and F1 Exhibition, or you're able to take Lollapalooza to multiple locations. All this is fueling a flywheel which allows us to grow fandom. They're also attractive. Attractive financial profile of these assets is worth noting. They're asset light, highly contracted revenue at F1. For Live, there's enormous high visibility given advanced bookings.
And both continue to experience macro tailwinds that they're going on with live sports, entertainment, and experiences. We'd also like to think that they are leveraging Liberty's strengths. Within the premium IP portfolio, we have some abilities to help grow our assets. We've had success with media entertainment. We've built relationships and gained knowledge to accelerate growth. We've had strength in brand building and storytelling, which has been applied to Formula One, and we hope can be applied now to MotoGP and repeated. We've collaborated with our management teams, including through equity alignment. We've given them some capital structure expertise, liability and tax management, capital allocation. And we hope we've been patient capital with you with a view towards investing alongside our public shareholders. So let's turn briefly to F1, which is firing on all cylinders, to use a bad metaphor.
You can look at the strong growth since our investment. Picking just out of 2019 to date, we've had double-digit CAGR on revenue and EBITDA. In each case, we've been boosted by the reach of our fans, which has grown. Year-to-date attendance is about 5.8 million with three races left. We fully expect to see 6 million, which will be a record. U.S. engagement has notably grown. The five races set U.S. viewership records this season. The Miami Grand Prix was the most-watched race ever in U.S. history. And we've seen great growth in F1 TV in the U.S. market, up about 14%. And finally, looking at the U.S., we're all excited for the LVGP next weekend. One of the key things has been building an attractive fan demographic. And we built a younger and more diverse audience than pretty much all the other sports.
For example, our average fan age is about 39. It compares favorably with 53 for MLB and 58 for NASCAR. All this leads to higher interest from our partners and increased value for our shareholders. Teams have been a crucial part of this ecosystem, and you've seen huge increases in their value and new interest. For example, Red Bull has grown its sponsorship from seven years ago was about $100 million to $350 million today. You've seen rising valuations. Aston Martin recently raised money at about $2.5 billion. And you've been attracting new interest, new OEMs, for example, Audi and Toyota, and the return of Ford. So the favorable market dynamics that are going on, all that fan interest, all that partner interest, all that broadcaster interest has obviously helped our financials.
Last year, we discussed that F1 was in an attractive position due to the high demand for the sport and the limited supply of available inventory. We've seen competition across potential bidders. For example, in promoters, we had Sydney versus Melbourne, and in Spain, we had Barcelona versus Madrid. Obviously, that allows us to extract more value for our shareholders. In media rights, we've seen competition between linears and streamers, and all of this enables us to also require our partners improve their experience for the benefit of our fans. For example, in Hungary, we've seen big upgrades to the paddock and the new grandstand. In Monza, we've seen improvements to the track, and we see broadcasters continuing to add new and diverse content to strengthen the offering. All of that also leads to strong financial growth.
12% CAGR across all revenue streams since 2019, particularly strength in some areas like media rights have been driven by the US and F1 TV. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the brand and its impact on sponsorship in particular, and that has been two factors really driving. First, we've got an external factor where there's high demand for sports assets, high demand for sports interest and properties. It's where fans are most engaged. And we've seen access to sport accelerated by social media where athletes have become really the ultimate influencers. But we've also been accelerated by a second internal factor. F1 has built its own incredible brand value. Premium global presence, attractive demographic, as I mentioned, a strong sustainability story, all that's helped attract partners. And perhaps you see that most directly in our growth in sponsorship, which is up 16% compounded since 2019.
We've had success in not only attracting new partners, but scaling existing partners up the ladder as we demonstrate value to them. We've created additional inventory for our partners. For example, the Sprint races, F1 Academy, the Paramount+ Cool Down Room. I'm sure you'll all watch that closely. We've added since 2019, 14 partners, including nine at the global or official tier. This success has allowed us to de-risk our sponsorship and be strategic about our sales cycle, meaning we're not in need of saying we're going to deliver this quarter. We can start thinking now about what we're going to deliver for partners and what we're going to seek from partners out in 2025 and 2026 and get the highest value and highest quality names through our sponsorship pipeline. What happened in Vegas didn't actually stay there.
We've talked a lot about the broader value that Vegas has brought to F1, but that thesis has absolutely been playing out. You've seen in sponsorship, for example, Amex was introduced through LVGP, scaled to become a regional partner, and has now become an official partner. The presence of Moët Hennessy and Volcan Tequila in 2023 helped bring in our total relationship with LVMH, which will now be our largest global partner. In hospitality, Wynn has been a great partner, and now they've begun activating not only in Vegas, but across Shanghai, Monaco, Abu Dhabi, beginning in 2025. In licensing, we've long discussed the opportunity to improve F1's merchandise business. We really launched some of that in Vegas last year, including some more recently announced collaborations with the Las Vegas Raiders and the Knights, the Golden Knights.
And the broader F1, we continue to think about how to revamp our merchandise business, accelerating on what we did in Vegas. Lastly, in entertainment, the opening ceremony in Vegas tested our ability to produce shows. And we're really going to see that take effect at the season launch at the O2 in London, where we will have an amazing event. I want to give you a quick look about how we're going to launch the season. One of the things that we've really done here in the sport and thought largely about is providing increased access and democratizing, making that access more democratized. Before 2017, F1 was kind of a walled garden where fans really couldn't see what was going on inside. Since 2017, we tried to give fans a peek into the aspirational world of F1.
You've seen that through a great factor like Drive to Survive. That content reached about one-third of all Netflix's 85 million North American fans. And in turn, one-third of all the fans that have been following the sport for less than four years came in through Drive to Survive. 63% of our viewers there are under the age of 45. But that's not been the only factor. We've opened up our social presence. The teams and the drivers have become content factories. We've seen athlete and audience connection deepen through engagement with those social factors. And we continue to expand our touchpoints. The F1 film will be huge. You're going to hear more from Jerry Bruckheimer on that shortly. All this has led to incredible growth in our fandom, including on digital platforms, even as the reach of linear declines.
Now, the digital platforms provide less direct monetization, but do provide value for F1 and our partners. We see that some direct monetization by branding across the website from sponsorship partners. We see it through F1 TV, where our direct monetization of subs, and we continue to create new assets for a changing audience, but we also see indirect value creation. We position ourselves better for changing consumer behaviors. For example, younger audiences may engage only in a 10-minute race summary on YouTube, but it's important that we reach out and find those audiences where they are, and all of this does help our direct-to-consumer business thrive. We use social as a marketing push for owned and licensed products. We've had an increasingly fan-centric approach. You remember, I hope, this premium IP flywheel from last year. Our fans are our customers.
Scarcity creates competitive tension and opportunities to extend the brand. How do we supercharge fandom to create further growth? One, we continue to want to learn more about our fans. Two, better target our fans and improve their engagement through personalized communication and marketing. Three, we want to drive more value for our commercial partners and demands that they have their more involved in the F1 ecosystem. All this has led to more fans to monetize, and the flywheel continues. This only works if we at F1 have the ability to understand consumers better. And we are investing in data and analytics, which are underway and key to making that progress. Above all, we're both deepening the fan engagement and trying to grow the audience simultaneously. Historically, F1 had a one-size-fits-all strategy, particularly around fan engagement and communication.
To better understand fans, we continue to work to segment what are their needs and what are their interests. Historically, as I said, we targeted kind of motorsport fans, our heritage fans, and we've now expanded our focus to also include what I'll call lifestyle fans, audiences who may have been and come through social or Drive to Survive, may come through the F1 film or other ways. If we try and think about how, if we segmented them, how F1 speaks to that fan. For example, if a fan is attracted to a celebrity focus of F1, which we have plenty, we try and push them towards marketed videos of Alesso at LVGP. If a fan grew up heavily involved in the sport, we might be trying to show them articles on the new 2026 technical regulations.
All this leads us to drive commercial activity, and we push celebrity-focused fans to purchase at the Paddock Club or on the Amex presale, and we push our heritage sports fans more to F1 Experiences or F1 Exhibition. So let me turn briefly to what we hope will be our newest motorsports action in MotoGP. It is a great sport, truly compelling, over 60-degree lean angles on the bikes, more than 220 miles an hour speed. These riders are crazy. There are an enormous number of overtakes, almost too many to count, and these are action-packed 45-minute races, which works well suited for a younger audience, which this has. When you look at the weekend at MotoGP, we really have a progression of sprint events, Moto2, Moto3, and then obviously MotoGP itself.
Those very successful feeder series are not only important for building fan engagement, they also provide broadcasters with up to 25 hours of content that they can use over the weekend. This is a great business. It is a rare opportunity to acquire a global league-level asset with centralized commercial rights and diversified revenue stream and quite high profitability. A little different than Formula 1, we have a fixed fee structure with the teams. That creates much more leverage in the operating model to the ability we can generate revenue more is going to flow to the bottom line. It has strong cash flow generation. CapEx is about 1% of revenue. It's partially offset by a higher Spanish tax rate. We have a more favorable tax structure at F1. It also has a tremendous management team. Carmelo, Carlos, Enrique, and Dan Rossomondo, who's here today, are all exceptional.
They're going to be excited about their partnership with Liberty as we are excited about our partnership with them. Maybe we're spending one minute looking at the global relevance of motorcycles, which you may or may not be familiar with. Highly relevant across the world, more affordable than cars for multiple reasons. Upfront cost is roughly a quarter of a car. They're more fuel efficient. They're easier to maintain. Many motorcycle owners around the world repair their own bikes. And it's a large market. Motorcycles are about two-thirds of the car market, hugely relevant in growth regions for MotoGP, including Southeast Asia, India, and South America, areas where bikes are key modes of transportation. But we have a large opportunity not only among our current fans, but to build new fans. The fan base has been growing already before Liberty's involvement.
Year-to-date attendance is up about 9% on a like-for-like basis. And they're maintaining the record levels that they saw in 2023. The French Grand Prix set an all-time record for MotoGP attendance at 297,000 fans. The average audience on TV remains growing, and our digital audience is up about 5% as well. The current fans are highly engaged. 92% identify as avid, and 82% say they watch over 75% of all the races. But there's also an opportunity to monetize those fans better and expand new fans. We expect new fan growth across geographies where motorcycle interest is important. And we have an opportunity to capture fans based on the entertainment aspect. MotoGP is going to launch a new brand identity at its season closer this coming weekend. I think it's going to be quite exciting and be a great kickoff for a new profile.
Once the transaction closes, Liberty hopes our ability to expand the storytelling marketing will grow it even faster, and we'll get a chance to showcase this incredible sport and further develop the MotoGP brand. It's worthwhile spending one minute on the U.S. motorcycle market. Obviously, the U.S. has been an enormous part of our story at F1, and there's a potential we think to do much of the same at MotoGP. Motorcycles were highly relevant in the U.S. Sort of growth was after World War II, '70s and '80s. The Boomer generation, with increasing amounts of discretionary income, bought bikes. Japanese manufacturers came in. Some of you may remember Kawasaki, "Let's let the good times roll." That was a tagline all over the place. And in the U.S., motorcycling is primarily not a method of transportation. It is a hobby. It's not a necessity.
Motorcycling hasn't recovered post the 2009 Great Recession, but we think there's real opportunity. Some of it's been safety concerns. Some of it's been younger audience having hobbies other than motorcycling. There is an opportunity to engage our lifestyle fans, especially in the U.S., and leverage some of the storytelling that we've had and the marketing success we have had at the F1 brand, we believe here in the U.S., and be quite effective. Looking at the U.S. a little more, we have one U.S. race already in Austin. We have one U.S. team in Trackhouse Racing. We do have involvement from OEMs like Harley-Davidson, which has some involvement today. They have spaces in our fan zones, and they have a bagger series in Austin. We expect more interest from OEMs. We expect more interest from U.S. partners, and that'll be part of what drives us.
All of this leads to a great opportunity for us and the U.S. for MotoGP. Changing gears a little bit. We've talked about all the excitement in going to these live events, but one of the problems is, in many cases, it's hard to know how to get there. Consumers want to know what event they want to attend, but planning may require many complicated steps. You got to get tickets, figure out travel and accommodations, wait in lines, planning entertainment around the engagement. The solution is Quint. Quint is a one-stop shop for consumers with one provider, one package, one environment to access all of the fans' needs. Quint had a solid 2024. The Derby was the largest event in their history. They've had great success at premier opportunities around MotoGP, where their revenue is up about 200% over last year, 2024 over 2023.
Over the past year, Quint has also scaled its relationship with F1. They've simplified the product ladder. They've standardized its experience across the races. They've enhanced our data collection capabilities at F1, and we continue to improve the Quint relationship with our promoter partners. We expect to have a continued relationship between Quint and MotoGP despite moving the asset over to Liberty Live, and we feel good about the opportunities with another Liberty company. For example, Quint can help expand Live's premium hospitality. One of the efforts at Live is to grow things like BottleRock, their high-end Napa Valley culinary and wine festival. There should also be potentially opportunities with Vibee, Live's experiences platform. All this should allow us to provide the ability to expand and understand better the data about our fans, capture it, and help our fans have a better experience at Live Nation.
Turning briefly to Live Nation. Live Nation's global fandom continues to grow massively, 10% compounded with international fans notably up 13%. This has been driven by several factors, including the expansion of social media and streaming, artists becoming their own direct-to-consumer brands, opening access to global demand for music and artists, and artists expanding their global popularity and touring. Concerts is a supply-driven business. Demand exists to see the favorite artists, but there's limited opportunity to see the artist live, and that helps drive scarcity value and attention, much the same way we talked about some of these other premium IP experiences. Live Nation is well-positioned across all its business units. At concerts, they've seen continued growth in the global artist pipeline, and they've seen more large show commitments, as I mentioned already, for 2025.
At Venue Nation, they expect to see 60 million fans this year, up 8% from last year. They've been able to increase on-site fan spend at those venues. Live will add or refurbish 14 venues globally through 2025. Again, that's going to increase capacity by an estimated incremental 8 million fans. At ticketing, Ticketmaster is the scalable technology and the most effective marketplace. It's positioned for continued growth due to client demand. At sponsorship, we've seen brands looking to meet fans where they're highly engaged at live music. A recent study found that fans are more loyal to brands which offer live music perks. All this leads to great financial strength and growth at Live Nation. We've seen deferred revenue, for example, up six times versus 2014.
And we have high visibility into the medium-term revenue growth because of that customer demand and the ordering for future concerts. So where have we been at Live Nation? The strength of the portfolio and some smart deals have led to strong returns. We've done about 17% compounded versus the S&P at about 11% over the same time frame. I think we would look even more favorably if you compared some of the media peers. So that has been a great run. And I want to finish by thanking you. I got through the easy part. Now the hard part. It's humbling in many ways to be up here. You all were nice enough to set an all-time high on LYV the day I announced I was leaving. Thank you.
And you did it after we locked down the market data on my announcement press release because I could have gotten a little bump. It would have been nice. But I want to start with a thank you. First of all, to all of you, the shareholders. You've been great supporters, a great audience, tolerated all of our shenanigans. You've been a part of the 200 earnings calls that I've done. You may recall we're doing three a quarter. And you've been willing to follow us into uncertainty, and you've been believers. Hopefully, your trust in us has been not misplaced. To the portfolio company leaders, too many to mention. Thank you for being our great partners. And you've driven your businesses so well, and you have all taught me a ton about your businesses, and I thank you.
To my team, I think you've seen some of them, but I am lucky to be surrounded by a smart, curious, and quality group. They are amazingly talented. We see a small section on the management stage, and you see some running around, but there's another small army back there at Liberty who really are very, very capable. Many of you I hired, and in the small company that we are, most of you I have worked with. And I've been so fortunate. And you are what I will miss the most. So I look forward to seeing all you guys can accomplish. And lastly, to John. Thank you for the opportunity. When John hired me 19 years ago, he wrote a letter and said, "The future is what we make it." And I'd like to think we've done that. You've given me, John, a great opportunity, a great platform.
I've learned so much from you about so many topics. You trusted me to drive this chapter of Liberty with generosity and a willingness to believe in the things that I brought forward and the team brought forward. And you have been a willing participant in our shenanigans. And with that, let's get on with the show.
Good morning. That's a hard one to follow right there. I need to start by thanking Greg for his incredible 19 years at Liberty. It truly has been an amazing period, as you saw from the earlier slide of acquisitions, dispositions, spins, split-offs, investments, and constant learning for me and the rest of the team. I can't wait to see what he does in his next chapter. I know there's at least seven continuing board memberships, so I think he'll continue to be busy.
Last year, we talked about the creation of the Liberty Live Group at this conference, and today we're talking about the spin of Liberty Live. Furthering our simplification efforts and getting us to the point where all of our assets are truly asset-backed securities with no tracking stocks. This is truly the end of an era for now. Going forward, Liberty Media will be comprised of our motorsports business, Formula 1, and MotoGP post-acquisition, and other sports-related assets. The 2.25% 2024 convertibles and $54 million of corporate debt will also remain with Liberty Media. Liberty Live will include our 30% interest in Live Nation, our subsidiary Quint, the 2.375% Live Nation exchangeables, the undrawn $400 million margin loan, cash, and other private assets. Quint will be reattributed to Liberty Live in exchange for the Kroenke and Overtime interests. Note that the final asset composition is subject to change.
There may be small cash movements to finalize the reattribution at the time of the split-off. We would expect to complete the split-off in the second half of 2025. We've seen consistent growth at Formula 1. Formula 1 is a unique business with the majority of revenue under longer-term contracts. At 9:30 A.M., Formula 1 had $13.1 billion in revenue under long-term contracts in comparison to $11 billion at the same time last year. This graph on the left side shows that contracted revenue is up 1.8 times over the period, and our typical partner contract length is three to five years. The mix of our overall revenue is relatively consistent from 2017 through the current period, with slight growth in sponsorship and other revenue as a % of the total. The growth in those two categories is partially attributed to the impact of the initial Vegas race last year.
We've grown and invested in the business while maintaining stable EBITDA margins. Our year-to-date EBITDA margin at 9/30 was 25.8%, which represented growth of 140 basis points over the same period last year. And it's still impressive to me that the team generated positive EBITDA margins in 2020. This is all underpinned by a flexible cost structure. The stable margins come as we continue to invest in the business. You've seen other costs of revenue increase primarily due to Vegas, our growth in our hospitality offerings, strong growth in commercial revenue, which impacts commissions. As a reminder, these costs support all the revenue streams at Formula 1, not just other revenue. There's been slight leverage in other costs of Formula 1 revenue as a percent of total revenue in the last 12 months, despite the annualization of Vegas costs.
SG&A has remained relatively stable as a % of revenue over this time period, despite costs supporting growth in the business, such as headcount. And team payments have continued to decline as a percent of pre-team share EBITDA. They were 62.2% year-to-date at 9/30 of this year versus 64.6% for the comparable period last year. While the percentage has come down over this time frame, the overall dollar amount of team payments has continued to increase each year as we grow the overall F1 pie, which supports the continued health of the overall ecosystem. This should be a very familiar slide as we look at the last five-year average EBITDA to free cash flow conversion at Formula 1. Formula 1 continues to have 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 at the OpCo level, representing a 20% impact this year versus 25% in the prior year, driven by continued positive refinancing activity by the team and slight debt reduction. Working capital has gone from nearly neutral in past years to a more significant positive, benefiting the receipt of payments in advance of hosting races and the Vegas race. Note that there can be timing differences due to layout of the race calendar in any year. Taxes are generally consistent, but we expect to see a modest uptick in the cash tax rate as profits increase and the future utilization of certain U.K. tax attributes stays constant. We continue to expect to have a high single-digit cash tax rate in the current year, trending towards double digits in future years.
There's been a modest uptick in Formula 1 OpCo CapEx driven by investments in the Media and Technology Centre out at Biggin Hill, which further enables remote broadcast operations and enhancements to the broadcasting product. As discussed in the past, these improvements should reduce travel costs, make us more efficient, and help us to get to our carbon-neutral goals. Over 2022 to 2023, we saw the impact to CapEx driven by Vegas-related activities. As a reminder, the Pit and Paddock Building investments occurred at the F1 corporate level while the track CapEx was at the OpCo level. Free cash conversion at the Formula 1 consolidated level has grown to 64% compared to 58% when we showed you the slide last year. We're at 77% if you exclude the Vegas startup investments. There's a healthy liquidity profile at Formula 1.
At quarter end, Formula 1 was at 1.1 times net leverage. Following the MotoGP transaction, we would expect to be closer to four times, and MotoGP should be at around 5.5 times, and as you saw from the free cash flow slide, we would expect to delever quickly due to free cash generation. There's an adequate war chest moving forward with over $900 million of cash post-MotoGP funding and substantial free cash conversion rates at both Formula 1 and MotoGP. Quick look at MotoGP's financials. Just a reminder that these are historical financials presented in Spanish GAAP. Following the acquisition, we'll obviously report these in US GAAP. Moto experienced 36% revenue growth from 2021- 2023, with growth in each of the major revenue streams.
The three primary revenue streams should look familiar with media rights, race promotion, and commercial, which is very similar to Formula 1, commercial being primarily sponsorship revenue. Adjusted EBITDA has grown 47% over this period with expanding margins. MotoGP has announced their 2025 calendar. It includes 22 races compared to 20 this year. From a free cash flow standpoint, as Greg said, Moto is a Spanish taxpayer with a 25% statutory rate and very minimal CapEx, with CapEx averaging 1% of revenue over the last few years. The higher tax rate at MotoGP compared to Formula 1 is offset by a fixed and lower overall team payment structure that trends in the mid- to low-30% range on a like-for-like pre-team share basis. This results in a very similar free cash flow profile to the Formula 1 business.
Looking at the MotoGP transaction, we fully secured funding for the EUR 4.3 billion deal. EUR 2.3 billion will be funded by a mix of debt, cash, or revolver. We've also secured EUR 1 billion in incremental term loan commitments at Formula 1 and raised $950 million in gross proceeds from the recent 12 million share FWON issuance at $77.50 per share. This transaction always had the option to deliver additional cash instead of shares to sellers, and this issuance attractively placed the equity with long-term shareholders. Debt at MotoGP and management's rolled 14% ownership interest round out the total funding sources. We also have commitments for a new EUR 150 million term loan at Dorna with upsized EUR 100 million revolver. And we've entered into a deal contingent Euro- USD hedge covering US dollar funding sources, which is nicely in the money at 9/30.
Turning to Quint, Brian's going to talk much more about this in detail, but at a high level, Quint simplifies the fan experience for premium events. Quint aggregates rooms, transportation, tickets, and premium experiences and provides a single access point for consumers to purchase and experience high-end events. They create a value proposition for the end consumer and further develop product to scale the consumer through increasing levels of VIP experiences over time. Quint earns revenue from the end consumer and provides margin or revenue share back to the promoters. They occasionally provide minimum guarantees to access inventory, but the quantum is kept to very minimal levels to reduce the overall risk to the P&L. Quint has costs to provide the value-add experience, and then keeps the remaining margin. These consumers are Quint's customers, with 80% of buying customers never touching the organizer's website.
And lastly, the slide that everybody has been waiting for, an overview of F1's intergroup eliminations. As you can see on this slide, we have revenue from the F1 and Corp and Other segments. Corp and Other includes Quint and rent payments received from LVGP up at the corporate level. These rent payments totaled $20 million for the year, and they were $7 million for Q3. The other elimination line item represents the Formula 1 revenue that they received from selling the ticket inventory to Quint. Both of these eliminations are also reflected as offsets in operating expenses so that F1's EBITDA represents the true standalone EBITDA of the business. Corp and Other EBITDA includes Quint on a standalone basis, the corporate overhead, and LVGP lease income. There's no tax or exchangeables slides today, but there's some nice leave-behinds in the appendix for your enjoyment.
So feel free to reach out to IR with any questions on those. Thank you very much.
Hello everyone. We are nearing the end of the F1 record season, which will have 24 events in 20 countries on five continents. The sport is having a fantastic season on track. The Constructors' Championship has closed up dramatically with three potential winners still in the mix, and we expect more thrilling races to come, which is good for fans' engagement and our business as a whole. Strength on track is met with strength in our financial performance. 2023 was a record year of revenue and Adjusted EBITDA at F1, and growth has continued this year. Our teams are also in more robust financial health than ever and continue to attract large blue-chip sponsors, demonstrating the attractiveness of the F1 ecosystem to global brands.
Our future vision for Formula 1 is strongly endorsed by the involvement of a growing number of automotive OEMs from 2026, when Audi will enter as a works team running their own engine. Honda will return as a power unit supplier to Aston Martin, and Ford will become the technical partner of Red Bull. It was also recently announced that Toyota has returned to Formula 1 for the first time since 2009 through a technical partnership with Haas. Fan engagement is at an all-time high, with record-breaking attendance at races and an increasingly diverse global audience, rewarding investment in our core broadcast product, our digital and social platform, and licensing deals. F1 events are typically the largest or close to the largest sporting event held in their host countries.
The 2024 season is seeing attendance growth off the strong 2023 season, and we expect to well exceed attendance of six million fans this season. Season to date, cumulative audience on linear platform is well north of 1 billion and over 65 million fans on average tune in for races weekend, with particular growth in markets like Australia, the U.S., China, Canada, South Africa, and the Middle East. We also estimate we have approximately 20 million incremental viewers per race weekend on digital channels, including YouTube and F1 TV. As mentioned last year, we have continued to work with Nielsen on improving our multi-platform measurement capabilities.
And starting with consolidated end-of-season audiences reported later this year, a large share of digital audience will be included in official Nielsen ratings. Our F1 TV product has continued to attract new subscribers with limited upticks in churn despite the price increase earlier this year.
Last year, I provided you with an update on F1 strategy, setting the direction for the business to capitalize on its surging fan growth. This was centered around five pillars shown here. Over the past year, our team has delivered well against this strategy and is driving sustained growth across core revenue streams, with incredible momentum heading into 2025. I go through each of these pillars and progress we've made, as well as our overall focus to augment this strategy and unlock the next phase of growth. First, maximizing value across commercial rights. 2024 has been a year of great momentum with key renewal and new partners signed. On race promotion, we successfully filled our target 24 races calendar, which we believe is likely to accommodate a maximum number of races. The limited slot available creates competition between prospective hosts, building a strong pipeline of new races.
In certain instances, competition between rival series in a particular country can lead to step-change increasing fees secured. Promoters are improving at track spectator facilities, staging music concerts with the A-list talent, and adding F2, F3, or F1 Academy races to expand the on-track offering at their events. Looking forward, we have 11 races contracted to 2030 or beyond, which provides a visible and growing income stream over a long-term horizon. We are also highly confident in the strength of the renewal market and believe the robust demand to host races will provide a solid growth catalyst with the new or renewed agreements. On media rights, 2024 was a lighter year for renewal activity. We are focused on key upcoming markets like the U.S. and feel very optimistic about our prospects.
With strong growth in our U.S. fan base and the impressive work of ESPN, we expect to see continued demand and interest in the sport and U.S. market. Moving to sponsorship, our attractive brand attributes and expanding global platform are attracting an ever-stronger sponsorship pipeline. We have signed and renewed a large number of deals in the last couple of years, including renewing multiple global partners, the addition of Qatar Airways, and upselling of MSC and Lenovo to global partners, American Express entering into a regional deal, and recently expanded to official partners. From 2025, we will also welcome our newest global partner, LVMH, in the first of its kindly multi-category partnership with a world leader in luxury. It is historic in this breadth, brand significance, and economical value. We look forward to announcing further details of our partnership.
As we pursue a strong pipeline of future opportunities, we have increased our commercial inventory, including additional races, new products like Sprint and F1 Academy, creation of new graphics, growing use of our virtual technology, and additional brand alignment activations like collaborating with DHL on F1's first purchase of sustainable aviation fuels. On our hospitality offering, we continue to strengthen the core value proposition and look to grow capacity into the Paddock Club. In 2023, Paddock Club attendance was up 80% compared to 2019 for comparable events, and we are seeing sustained growth in 2024 with 14 of the first 18 Paddock Clubs sold out. Second, augmenting our diverse and valuable fan base. F1 is in the very fortunate position of having a large and growing fan base that is increasingly diverse, younger, and attracted to commercial partners.
Maybe it goes without saying, but the Netflix series continues to be a gateway into F1 for new fans, especially in the U.S. We are eagerly awaiting the launch next summer of the Apple movie starring Brad Pitt, produced and directed by the team behind Top Gun: Maverick. In fact, Greg will be speaking with Jerry Bruckheimer shortly to showcase the impact this film can have for our brand. Looking forward, growing and extending our business toward the consumer will be an increasing strategic focus. We have the ability to significantly increase our brand footprint and fan touchpoints with increased segmentation and knowledge of our fans. For example, our audience focus has historically been on the sporting fans. We have recently enjoyed significant growth in a more casual fan base, many of whom are newer and attracted to lifestyle elements of the sport.
We are increasing fan segmentation capabilities and will be positioning F1 more intentionally and strategically toward these various cohorts. This will include appealing to both premium and mass market audiences through our commercial touchpoint and brand we partner with. More sophisticated insight into our fan base and new segmentation capabilities will increase the value we provide to our B2B partners and accelerate growth of the core revenue streams. We can help our promoter partners further improve the fan experience and their ability for data capture. We can assist our media rights partners with the production of tailored content unique to certain platforms or markets while also personalizing content recommendation and offers on F1TV. And we can increasingly segment our fan base to demonstrate highly targeted alignment for our sponsorship partners. Licensing more broadly is an area of increased focus in expanding our collaboration with like-minded brands.
The recent announcement of new partnerships with LEGO and Mattel Hot Wheels are excellent examples in the consumer product space. There are further opportunities in the gaming, retail, experiential, and more. And our licensed experiential venture today will bring existing and new fans closer to our sport through a mix of F1, entertainment, and hospitality. Our F1 Arcade licensing plans to open 20 venues over the next five years, with Vegas, Denver, and Philadelphia recently announced for 2025. And the F1 E xhibition is currently showing in its fourth location in London as part of its planned 10-year global tour. Additionally, our all-female racing series, F1 Academy, is having a marked impact with the fans and representation in female karting and single-seater racing. Those engagement levels are helping F1 Academy attract its own sponsors, including new partners to our business like Charlotte Tilbury and Tommy Hilfiger. Third, invest in strategic markets.
We are continuing to take a holistic approach at growing our presence in markets with under-monetized fan potential. This includes making strategic decisions on broadcast partners, race location, sponsorship, and licensing to engage and cultivate fandom in growth markets. The U.S. and Asia remain important in these regards. In Asia, we are exploring good interest from a number of potential host nations. This year, the Chinese Grand Prix was the first one held since 2019. The event was sold out and incredibly well received, with the live TV audience on CCTV up 50% from when we last raced there. Our growth in North America will continue to be a focus, supported in particular by the recently introduced Miami and Vegas races. Demand for races in the region has grown sharply.
Focusing on Vegas, we set a benchmark for other F1 events to follow and showcase the potential of our brand in North America. Vegas generated great interest in sponsorship, both locally, as shown by the number of partners secured, but also globally, where it has proved to be a successful entry point into the wider sport for sponsors like LVMH and American Express in particular. They have expanded their involvement to global and official partnerships and are actively engaging across the F1 ecosystem. It is clear we have seen highlighted interest from promoters around the world, in part due to the impact the races bring to local communities. Aside from the direct impact of improved ticket revenue for promoters, strong race attendance also helps drive economic and social benefit and strengthens the investment case for new host cities.
Clark County assessed at the inaugural Las Vegas race to have brought an estimate of $1.5 billion of economic benefit to the city, a number 50% higher than the estimated impact of Vegas hosting Super Bowl LVIII, and rather than being a one-off, we will be back every year. As we continue to optimize and expand our footprint, it is important to weigh both what the local community may bring to our fandom as well as the fan profile and economic opportunity we bring to them. Fourth, bringing world-class racing. Maintaining world-class racing with high-performing operations is core to our foundation. The racing has been incredible this season, with the most race winners in any season since 2012.
The success of the FIA Cost Cap, a more equitable prize fund split, improved racing following the FIA's target technical regulation change, and the increase in attractiveness of F1 have all contributed to a strengthening financial position for the team and material growth in their valuation. There are steps we have taken to improve and upgrade the quality of our operation so we can better showcase our racing product to the world. For example, we have finished the main elements for a long technical project to fully refurbish our UK-based Media and Technology Center, creating a world-class production and broadcast facility to operate from. This further embeds our ability to perform production operations remotely, resulting in fewer people and less equipment transported to the track. The consolidation of the remote operation capability is a key contribution on our journey toward net zero.
Fifth, prioritizing sustainability in our operation and with our partners. Our sustainability strategy is centered around three pillars: a 2030 net zero target, promoting diversity and inclusion with our sport, and transitioning to more sustainable events that contribute towards positive change. Earlier this year, we've published our first impact report detailing our 2023 progress. I will note a few highlights from this season. On our 2030 net zero target, I'm proud to report our carbon footprint decreased by 13% from 2018- 2022, despite an increase in race count. Key areas of recent change include the introduction of sustainable aviation fuel for our cargo operation, a biofuel truck fleet for European race travel, trials of on-site low-carbon power generation at races, and working with race promoters to deliver more sustainable events.
F1 continues to make good progress toward running on 100% sustainable fuel from 2026, a decision fundamental to Audi, Ford, and Honda either entering or returning to the sport. We believe this will be the next area where technical innovation developing F1 positively impacts the automotive and other industry sectors. In closing, the business and wider F1 ecosystem are in excellent health, with great on-track action driving a continuous surge in popularity, growth in the fan base, and engagement on every measure, a compelling sustainability strategy, and improved financial sustainability of our teams and race promoters. The commercial momentum is particularly strong, with full visibility into 2025, and this momentum is drawing even more interest in future partnerships at scale. We remain very excited about what is to come, and thanks everyone for their support. [Foreign language] , full speed ahead. Ciao.
Ladies and gentlemen, please remain in your seats.
We are excited to welcome to the stage Greg Maffei, President and CEO of Liberty Media, and Jerry Bruckheimer, iconic filmmaker and producer of the Apple Original Films Formula One movie.
Jerry, thank you for coming.
Well, thanks for having me.
Iconic seemed like an understatement for you. Think of all the movies that you've done. They're amazing. One of the things that I find about television that others might find too is it flattens the experience. You can't see how much the serve bends at Wimbledon. You can't see how hilly it is at Augusta, and you cannot see how fast these Formula One cars go. And the first thing that you guys were emphasizing is that ability to try and capture the absolute speed. What was your thinking? What was your process about that?
I think that we wanted to make the most authentic Formula One movie or racing movie ever made. The way you do that is, first, you have to have the technology. I think we have 16 cameras placed around the car at various times. We had our two actors, Damson and Brad, train for three months prior to filming so they could actually be in these cars. We worked with F1, and Mercedes built our car. It's an F1 body over an F2 engine, but they're going speeds up to 180 miles an hour. I hope there's no insurance people here. What's so great about it is the access that F1 gave us to the tracks, to the technology, to everything that we needed to make a really exciting movie.
Not only do we have those cameras, we have Apple-made special tiny little cameras that we put on the actual F1 cars in races. You have Lewis Hamilton driving a car at 220 miles an hour with these tiny little cameras. All this is great. All this technology that we've created for this movie is special. We learned a lot on Top Gun. We have a camera now that remotely can pan. We can pan from Brad's face to Damson's face in another car, which is really phenomenal technology. That's all great. The most important thing is the emotion. We have a really terrific script. It was written by the same writer, Ehren Kruger, who wrote Top Gun. It's got emotion. It's moving.
It's about a driver who was a phenomenal kid when he came into F1, had a terrible accident, and never was invited back until a friend of his, who's played by Javier Bardem, comes to him and now owns a team, is about to lose his team unless he wins one race, comes to Brad and said, "I have a phenomenal young driver, but I need somebody who can settle him down and drive with him." And it's Brad's chance for coming back to the track and showing people what he could do at F1. So it's about that emotion of a guy trying to make it after he failed once.
I'm glad you pointed that out. There was some blog that said it was going to suck because I wrote the script.
I'm glad you pointed out the facts that it's not going to suck, and I had nothing to do with the script. So thank you, Jerry. Stepping back and thinking about the bigger vision, Formula One has such a rich history and global fan base. You've looked at this sport now for almost three years?
Three years. Yeah.
What aspect of the sport are you most excited to tell, to bring to life on the screen, and you hope audiences will take away from it?
First of all, these cars are amazing. And not only are the cars amazing, the drivers are amazing. I mean, they're the best 20 drivers in the world. And it's the only sport where your teammate is also your competitor because everybody on the team wants to be the number one driver. So you have that dynamic, which no other sport has.
We show that in this movie.
You know, I talked a little bit about how we're segmenting our fans and trying to understand there are fans who like the celebrity aspect, fans who like the technical aspects, the drama. How do you balance? We have a challenge there in trying to manage all that. How do you balance the idea of trying to tell this dramatic story with having authentic F1 racing? How do you try and put those together?
Lewis Hamilton is our partner in this. He saw part of the movie yesterday and gave us a critique of how the drivers actually do various things. The level of specifics that he gave us, like in Silverstone, in turn three, you're in second gear. He could hear with his ear we were in third gear.
It's that kind of thing that he's bringing to the movie. And also, he said, "Brad, it's a little too easy for him. So we're going to make it a little harder." But he said when he finishes a race, especially like Singapore, where it's very hot, these guys can barely get out of the car. They're so exhausted. Lose 10 pounds. And he said that he just has to lay down for five minutes before he can get up and do the press interviews that he has to do. And it's not only him, it's all of them. They're just completely exhausted. We're going to show what it takes to be an F1 driver.
So back on the speed for a moment. You use these F1 chassis and F2 cars.
What was the most challenging part from a technical perspective in your mind of trying to recreate that speed and bring it forward?
It's usually the vibration. So we have to have these mounts that give you some vibration so you can feel the speed, but not too much vibration where you can't see the image because you're going so fast and the cars are going from 220 miles an hour down to 50 in some of these turns.
And you raced or, rather, you filmed at real races like Silverstone. Logistically difficult to try and work around actual race? And there were drivers there who were like, "Don't get in my way." So how do you balance that?
Well, the interesting part is, since we teamed up with Mercedes, the other teams said, "Wait a second.
This movie is going to be about Mercedes and we're going to look bad," Red Bull said. "We're going to be the villain." It took us three years to convince them they're not going to be the villain, and we finally got to a place where all the teams are really leaning into us to really help us. I think the most difficult race that we have is Vegas because it's a street race and it's at night and we don't have much track time limited because of our relationship to Silverstone and our relationship with the community. Limited amount of time we can shut down the streets. So a very tight window makes it harder for us, but also harder for you. Yeah, we only get like 15 minutes in breaks when the guys aren't out there actually practicing.
One of the things they're very proud of, and Dean Locke is here, I think, from F1, is F1's relatively unique. It has a massive broadcast center. It captures all its own video. It does all of the filming. We don't have our broadcast partners do it. It's the opposite. We do it and share with those broadcast partners the elements. Gives us a lot of control, gives us a lot of capabilities, but it also created opportunity, I think, for you to have intersection with our stuff and yours. Maybe you could comment on how that worked.
Sure. We sat with your onboard camera people who create your cameras, and we figured out a way to put those Apple cameras in with their cameras to bring the real speed to our movie. But you know what's interesting is it's always about the cooperation that you get.
When we did the first Top Gun, I went down to San Diego and met with the admiral there, and he said, "I don't want any part of this. Somebody's going to get hurt. It's going to be on my record. I'm done." Tom and I went to Washington and met with the Secretary of the Navy, a guy named John Lehman, and he said, "Jerry, here's my home number. I know what this is going to do for the Navy." And the admiral that was there was replaced, and we made Top Gun. The recruiting went up 500%. It's the opposite with F1. Stefano came in. He said, "I know what you can do for this sport. We open our arms. How can we help you make this the greatest racing movie ever?" And F1 has been phenomenal.
John Lehman's a friend of mine, and he loves that story, by the way. I've heard him tell it. You chose a title just F1. Why was that so important to Joe and you?
Because the great racing movies were Le Mans and Grand Prix, and now there's going to be F1.
Small task. I like that. But so with the aggressive thing. You know you've been watching part of this all works because of the surge of popularity of F1. That fits well for your dynamic and the commercial opportunity view. Much has been discussed about the impact of Drive to Survive. As an industry insider, how do you compare the reach and viewership and demographic of a show like Drive to Survive to what you think this motion picture will do? What is going to be the contrast?
Well, our reach is enormous.
Warner Bros. is releasing the movie worldwide. We're going to be on IMAX screens throughout the world end of June. I mean, just the visceral feeling you're going to have when you sit in the theater and you hear that sound, that Dolby and Atmos of these cars and the dramatic story that we have because it has emotion to it. When you walk out, you're going to feel better. Like when you watch Top Gun, you're going to have a great feeling, and this permeates everywhere because they're going to have a huge campaign over the month before the movie comes out. In fact, the hit that we're having on social media, just every time Brad goes to a track, you look at social media, he's everywhere, and it's all branded F1.
The theatrical release, and then it's going to move to a streaming model once the movie's completed, its global theatrical release. Apple was obviously the original funder of the film. Apple Original Films funded the movie, and Warner Bros. distributing. Top Gun: Maverick pretty much had the same path, right? When you weigh this distribution, Jerry, when you think about this, how much does the combo of having a global theatrical release and then the streaming really drive the reach and impact of a movie like this?
Well, I think what they found out is when a movie gets released in theaters, it does much better on streaming because the audiences understand that it's really special if it goes to theaters, and that's what we're going to have, the impact we're going to have worldwide with this film because there's so many fans around the world.
The only market that has not found F1 as much is the United States, and I think that's going to expand it because Brad's reach is enormous, and he's got so many female fans. So that's going to bring the female audience in. We're going to get the guys because they love racing, and we'll get them. But it's going to be a great date night, and that's what we want.
You heard it from Jerry, but who knows? So you've looked at, and some of this has been a great partnership. It's been a great revenue opportunity for F1. Not only did we have some licensing fees, but we were selling them car parts and things like that.
But aside from the theatrical reasons, the streaming, maybe you could talk about the broader financial promotion of the movie, how that worked for you and what was appealing?
Yeah, I mean, we reached out to not only the F1 sponsors, but other sponsors that F1 hadn't gotten to yet. So I think they have new sponsors now thanks to us. But you'll see our partnership. And a good partnership. And their sponsorship all over the car, which helped reduce the cost of the movie, which we shared with F1, of course. But we're going to have promotions from so many top sponsors around the world that will be co-sponsoring it with Warner Bros. and Apple. So that saves them money and gives us a bigger advertising dollar when the movie's released.
So were you a racing fan before all this started?
Well, I did Days of Thunder, so I started with NASCAR, and then I moved up to F1.
Don't say that to them. But yeah, we like to think that.
No, F1 is fantastic. NASCAR, they just go on an oval, but they have to do a little different things here. But they're great drivers too. I don't want to disparage the NASCAR drivers. But the drivers here are really interesting because not only are they phenomenal drivers, in order to make it, you got to be a phenomenal driver. And these kids start when they're seven, eight years old. Lewis started when he was five or six years old. His dad mortgaged his house so he could get a better engine. But he was a phenomenal driver and eventually got a sponsor. But they're great drivers. They're charismatic and they're handsome.
And that gets you the female audience, which is wonderful.
And does that come through? You've filmed a bunch of sports movies, Days of Thunder and the like. Does that contrast, do you think, come through in the movie? And what do you see is different about F1 than some of these other sports that you've looked at? You've done this, Jerry. Back to the iconic. You've done a lot of these. How do you compare this?
I think it's the speed. You just don't have the speed and the exhilaration that we can bring to an audience with this movie. Again, it's an emotional path for Brad's character, and that's what resonates with audiences around the world. We can make things really exciting, but if you're not inside that story, we call what we do. We're in the transportation business.
We transport you from one place to another, and that's what F1 does.
So Lewis was a critical part of this. And I know I had dinner with Brad and Joe and Lewis, and he was so excited. Lewis is a guy who has a wide range of interests, whether it be music or fashion, all of which have been demonstrated outside of having been a seven-time world champ. But his passion for this came through. You mentioned some of the things about being able to just hear the gear. What are the things that stand out about Lewis's participation and that you like?
Everything that he has brought to this movie, I can't even express our thanks to him and all the folks from F1 who made this all possible.
But the authenticity that he brings, and we just can't imagine what goes into what a driver does and what the sport brings to an audience. And he gives it to us. Sometimes we don't like to hear some of the things he says because it costs us more money to fix things, but we're all in. We want to make it great, and he's certainly helping us.
And one of the focuses at F1 has obviously been bringing in not only new audiences, but new participants in the sport, whether it be something we're trying to do like F1 Academy to bring in young women to be drivers, but other roles as well have been really about trying to bring inclusion.
And that's been an important part for Lewis, why Lewis's participation in the sport, but also somewhat of an important part for Lewis's participation in the movie as well, right?
Absolutely. Damson Idris, who is the co-star with Brad, is a phenomenal young actor. When you see the movie, he's a movie star. He's got charisma. He's got a great smile. He's a brilliant actor. And he put in the three months too. He's a kid from London, from, I guess, the east side of London. And I think he hadn't driven very much because in London, you usually don't have cars. So he got into it even as much as Brad because he had to spend more time just learning how to drive. I don't think he had a driver's license when we hired him. But he's doing phenomenal too.
So we have been huge beneficiaries of opening up the sport, something like attention, and obviously, Drive to Survive was an enormous kickstart. Other things we've done around social, but we touched on this a little bit, but nothing lasts forever and nothing will be so lucky if we have Drive to Survive 20, but we can't count on it. But how does this change? We touched on it briefly. The cinematic is so big. Brad is so big. How do you think this is going to change the perspective of Formula 1 in the United States?
Well, it's a dramatic story, so you get inside the lives of these drivers and what they kind of have to go through because when you see F1, you don't see the behind-the-scenes of what these kids actually have to do. They are booked every five minutes.
It's unbelievable what their life is like. And the physical toll that it takes on them, the amount of training that they have to do, you never see that, but we'll certainly show you some of that in the movie. I love to make what I call process movies. I've done it over and over again, where I had a TV series called CSI that takes you behind the curtain and shows you what the world is really like. And that's what our movie does. You get inside the world of F1 and you see how it actually works. But there's a wonderful dramatic story, as I keep telling you.
So we're all excited. We saw the trailer, rather. And this was delayed, obviously, by COVID and a strike and all this. But when's it going to happen and where's it going to get released?
It's going to be the end of June. It's going to be everywhere around the world on IMAX theaters. So you're going to get the huge experience that IMAX gives you.
And the premieres are going to be?
Well, that's up for discussion.
But I thought we had an idea, but I thought I knew what.
Okay. Well, I'll let you.
I think we're going to show it in Monaco. We're going to show it to the drivers and to the F1 teams. And then we'll have premieres in New York and London and a bunch of other cities. Brad is really invested in this movie. He doesn't like to do press, but I think we'll take him on a world tour where he'll be glad to show his efforts in driving and acting in this movie.
Can't wait to go. I hope you all agree. Thanks, Jerry.
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Thanks, Greg. Thank you to Jerry and Greg. We're going to take a 15-minute break. So at about 11:20 A.M., be back in your seats. We will have an ad to start the next segment. And please get a hat. I'm great. We're under control. I'm fine. Everyone, can please take their seats? We're going to get started here in just a minute.
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Hello, thank you. Before I start, I do want to make sure I give a shout out to Maffei. I don't know if he's in here still. But he is, he has been an incredible chairman, supporter, of Live Nation for many years. So, we'll miss him, but I want to make sure I give him proper credit. Liberty has been an incredible investor for 10, 12 years now, played long with us, and, thankfully we've been able to give them the right return. So, now I'm going to take you through our exciting business and, what we're up to.
Live Nation, you know, we get asked all the questions all the time coming out of COVID. We had such a boom. What's the forward projection back to the industry? This is an industry that was growing at about 8% annually for many, many years. Let's take COVID, the up and down years, out of the equation, get back to now and going forward. We think this is a continual 8-9% compounded industry. We think there's incredible tailwinds that'll continue to grow this on a global basis. As that business continues to grow from an industry-wide perspective, we expect to deliver our double-digit AOI growth that we've been delivering for the last 10+ years, and we're off to a good start in 2024 on that. We get asked a lot about the consumer pullback compared to other experiences.
Live entertainment is really at the top of the pole from an experience economy perspective. Sports is obviously high up there too, but entertainment, live concerts always ranks number one with consumers on when and where they want to spend their experience dollars as that shift from product to experiences has happened, and you know, I always get asked the question, why is the 14-year-old today, why is consumers, what's the demand being driven by? You know, one of the underlying realities of the music business is for many years, probably most of you in this room, your library was fairly limited. You had bought a few CDs, you listened to a top 10, kind of got fed a very small, narrow, spectrum of songs.
You think about that 14-year-old today, my son. He has a jukebox in his hand. He has more music than ever, TikTok, YouTube. He's getting exposed to music well beyond anything we did. And then the other part is it's global now. That 14-year-old in Colombia knows that Tyler dropped a new single this week. There's no more gatekeepers. So globalization has happened in music. It's in every 14-year-old across the globe right now has TikTok, YouTube, and a phone and knows what's the latest and greatest in music. So wide, wide demo. That then all turns into, I'm now a big fan of Tyler. My son texted me last night, "I have to go to this festival this weekend in LA." I didn't have the heart to tell him it's an AEG festival, but either way, he's a music fan, so I'll take it.
But this continually becomes the reality. Going to that show becomes one of the, one of the most priorities in terms of those magic moments that we all want to remember, that night out with your friend, your wife, et cetera, and as you can see, to some people, it's even better than sex, so we'll, we'll leave that alone. I get asked about pricing because the, the press likes to talk about the 2%, those, those high expensive concert tickets that we read about. Reality is concerts are very, very affordable, more affordable than sports. Sports kind of is a badge of honor how expensive it is, and concerts kind of get beat up a little bit if they're, if they're charging $400. So overall, concerts are still very affordable. This is good. We didn't even do the get-in price where concerts are about $50.
This is a comparable that says if you want to go sit in a great seat for any one of these events, what does it cost you? So $90 for an average concert upfront P1 versus, as you can see, the sports comparables, our amps are 56. So still an affordable event, to go live that magic moment. And ultimately, we look at supply demand. Why will the industry continue to grow? Reality is there are more people buying tickets. Last 10 years, more fans are buying concert tickets, than ever before on a global basis. So the demand is growing, more consumers buying, and the supply is growing. There's more artists on the road. Every artist around the world now, because of this global explosion, if you're a young artist in India, you can go from TikTok to playing Irving Plaza, which never happened.
In 50 years, this industry was kind of controlled by U.S., Western Europe, record label, distribution, roadblocks. Today, it's unlocked. So not only is the fan unlocked that's sitting in India or Colombia, so as that young artist. So we're seeing a surge in young artists going on the road that end up on the road as well as the consumer. So I'll take you through our, as we've done every year, as the industry is growing, here's the six levers on why we're going to continue to deliver our profitability. First and foremost, we've been growing this for multiple years. 150 million customers went to a Live Nation show this year. That's obviously, you know, larger than most of the sports leagues combined. Our goal, our next goal is 200 million over the next while.
We'll get there one because the business is growing, as I've just explained to you. If we just kind of follow that 8% or 9% industry growth, that gets us there. We're opening more venues. We're building more globalization of our business, expanding more offices. So we expect this to be a big overall driver of our business. We look at 2025, we're already all on track to that from an industry and a Live Nation perspective. It looks like a record year next year. We're looking at about a 10% up already, headed into 2025. So we think 2025 continues the trend we've just outlined. Second lever is, although again, lots of press around the sold-out show, 95% of our shows don't sell out. So huge opportunity and utilization, right?
Just getting that extra 10, 20, 30 people in Jones Beach on a Friday night, Irving Plaza. So lots of work gets done internally from our pricing team, our data, our analytical team. How do we sell incremental tickets to the show that's already happening? You put more bodies in those venues, it drops to the bottom line. Third is venues. We're big focus of our businesses around our Venue Nation division. First part is making sure our current venues get upgraded. Lots of potential there. Jones Beach would kind of be our first one where we put some real dollars into it, took that from an older venue into a much more premium experience, took premium from three or four percent up to 20%, so we can drive a better bottom line at that venue. We got 40-50 amphitheaters.
We're going to renovate at least 25 of them. So we look at our current portfolio, doing a better job on all of our experiences, VIP, food and beverage, all ways we can extract and drive a better onsite experience, which again drives an overall higher revenue per venue. We look at onsite continual ways of how do we drive the hospitality, food and beverage experience upgrades. So this is a core skill. Internally, every year we're looking at new ways to expand the menu. Today, we have tons of ways. We're looking at non-alcoholic drinks because that's a big new surge, mocktails, signature ideas that can drive our overall F&B. We still think we're in the early innings compared to some of the greats out there that are doing a better job than us. But we've got lots of runway left on this one.
This sets up kind of the question we get asked a lot of recently about our new surge towards venues and Venue Nation. On a global basis, Live Nation operates in over 45 countries, have 100 offices. Our big push has been around international venues. This clearly shows when you take the U.S. out of the equation, which is fairly mature because every city's probably got an NBA team, an NHL team, an MLS, NFL. But outside of America, you probably have a stadium for the soccer team, but you don't have an arena. Lots of development, available here. So we're spending a lot of energy on a global basis saying, where can we build an arena, an amphitheater, 5,000-seat, business? So we're currently in the pipe right now. We've got about 35 large venues. We'll roll out over the next five years.
Expect that to be a big, big, drop to our bottom line. We see right now we kind of have become the movie theater for developments. If you're building something, you want a live event venue and your development to drive foot traffic, to drive excitement, so a large pipeline of ideas and projects around the world. We'll continue to invest where we think we can find a white space. Once we put all that in, sponsorship is kind of our dream division. We have over 1,000 sponsors. The more venues we have, the more customers that walk in the door, and the more global destinations we have. This will continue to grow at our 10% annual rate. This division has been delivering double digits for many years. We think there's a lot of runway left in this space.
And ticketing—incredible year on this business globally. We've been growing and picking up lots of customers. This is a great enterprise platform outside of America. Lots of territories, Brazil being the earliest one we've just entered. But again, when you have 45 countries where you're the promoter, have venues, rolling out ticketing to those markets is part of the strategy. And we see this business as a continual global expansion story. And the last driver of our business is monetizing that customer base. Obviously, Ticketmaster, one of the top apps in the world, one of the biggest drivers of traffic. How do we then monetize when you're at the checkout and when you're shopping? So we've been building this division for a while, whether it's insurance or premium add-ons.
We continue to see ways from travel, concierge, hotel rooms, any way we can upsell you while you're thinking about going to that experience this weekend, whether it's a Formula One race, an NFL event, or a concert. We think we have more ways to monetize the pipe. So those are the six main drivers that'll continue to take us to new levels and deliver double-digit AOI. We think we have an incredible industry, secular tailwinds driving this live and experience economy. We're the leader in it. We think with the execution against those six levers, we'll be continually delivering double-digit AOI and top-level growth. Thank you. On the streets of Las Vegas. Take your memories beyond the court with NBA Experiences. Can't explain this to somebody. I've never seen anything like that. Get to be up close like this. It's pretty insane.
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Good morning, everyone. Pleasure to be here. I can tell you, admittedly, this is a bit of an experience for me, which I think, I think that'll be topical for the day. You'll hear experiences a lot. You know, when I first started at Quint, we didn't hear things like Michael was just talking about. We didn't hear about the experiential economy. We didn't hear about building ultra-premium. We didn't hear about building premium really at all in the consumer market space. And we're in the middle, and I, quite frankly, I think we're in the beginning of a cultural shift.
And that cultural shift puts us right at Boardwalk and Park Place of a very exciting time for our business. I believe that we are seeing a shift from that primarily started with millennials and really has now moved cross-generationally and globally. And it is the shift from buying and purchasing things towards experiences. Things that we can put in our long-term memories that we can connect with people and experience things differently than we have in the past. So what I'm going to do today with you all is I won't run you through a bunch of numbers, but I've been asked to just walk you through just a general overview of how our business works, who the key players are, and how it effectively makes money. So let's start with the dynamic. The dynamic is very, very simple in that you have customers.
Those customers are looking for a few things. They're looking for access. They're looking for VIP experience. They're looking for coordination. And most importantly, they're looking for simplicity in that process. We have our partners, our organizers, our teams. They have the access, the IP, the inventory. Sometimes they have the hallowed ground that people are looking to get to. The customers don't know where to go to get it. And the organizers maybe don't have the scope to coordinate and manage and sell and process on their own. So it creates a gap and a need. And so that's where Quint comes in.
We have a series of expertise, and I'll talk a little bit more about the differentiators, but I'll give you the basic line items, which are the direct consumer side of our business, managing millions of inbound traffic and hundreds of thousands of leads in a way that we can respond to consumers so they can get to the product that they're looking for. Sales and marketing strength. We've built the best proprietary technology in and around sales and marketing. We're full service from top to bottom. So we are coordinating the assets. We are bundling that product together. We're managing the process for customer arrival, transportation, hotel, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. I would also say that outside of just the coordination piece, there's a huge value add in the way of product development and ideation around what customers are looking for.
See, our business is running sometimes two, three, four events in a weekend that are just experiential. So we get a lot of repetitions. And what applies to one sport and what customers are looking for oftentimes applies to another event. And you'll hear me talk a lot about sports, but the opportunity, and Michael just referenced this, there's a huge opportunity in and around the festival business and around concerts. Live entertainment of any kind is a target for us. We've primarily focused our time in sports, but we believe that there is a huge market beyond. So what are the things that Quint explicitly focuses on as differentiators? The first one is we're experiential package experts. Everything that we do, everything we focus on is what we call Ticket+ .
Our goal is to provide a unique experience to that customer that translates to a connection to the organizer, and then you have a fan, a lifetime fan. To improve that experience on site. This is where our product development, our understanding of pricing, our understanding of marketplaces and what people are looking for is essential. We're a white label platform. For years, people have said, "I've never heard of Quint. What do you guys do again?" By design, our brand sits behind our partners. We produce white label brands with our partners for the idea that our customers are already emotionally attached or committed to that brand. Introducing Quint's brand to the sales process feels disruptive and authentic. We're a complete solution. I often say, as we're talking about new business, I'll do as much.
Quint will do as much or as little as our organizers ask us to do. But what we find over time is the most successful partnerships are when we are involved from the beginning with product development, pricing, marketing, sales, and delivery. All of that, given the volume that we do, requires technology. And since 2014, we've been singularly focused on building the best technology in the packaging space anywhere. A unique piece of that is in 2017 when we signed our first Formula 1 deal, which forced us to globalize. It forced us to figure out how do you manage time zones, currencies, languages, and the complexities of delivering all over the world. The good news is we get a lot of repetitions between Formula 1, 24 times a year, MotoGP, 22 times a year, the NBA. There's another six or eight international events.
We're constantly on the ground, which allows us to improve our technology, improve our process, improve our customer experience. The last bit is really about being global, and once we had the technology in place, we then went about building the footprint, putting offices in the appropriate places to give us beachheads so that we can expand into all regions in the world, and we've successfully seen that over the last six years, so we saw an early slide, I think, from Greg talking about the complexity of how you buy things. We saw Brian talked a little bit about multi-arrows pointing all over the place as to how it works. Just to give you the most simple process I can possibly explain, which is we try to be a single point of contact for customers. Customers will find one of our white label sites.
They'll be contacted by one of our sales reps or be able to purchase online. We then coordinate and manage the hotel, the transportation, the logistics, the meet and greets, and all the things that go along with it. And out of that, there's a margin. We have a couple of ways that we really prefer to work. One is a royalty. The other one is a margin share. I like the second one better. Everyone stays motivated not only on the best customer experience, but around profitability of the program. I won't go into a lot of detail here, but to illustrate how our programs work, above the gold squares in each one of these programs, you'll see what you would get with a normal two-day ticket. So I'll go through one of them just for the sake of illustration. Let's go to the NBA Hall of Fame.
So you can buy it for All-Star Weekend. You can buy a three-day normal, regular three-day lower-level ticket. When you're on through our program, we're taking you on a cruise with an NBA legend. We've got a concert on Saturday night that we're producing. We've got pre-game hospitality that includes appearances and activations for two of the nights. We produce after parties. We're doing morning shoot-arounds with legends where you're actually going out there in Paris where we do our, when we do our NBA events out there, we'll have Wembanyama and we'll have Tony Parker doing shoot-arounds. That's a pretty unique opportunity for our folks. Encore shoot-around. Very cool. Photo opportunities all over the place. So this is just a sample of a couple of the packages that we do for each one of our providers.
So the next question I get asked about a lot is, what type of growth potential do you have? And we'll talk a little bit about this. So there's five key categories that I really spend a lot of time and our team is focused on, the first of which there is a ton of organic growth that sits in our business today. And I'll give you an example. Our largest Formula One race today, from an experiential standpoint, is half the size of our Kentucky Derby program. And there's 24 of them. So there's, and we're going to continue to grow the Kentucky Derby. So there's huge upside potential. There's 22 races in MotoGP that we're just getting started on. The NBA is in early stages. So in our existing business, there is plenty of upside opportunity.
Then we talk about new logos, new brands, new places for us to go and replicate the model. With the global nature of our business, we're well positioned to not just domestically in the US chase these opportunities, but I think we're the best positioned for international brands. And that's a key focus of our business. We can also look outside of sports. There is nothing about our business that requires that we stay inside of sports. Concerts, festivals, any form of live entertainment has a similar model. We've been focused on sports for a long time. We plan to expand. The travel bit, this is a really important element.
Oftentimes, especially for those of you that have been to a Formula 1 race or go to a Kentucky Derby, you'll find that a three-night stay in Louisville or a four-night stay at an F1 race might be as much or more than the ticket that you're purchasing. We've built our technology to support that as well. I love this stat around travel. 82% of our customers travel 1,000 km or more to attend events under the Experiences program. 30% of them are buying hotels from us today. So there's a huge opportunity within that space just to service the existing customers that we have. We think that embedded marketing and sales team, one thing we do very well is sales and marketing. So we have engagements in multiple places where we are the de facto sales and marketing group for organizers, primarily in the premium space.
We see us doing a lot more of that as an embedded sales team. The last one, and I'll just touch on this briefly, is master services agreements. We have a logistical capability around transportation and hotel and the technology to support it. So as an example, we have an agreement with the NBA where we manage all of their on-site league-level hotel bookings. The 77,000 hotel room nights that'll get booked at Summer League this year will be booked by us. Same thing with All-Star, same thing with the international games. And we see the opportunity to replicate that piece of business.
Our model in action, all the work that we do this year, we'll see about 300,000 people that have come to us and given us all of their data and information saying, "We're interested in attending one of your events." 81% of the customers generated for our programs never touch our partner site in the sales process. So it's not just the funnel that's coming directly from the Kentucky Derby to Derby Experiences. This is us creating our own marketing efforts and capturing those fans. 81% of buyers. We have customers from 114 countries, and 59% of our customer base this year will come from international, will come from outside the US. A couple of illustrations here, and the first one is one of the things about our business is it takes a little time to build. You have to understand the market.
Each market has a little bit different, has different things to offer, and certainly, Monaco is one of them. Our first year, you'll see the footprint where we had a yacht and a terrace, and if you fast forward over time as we've built this program, this is what it looked like today, and this is illustrative of how our business works in general. We build over time. We find additional experiences and assets, and we continue to grow. The Kentucky Derby, 16 years. We're doing premium dining. We're doing hospitality. We're building Taste of the Derby. We're doing Fillies & L ilies parties. We're putting on concerts. We're doing Walk the Track tours, literally taking people out onto the track, putting them in little rubber boots and letting them walk around, which costs nothing but has high value to fans.
This last year, we had a family who took small urn and was pouring remains out on Churchill Downs. It meant that much to them. In terms of market share, 2023, the sports hospitality market was $13 billion. It's expected to be $79 billion by 2031. You can see our relative market share today. And this is really around sports, and this doesn't include the travel components that I just talked about. So when we think about growth opportunity, tremendous opportunity ahead of us. Thank you.
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All right. I guess that means I can start talking briefly. Your guys are going to, you guys are going to do most of the talking. Of course, I'm here with Roger Goodell, the NFL Commissioner.
I think you all kn ow Greg Maffei as well, still the CEO of Liberty Media. You're counting, you're looking at your watch there. You saw it. We want to talk a lot about brand, brand building. Certainly hard to imagine stronger brands in some ways than the ones that the two of you help oversee, in part international, certainly for F1 coming domestic. You know, Roger, I'd love to start with you in terms of what you see as the international opportunity for the NFL. Obviously, any number of fans are aware of the games that have been taking place overseas. How do you think about that brand building, internationally? And why is it something that's of importance?
I think in today's age, you have to be global. I do. I think your brand, but also your business. And I think it's diversifying.
That business is really important. And, you know, our experience has been, as we share our game, people want more of it. We play a game, people want more games. And so, but to us, we don't want to be the traveling circus. We're trying to create a business, a business globally. So it's the same core features of our business here. Media is incredibly important, sponsorship, consumer products, and events. And so the game, the game is sort of the spark, to sort of light the rest of those elements of the business. And I think, you know, we've learned a lot. Greg invited me up to an F1 race in Montreal, I think a year ago. And it was, it was there, there's so many, I think connections and things that we could learn. And I learned a lot in just my day up there.
So it's a constant, how do you continue to adapt to what's going on in the environment? And internationally, it's just even more complicated, but also I think more promising for us.
You do.
Y eah.
I mean, but there isn't a team loyalty, obviously, that you're dealing with. I mean, here in the States, it's not about the NFL brand. It's about whoever your team may be over there. Obviously, that's a.
I think people are fans of a team here in the United States. And I think that's where you'll see the emotion, but also you see it even in businesses like consumer products. People are buying team-related products here in the States. Internationally, it's actually the opposite right now. And it's probably because we don't have years of that emotional connection. But it, it's going to happen and we're seeing it more and more.
But right now, they consider themselves NFL fans here. And so you can sell an NFL Shield product, and it's quite popular over there. Eventually, I think that'll be a sign of our progress if they start adopting a team.
Mm-hmm. Greg, how do you think about it?
Well, first, I want to thank Roger. He's being incredibly generous in claiming not only being here today, but in claiming that they're learning a lot from us because the NFL is our role model in so many ways. We first talked about it, you know, some of the things we've done to try and bring a cost cap in, to try and have a less steep curve on the revenue payouts to the teams, to think about the health of the teams, all things that the NFL has been a leader in.
And Roger's always been so generous with his thinking and his time. And there are, we'd like to think a few things we can share. We're a little bit the opposite, right? We, and again, crediting, the NFL, we try and create an event out of every one of our Formula One races, which Chase Carey used to describe the Super Bowl for that country. And we're trying to build that up as an event. But our history has always been far more international, and we're bringing it here into the U.S. And it is also a little bit the same. Historically, there were people who loved F1, but there was no branding around F1. We didn't have any of that.
We had people who were buying. I think when we first got involved, the most popular gear was still Senna, who had been dead for 20+ years, but was still the most popular. The marketing's gotten, the teams have gotten a lot better, but we've gotten better. And I told, was telling a story in the green room beforehand, about eight years ago. I went to the race seven years ago in Barcelona, and I saw New York Yankees caps everywhere. And it drove me crazy that I could not find F1 gear in the weekend we were having the race. Now, one of the proudest things we have is the F1 brand is really the case we do have even here domestically. But we've been able to, you'll see us, we sell gear, we have merchandise, we have branding around F1 that people want to be associated with.
It's begun to open up a licensing element that we never had that the NFL has been absolutely killer in for a long time.
Yeah, but we've, you know, there have 24 events, right? We have 17 weeks of the season and then playoffs. So we're, we can get probably in that low 20s. But, we hope to, we have five international games this year. We hope to have eight next year, and we hope to be 16 in within five years. So when you take our presence here in the United States, we're not too far off in the number of events that we have. I think there, that's where I think there are a lot of connections and a lot of carryover and a lot of learning between the two entities.
Yeah, our business model, frankly, we couldn't recreate our business model today if we tried. Thank you. Every baseball team would love to have.
Yes. That would be one on the Braves, we can tell every baseball would love to have the model.
Yeah, for sure. You know, Roger, when you talk about as many as 16 international games within five years, I'm just curious, what have been the learnings so far? What sort of have been the big takeaways from what you have done that you will obviously apply to conceivably growing at that rate over the next few years?
Well, I think anytime you take your product to the fans and your consumers, the better off you are. I think this is the example of it.
We used to play preseason games internationally, but what happens is the fan becomes sophisticated and they realize the star players aren't going to really play. So you have to take your highest quality product. It's one of the things that we talk about even with the preseason. The quality of the preseason isn't as good as the regular season. In my view, we should be doing more regular season than preseason. We're looking at a change from the 17 and three format to maybe 18 regular season games and two preseason games. That will open up more inventory to allow us to play more globally. You build on success. You know, every time you play an international game, not only is it important to be successful for that market, but other markets are watching.
We had probably six other countries, at our last game in Germany last Sunday that were all interested in having an NFL game. It becomes the jewel that everybody wants. It's that Super Bowl that everybody wants. That, that's how you build, to me, how you build that global business is making sure everything you do is successful.
I'm curious, is it then just about building that global brand, or is the possibility there of creating a European or South American league at some point and/or adding a franchise to the existing NFL? How do you think about it?
It won't be while I'm commissioner, but I, and it's not because I wouldn't want to. I just think it's a longer time frame. I think, you know, you have to build the fan base first.
I have no doubt in my mind that both London and a couple of markets in Germany could support an NFL franchise today. There's the fan base. Is there sponsorship, licensing? All of that is there. As a fundamental media market is getting there quickly for us. So I do think that the biggest challenge for us is the competitiveness. How do we keep those teams competitive with the teams here? Because that's the core of our product is having a competitive balance across all of our teams, and I don't know if you can do that today, but as we were talking a little bit earlier, another advantage that both of us have is our events are once a week right, so you have time to travel, you have time to be able to do the competitive things that are necessary.
The postseason is the hardest because on Sunday night, as we begin the postseason, we don't know where we're going to play until those games are over.
Yeah. Greg, similarly, and just in terms of expansion, obviously you've already expanded here in the US and added races. I mean, what's the continued plan there? Or do you reach a saturation point in some way?
Well, we reach, you know, a limit on basically how much you can travel and drain people. I mean, 24 races around the world, you know, we're scaling from Australia to Brazil, Montreal to Abu Dhabi. I mean, it's just, we put a lot of strain already on people. We've tried very hard to manage the calendar.
We've gone from 18. 24 races, and we really are at the apogee, but we tried to manage the calendar to say, how do we take who can have a race where there are historical precedents? For example, Monaco is always around the end of May, beginning of June. Silverstone is always around July, our July 4th. Monza is always around our Labor Day. You know, how do you keep those historical ones? How do you try and do things to manage the travel? And then how do you not have things on top of each other? Because we can't have, it's already enough of a strain where there's substitution. If you had things that were very close by, you have promoters who might go in and, oh, I'm going to lose fans to that one. So you're trying to weave all that and balance it.
We love our three races in the U.S. That's probably the limit as a practical matter, and we do have demand. We are blessed. Thank you. CNBC had a nice piece on it. Blessed to have many cities which want to have an event, but it is really trying to manage all those elements of the calendar. How do we get paid? How do we promote fans? How do we manage the travel? How do we manage the calendar for historical races and weather?
And you have a track right around our stadium.
We do in Miami. And that's been a great, a great race. And by the way, these things are always learning experiences. Frankly, Miami the first year was not everything I think that the Dolphins would have hoped or we would have hoped.
Nothing but credit to Tom Garfinkel, how they've improved the second year and the third year, and the bar just keeps getting higher. It's part of what we've been lucky is your sport gets increased demand. There are reasons why people are willing to invest. They see the need, they see the opportunity, and that's been great for us.
When we talk about brand, obviously, you know, I mean, there's the team brands and there's the players' brands as well. It's obviously a very different world than it was that I grew up in in terms of the ability of players to connect with their own fan base. How do you think about that? And in your case, the drivers as well, given that they all can and do, seek to have a direct connection with their own fan bases.
I think it's incredibly positive for us because, you know, ultimately that's what we're selling, is not just these individuals as athletes and what they do on the field, but it's also who they are off the field. I think that's no more evident than with the draft. They're not even NFL players, but the draft is incredibly popular because it, they want to know more about how did that individual get to that stage? How did that individual become a first-round draft choice? People want to know the story behind, and it all goes to access ultimately, and we want to give our fans greater access to those individuals and their stories, and we also want to give more access to our fans of what's happening on the field also.
That's I always say it's never been a better time to be an NFL fan or frankly a sports fan because that access. Or an NFL owner either.
If you think about Roger mentioned already, you know, his games are events once a week and there really are big events and ours, we're trying to do the same. One of the things is there are relatively fewer events. You want to fill in with a lot of shoulder programming and a lot of different kinds of programming to keep the fans engaged. The NFL has done such a great job with the combine and the draft.
You know, you see us doing that too, trying to tell more stories, things like Drive to Survive, trying to do things like we're going to do this O2 launch I mentioned in London. We're trying to build those programming events around. One of the things that is similar in that storytelling is both of us have. This is not a modest thing. We both have, you know, helmets on our drivers or our players and how to build their identity. Well, part of it is the storytelling that's gone outside. Part of it's the social, you know, Drive to Survive has gotten all the play. Well, it really was a copy of Hard Knocks that went first, right?
Doing the same thing, giving you what's going on behind so that there's not just how many guys you don't know who they are, but you really understand the personalities, the issues, the, frankly, the human issues that draw a lot of people in.
Was Hard Knocks important for the NFL?
Yeah. And I'd even say it goes back further. I mean, Pete Rozelle and a guy named Ed Sabol created NFL Films. That was really the core of that. That created all this content almost all around the games highlights, but it also got into stories a little bit off the field. But I listen, it's a copy, one copy, the other Drive to Survive. We saw that and we saw what it did for F1 here in the States. We'd like to do the same, internationally.
You know, we created a joint venture with Skydance, which we own 50/50, not just for NFL content, but for all sports content. Because I think the one thing that is an advantage for both of us and frankly, anybody in sports, it's live. And I think live is a distinguishing factor in today's environment, particularly in the media world we're dealing with.
It may be the only thing keeping my business alive.
That and great talent.
Thank you. I'd say it was great hair. That alone is, you know. Speaking of the media business, so to speak, you know, I mean, you still, broadcast is still the key distribution mechanism that you use for the NFL. Obviously streaming is growing. Amazon Thursday Night will have a game. Netflix is going to have the first ones over Christmas.
But give our audience a sense of how you think about that evolution and why broadcast remains so important for the NFL.
I think for us, our fundamental goal is to reach the greatest number of fans. We want to make sure it's accessible. It's free if you want to consider network television free anymore, but it's the closest thing to that. If you have an antenna.
Yeah.
That's still, but the reality is it gives you the largest platform. If we put a game and we had an experience, which we used to, we moved, I think it was back in about 2010, Monday Night Football to ESPN. And then we simulcast the next week and still most of the people were watching on ABC six years after ABC never had a game. Six years later, they were watching more on ABC than ESPN.
I think it's just a reality. It's people are still watching network television for the big events. I think that's why we have stayed there. We've also moved to streaming because there's a large number of people that are not watching networks that are still fans of ours. We want to make them our fans. It's particularly important for the demo, which, I'm sure Greg feels the same way, which is it's harder to get those younger fans. When we moved to Amazon on Thursday night, our average age of the audience went down 10 years in the first game and continued that. YouTube with Sunday Ticket, same thing. I think you've got to fish where the fish are. You got to go where you think the fans are, you can capture them.
Streaming is here to stay. It's not going anywhere.
Yeah. I think one of the things the NFL is so strong that they can be on every platform and somebody will find them, you know. At F1, we've thought a lot about still trying to grow our reach, still trying rather than always saying, hey, what am I going to get paid the most? Who's going to build the most reach? We're still on the upside. That's also partly not only because we want to grow the fan base, but remember sponsorship is such an important part of and growing part of our business that that reach helps our sponsors. One of the challenges out there is you've seen a lot of people go and monetize themselves in these leagues, but give up certainty about their time frames or where they are.
For us, it was important to be on ESPN. Everybody knew we were on ESPN. That's, you know, you could find us and finding, you know, uncertain time frame, uncertain channel is a weak thing. The one thing I'd add though is, you know, the social is changing and yes, people love live, but we get enormous traction among younger audiences and different audiences on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram who are watching parts of races or highlights of races or things like that. And you're not getting the same direct monetization. I touched on this briefly when I was in my piece, but you are building that fan base. You are getting them interested and you are making them, you know, the next gen and reaching them where they are. And we'll see how we convert those into obviously more direct monetization over time is our goal.
You know, Roger, when it comes to the use of broadcast, I mean, you mentioned the generational change you saw in terms of viewership when you went to Amazon. So is it fair to assume over time that the program will migrate to these streaming platforms, so to speak, or are we always going to have a broadcast option, do you think?
Well, they've been talking about the death of networks since late 1970s, early 1980s, and it hasn't happened yet. I don't know whether it will going forward. I still think it's a very strong business model, and again, it's reaching the largest number of people. So for us, we're going to be there for the long term as long as it continues to have that position.
And streaming.
That's because you're 47 of the 50 most popular programs.
You are the network of the 50 top. I think 47 are NFL, I believe. Well, we like to go out of 100, 74.
Are you maximizing the profit potential that you can get even given that leverage and or?
Again, I think this is all about thinking short term versus long term. I think if you focus entirely on your short term maximization or optimization of profit, I think you give up something long term. And I think for us and our ownership, I think we've tried to convince them to think long term. And while we went down when we moved to Amazon Prime from Fox, the average audience went down probably about six or seven million people. We're now just ab out, and I think tonight we'll exceed that.
So, I think we're. It's just the changing, and you have to sort of be at the leading edge of some of these technologies, and you have to take a little bit of leap of faith there at some point with good partners. And I think we have chosen in the streaming space, in particular Amazon and YouTube, and I think both of them are going to be in this space and dominant in this space for a long time.
Right. And when it comes to something like a RedZ one, for example, what were your, you know, in terms of cannibalizing your kind of in a sense your existing product? Is it, why do you do it?
Well, because I think our fans want it. And I think, again, you have to meet the demands of your fans.
If you don't, I think you're moving yourself closer to extinction. For us, somebody else would have done it if we hadn't done it or somehow. I think the biggest risk to us is not that we lose viewers. It is that you teach people to watch sports differently. You teach them to watch it in small bites that Greg was talking about. You just look at the highlights. We're not seeing that. We're trying to give our fans highlights. We want to keep them informed, but part of that is to drive them to broadcast television. If something is happening in a great moment in a game, you put it out on a social platform. You see the numbers jump on network television like that because they don't want to miss it. You have to use those platforms.
Those platforms also probably have been enhanced by, you know, areas that you want fans to be more engaged. The two things the NFL has done brilliantly, or at least one over time is fantasy and increasingly now betting where, you know, those are both part of seeing those moments. Frankly, for Formula One, fantasy is a smaller part. We'd love to figure out how to be better at it. And there are certainly people who play it, but it's not, you know, the percentages are not like the NFL ones. And the other thing is the gambling with our, you know, clearly they're an international business, but U.S. dominated where gambling has been opened up in many, so many states. We're challenged because what works in the U.S. for gambling as it opens them up may not be what works for other places.
So we have a, we're over indexing internationally comparatively is a challenge. But trying to keep fans engaged and having that part is a huge thing. And both of those, you guys done a great job.
Roger, another is about sports betting as well. I mean, does it help engagement? Is there a downside to it? You know, do you get data in some way that's helpful as well for the league?
Yeah, I think all those things. I mean, the downside is the risk to the integrity of your sport. So we take that very seriously. It's hard if you have that, which we guard very cautiously. You don't want to lose it because it's really hard to get it back again. So that's number one for us. Number two is it clearly creates engagement.
People are. If a game isn't as good, they might be watching and following their fantasy team or somebody maybe that they put a bet on before the game. That's good for us, right? It just creates more engagement. We were not necessarily pushing sports betting here in the States. We actually opposed it, but when the Supreme Court spoke, we had to modify.
So you opposed it. Why?
Because of the risk to the integrity of the game. You know, we were very concerned about it. We've seen that through college sports and professional sports throughout the decades. I think there's a real risk there. So we spend a lot of time focusing on that, educating everybody involved, but you always worry about that.
Yeah. I mean, ESPN is going to launch the direct-to-consumer product this summer.
There may be a component of it that is very deep into statistics and even betting and things of that nature.
Yeah.
But this is how you see the trajectory of this sort of going.
I think it's going to continue to increase, but I do think the data. We look for data from all of our partners. It's really important to be a learning organization and continue to see what F1 is doing or to see what data can show you about your fan, what interests your fan, so we really focus on that a great deal. Yeah.
Direct-to-consumer and that engagement is, you know, one of the things we talked about investing in F1 and all the ways our touch points, whether it be F1 TV, whether it be Quint, or whether it be promoting our own race in Vegas, all of those are about trying to know more. And I've talked about it, but I think the NFL has done an unbelievable job about thinking how to segment their fans. And, you know, I don't think it was planned, but the Taylor Swift has brought a new set of fans in for you.
And you, well, people accuse me of writing a script. That clearly was not in the script.
You know, thinking about how you're all, you know, not all fans watch all in the same way, not all in the same place, not all the same level of engagement and trying to be a, you know, big tent experience. I think the NFL has done an unbelievable job and you guys have capitalized on the right, you know, when things are, things have gone well, like Taylor figured out how to run with it and, be very thoughtful.
Greg, have you guys ever quantified the economic benefit to a particular municipality where you have a race?
We do. We put a lot of numbers out on how well Vegas, how much money we made for Vegas and how much money we brought in. I think it was around $1.5 billion of economic value.
If Renee's here somewhere, she can shake her head and tell me I'm right or wrong. But I also think it was about $70 million, over $70 million of direct tax for the weekend. We were, you know, not that I want to compare notes, but we had more plane traffic, more telephonic traffic than the Super Bowl when we had our event. I mean, we're more people than the Super Bowl since across a bigger area. So it was a real econ omic impact.
Although a Super Bowl also, I would assume, is potentially enormously value added in terms of economic activity of a particular.
Oh, sure. I think, listen, again, it goes back to the event that Greg was referring to before. F1 is a huge event.
I mean, they have an event in Miami. I guess it's the first part of May. And you know, that's extraordinary what it's done for that community and how people came to Miami just for that race from all over the world. And so we try to. The Super Bowl was played three months after they had their first race in Las Vegas. And it was our first experience in Vegas. That was a great learning moment too for us to see how that all worked together. And Las Vegas not only absorbed it, but they did an amazing job. And the estimates of the economic impact there range from $500 million-$1 billion for that one game.
Well, and we try to again, you know, not to boast them too much. We try and copy, right?
Think about the Super Bowl. It is a week event. I mean, you've got parties that go the entire time. You've got buildups, you've got this and that. We try to do the same. We've really been stretching and thinking about Formula One race weekends, not just being Saturday and Sunday, but, you know, the buildup into it, adding things like the Sprint race, adding different kinds of elements. All of that's been extending not only for broadcast, but for really for the value of the event and the value of the city.
Roger, finally, you talk about tracking a lot of data. Are there more flags being thrown this year? Because I mean, I just feel like how many of these damn linemen are wandering downfield every other play?
You know, it's actually part of a technology play because every one of our players has a chip in their jersey. And so, we actually track when they're downfield illegally. It shows up on there. So that is actually technology that actually gives us an ability to call that play more accurately. And we're moving that way. Technology is changing our game also. Replay. People think about replay, but in the early 1990s when we got in it, we actually did it for a year and then stepped back and said, maybe this is harder than we thought. It's very difficult to incorporate that into action without being a distraction or slowing it down. So we're really working not only in getting the play right, but using technology to do it quicker.
Right. Bu t I mean, penalties do slow down the game.
Oh, for sure.
But you got to have penalties because if you're not going to have penalties, then you're going to have a real problem because it's going to be chaos out there. So we don't like the penalties, but we want to enforce them quickly and move forward. And we really focus on that. But penalties actually are pretty much consistent.
They are. Yeah.
We hear the same thing about injuries. And I think part of it is, you know, people playing fantasy sports, they have to go to their rosters and they go, he's out this week. He's out this week. And they think injuries are up. I've heard that. This is my 43rd season in the NFL. I've heard that every year I've been here. Injuries are up.
We actually had injuries go down dramatically last year, over 700 game loss injuries better than we've been the year before. So those are, that's something we've really focused on making our game safer. Injuries are going to be part of any sporting event, so that's part of it. I guess you don't have as big a problem with that.
No, we do. You know, Carlos Sainz had to, was out with a, got his, had to come back with his appendix after his appendix was done.
No, I'm not kidding. He didn't blame that on the race car though.
No, we've had people get jarred in race cars.
Yeah, for sure.
No, but you've done a lot to make the game safer for the race. No, I mean, just much the same way.
If you recall, really, Niki Lauda and Jackie Stewart, probably the most, you know, people died frequently in the 70s and 80s racing Formula One cars. And that's just, you know, the technology and a lot of the enhancements from what's done on the barriers to what's done with the Halo, you know, a whole lot of people have made it a very different, safer sport. It's not without its risk, but I'm a little more scared of watching MotoGP and watching those guys skid 100 yards in their kangaroo leathers. That's when those things fly.
But I think probably we've both improved, that you can make something more exciting and safer at the same time. And I think people doubted that for a long time.
And you do really feel as though you've made real advances. I mean, because the cars just keep getting bigger and faster.
Yes, they do. Yes, they do. The impacts are greater, and cars get faster, but I think all the things, you know, we focus a lot on the helmet technology. You, if you go back and look at film, even 10, 15 years ago, the players were wearing smaller protection on their shoulder pads. We don't encourage that. We actually try to go the other way, but it's always that difference. I know you deal with this every day with just performance versus safety. It's a, athletes want to perform at the highest level.
Without a doubt. Guys, appreciate both of you sharing some thoughts here and glad we could do it. Roger, good. Roger. Thank you.
Thank you, David. Roger didn't come.
I wore it. I wore white NFL socks for Roger because I hope they're licensed.
Thanks, Roger. Thank you.
Thank you much. Thanks, David.
Thanks, David. Great job. Oh, I didn't say it. You do it.
We're going to break for lunch. We'll be back at about 10 after one,
and Formula 1 is racing. Oh, they make contact. Coming down the entrance, and the crowd absolutely loving it. This is why we love Formula 1. Can we be there? Oh, just think of the time. All in love so strange, said you never knew. While I try my best, they cover our eyes. It's a common way to blame and hide the truth. I know that some will say, "Mad as little babe." Oh, but come on and mean it to me. I need it so bad. Oh, I need it to try. Need it to be. I need it in love. I'm fading away. Now me never get old. Am I aging? Am I getting younger? Taking our time.
Or just standing in the rain. Mean what you said. Oh, and mean it to me. I need it to try. Need it to be. I need it in love. I'm burning away. I need to never get old. I said I need it to try. Need it to be. Oh, baby. I need it in love. I'm burning away. I need to never get old. I need to never get old. I need to never get old. I need to never get old. I need to never get old.
Good afternoon. Hope everyone enjoyed their lunch. We'll start off again. The best things are worth repeating with more forward-looking statements. The best things are worth waiting for too. I know I could do it from memory. Yeah, we'd like to remind.
That one was longer because it was for three separate companies, so that's why we got even more excitement. This afternoon we have Qurate Retail, Liberty Tripadvisor, and Liberty Broadband. More CEO presentations, and then we will end the day with Q&A with John and Greg. Thank you to those who submitted questions in advance. We will take questions in the room, so please feel free to raise your hand during the Q&A and just wait for a mic to be brought to you. We will have folks in the audience to hand the mics around. And to start our afternoon, we appreciate your participating in even more ad-supported fun on behalf of Liberty +.
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Good afternoon. Hope your lunch was good. So I'm going to do a drive-by on a couple of slides and talk about some of our setup, hopefully for some of our companies this afternoon. There we go. I'm going to start with Qurate Retail. So in 2024 at Qurate, we took a number of balance sheet actions to proactively manage balance sheet, focusing on near-term securities and extending the runway for the growth we expect to take effect. You're going to hear more from David on those plans in a minute. So this year, we paid off our outstanding 2024 maturities. We plan to address the 2025s with cash or revolver. We tendered for 89% of the 2027 and 2028 notes, $950 million of principal.
We partially funded this with $605 million of new 2029 notes, and the remainder was $75 million of QVC and $277 million of Liberty Interactive Cash. As I said, this should extend the runway of our debt maturity profile and helps with our key goal of extending the 2026 revolver next year, so if you look at Qurate, over the last several quarters, they've been very focused on profitability and cost reduction, and they've done an excellent job with Project Athens, which was, as I said, focused on profitability, and it was really designed to execute a number of work streams that brought Qurate out of the tragic Rocky Mount fire. There were cost actions and margin actions. We divested Zulily, which was non-core to the video commerce business, and we now have a more profitable, leaner, and more efficient company going forward.
I want to note that the third quarter of 2024 was challenging. There were current headline events, both known and some unknown, which competed for airtime, for example, the Olympics and the election, and unknown ones like the Trump shooting, and these definitely impacted our sales level with deleveraging through the P&L, but going forward, Qurate is really going to be prioritizing top-line growth. With Athens benefits underway, that's the next step, staying true to Qurate's core video e-commerce mission and our strengths, customers who form a special emotional connection with our hosts and with celebrities. We provide merchandise that is proprietary to us or has special value only available on QVC, and we continue to focus on our enviable core customer demographic of women 50+ . Throughout this, our growth plan, we will leverage and enhance our one-of-a-kind video production capabilities.
And while we have an existing strong customer base that still continues to shop at healthy levels, increasingly, obviously, we've been impacted by cord cutting. And David is going to discuss this in more depth, implementing the strategies we planned to go ahead and meet our aggregated customers where they already are and where they think we think they would like to shop. For example, the average U.S. adult spends 88 minutes a day watching social videos. That's just a stunning number to me, maybe not to you. But that includes not just young people, but 74 million and 50 million adults, 35+ on Instagram and TikTok, respectively. We view this as a massive opportunity for Qurate, and you'll hear more about it from David. So let me turn briefly to Liberty Broadband. Hopefully, you saw the news yesterday.
We announced an agreement to combine with Charter at a 2.36 times exchange ratio. I want to make it clear that in addition, shareholders will benefit from GCI, and we intend to spin off GCI prior to the combination with Charter and Liberty Broadband. Charter will bear the corporate-level tax leakage of the GCI distribution to the LBRD shareholders. And I wanted to specify this because it's not clear to me that the market understands that the value of GCI is not included in that exchange ratio, and there are, you can all speculate on how many dollars I've seen ranges of $5, $8, $10 a share of incremental value in GCI. You consult your own analyst. I'm not forecasting.
The goal of this transaction is obviously to rationalize the dual-corporate structure, resolve rather the NAV discount that we have, and provide certainty to our shareholders of what they will receive in Charter. We've had a great partnership with Charter, and I look forward, as well as several of our other Liberty execs and related parties, to continuing as a board member. If you look briefly at Charter, I think they're moving in an excellent direction. Customers are really not concerned about the technology that's providing the bandwidth, whether it's fiber or DOCSIS. They're much more concerned with improving ease of use, bundling, and customer service, and that's where Charter is concentrating. They've already made investments in tenure and workforce and network upgrades. They're offering 15-minute response time to outages and same-day technician dispatch and outage credits.
And with our mobile package, you can have nearly $1,000 savings per year versus a typical two-line mobile household. In addition, Charter's moved to whole-dollar pricing with taxes and fees included, no junk fees. And video is still a very important part of the story, profitable and sticky. And where Charter is going with video is really paving a new video model. I think we've outlined in the past how the historical video model is broken. You may remember our circular firing squad talking about streaming and the like. What Charter is doing with hybrid approach to streaming and linear video packaging is absolutely groundbreaking. They've got industry-leading agreements with programmers to create win-wins. Their direct-to-consumer inclusion from all major content providers ensures that customers are never going to be asked to pay for the same content twice.
And the goal for Charter is to meet the customers where they are with what matters to them. Video enhances both retention and acquisition strategies, and our goal is to support the stability of the video distribution system over time with these innovative packaging models. In addition, I'd note over time, I expect more and more customers will move to the Xumo integrated platform that we share with Comcast. I'm going to finish off talking on Liberty Broadband with GCI. It was another solid year there. We continue to see the benefits to consumers that GCI was an early mover investing in 5G and a rural buildout and now has the fastest network in Alaska. The majority of the wireless sub growth year to date has come from having that attractive network, which leads to more attractive postpaid subs.
There remains business upside at GCI from attractive government funding programs, and I expect those to continue going forward, and you'll hear more from Ron about those. And let me finish off by talking about Liberty Trip and Trip. Discussions between Trip and Liberty Trip continue. We're working with their special committee. They're progressing. We remain focused on rationalization of the Liberty Tripadvisor capital structure. Obviously, given the discussions, I'm limited to what I can say, but I want to just turn briefly to the Trip business. I think we skipped ahead by one. Can we go back one? Thank you. There are three distinct brands under the Trip umbrella, as I expect you know. We believe they really should be valued as a sum of the parts basis given the very different nature and growth profiles of the three. Brand Tripadvisor owns the largest database of trusted reviews.
It's focused on profitability while innovating and driving user engagement. Examples would be AI-powered summaries to customize itineraries and tools which allow direct booking in the app. We continue to see engagement efforts improving and reflected in MAUs which have returned to growth year to date, MAUs monthly active users. Secondly, turn to Viator. We continue to invest in brand awareness at Viator to gain market share as experiences come online. We're also focused on improving the unit economics as we drive repeat bookings to increase the lifetime value of customers in the experiences space. And finally, The Fork. The Fork has had great success in 2024, building profitability and will be a great contributor to the overall profitability of Trip in 2024. One of the ways they've done this is by driving a great B2B partnership on the revenue side with Vodafone and Mastercard.
These three businesses are really working cohesively together. You can see some of how that has worked as Trip has grown out the two new areas, Viator and The Fork, and successfully diversified its revenue mix and increasingly getting positive EBITDA contributions from both Viator and The Fork. Finally, Trip has a robust liquidity position with $1.1 billion of cash and approximately $500 million of undrawn revolver capacity. I want to offer you up more from our CEOs. We'll come at a minute, but I also want to say thank you again to all of you. I thanked all my work colleagues, but I also want to thank my wife, my sister for being here today. A lot of contributions they've made, obviously, to me and hopefully reflected some of that benefit to you.
Who's in my kitchen? I'm making a face out of my breakfast.
Look, I've got my eyes, my ears, and my beak. Voilà. Giuliana Rancic here. Welcome to my home.
I am so excited to launch Tower Hill today. It's like getting on a roller coaster.
How are you doing? Let me first get this out the way, the famous statements. And maybe I'll pause here. First, I just want to recognize I have a number of teammates here. I have Bill Wafford, Mike Butera, Stacy Bowe, and Jim Hathaway. They made a lot of the stuff you're about to see happen, so I want to recognize them. Also, I want to say just a note to Greg. My wife actually met Greg before I did. She served at the time for the Chief Human Resources Officer of Live Nation while Greg was chair, and she would come into the boardroom and present to them from time to time.
Little did I know that presenting to Greg Maffei was going to be a bit of a family specialty. So I've had some opportunity over the years to enjoy that same experience with her. One thing I'll say about Greg is every time I've ever called him, he's always picked up the phone. So obviously, congratulations and thank you, Greg, and look forward to continuing to work with you.
Well, I don't have anything to say about that.
We have a lot to get to, so we can go ahead and get started. Let me first remind you of who we are and ground you in Qurate Retail Group. We're a stronger company than we were a year ago. We're certainly a stronger company than we were two years ago.
We're closing out the last 12 months with $10.2 billion in revenue across our three segments, QVC and HSN, which we refer to as QXH. They're the leading live commerce retailers in the U.S. Qurate International, which includes similar businesses in the U.K., Japan, Italy, and Germany. And then Cornerstone Brands, Ballard Designs, Frontgate, Garnet Hill, and Grandin Road that generate about $1.1 billion in revenue and inspire an incredibly loyal customer base. It has also been another year of Adjusted EBITDA expansion for us. We've had about $1.1 billion in the last 12 months, up from a corresponding $1 billion in the period before. And we've done all of this while serving millions of customers and hundreds of millions of households around the world. This was also year two of executing Project Athens, which we introduced here in 2022.
As a brief reminder, this effort was focused on five priorities meant to make our core business stronger: improving the customer experience and growing relationships, rigorously executing our core processes that was getting back the basics, lowering our cost to serve, optimizing our brand portfolio, and building on new high-growth businesses. We set a goal two years ago for the sum total of these efforts to capture $300-$600 million in incremental EBITDA opportunities. And we're proud to report that we did just that. We are delivering over $500 million in cumulative gross EBITDA to date as a result of Project Athens. This discipline has paid off with our 2024 year-to-date net Adjusted EBITDA margin in the double digits at 11.2%, nearly 250 basis points higher than we were in 2022. What made Athens successful was that we leaned into the things that make us truly unique.
First and foremost, our customers. Not only are they sticky, they have about an 88% retention rate, but they're also very deeply engaged. That QXH, an existing customer, purchases about 32 units a year and spends about $1,700 on average at a $50 average sales price. That's tremendous frequency. We also leaned into our content. We know how to produce live, engaging content at scale like nobody else. Globally, we produce about 40,000 hours of content every year. That's over 120 hours of live content, shopping content every day. There is nobody who can compete with that. And then we have real expertise around brand and merchandising. This allows us to present about 1,200 products per week to our customers. We have about 400,000 products in our ecosystem, and about 30% of our sales come from exclusive or proprietary products.
To wrap it all together, we have a world-class supply chain. We ship over 200 million units every year from 16 fulfillment centers. As we worked on building rigor and strength internally, we also had to stay attuned to shifts in consumer behavior. Linear TV continues to decline as social media continues to grow in popularity. This trend is increasingly reflected not only in industry trends, but we're starting to see it in our own business. We had a 2% decline in linear television viewing at QXH over the past year. For context, I would just note that the trends are most pronounced in the United States. The industry trend in the United States is to be down about 8% on pay TV households per year. In the international markets we serve, that number is something like 2%-3%.
In the face of this, including for us, though, we have been seeing real growth on social. At QXH, we've seen a 50% annual growth in social media impressions over the last two years. The U.S. social commerce market is an exciting new opportunity for us. That market is about $80 billion in sales today. By 2027, this is expected to be over $145 billion in sales. When you break down the trends further and look at the time spent by media type, I think it becomes clear that a mix of video platforms will be important to us and to our customer and to this business. The first three, social, OTT, and digital video, are increasingly important for growth, with average daily minutes growing at 8% or more per year. Our customers are spending time in new places, and we need to be there with them.
We've been thinking hard about our strategy for the next era, and that's what I wanted to share with you today. Qurate Retail is now the QVC Group, a live social shopping company. The legal change will happen when we file our 10-K in February, and our NASDAQ ticker will correspondingly change to QVCG for our A, B, and P shares. For the rest of the session, I'm going to dive into what this means for our business. We will be organizing around three priorities to truly win in live social shopping. We're going to expand to wherever she shops and spends her time. We're going to bring inspiring people and products generated by the world's leading live social content engine.
This will all be enabled by new ways of working where we maintain our discipline from Athens while using AI and other technologies to further drive efficiencies and fund growth. When it comes to social, we're extending our capabilities in sales and content and celebrities in the social-first formats across all of the leading platforms. We are seeing exciting signs of success here already. We have over seven million QXH followers across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. We had over five million views of a single creator video recently. Social is already growing very quickly. We're doubling down on our investment here. Our experimental launch on TikTok Shop just a few months ago resulted in a 2X increase in followers in just 100 days, and over 9,000 creators have been seeking information on how to partner with us.
We are moving quickly to scale, and we will be establishing a dedicated social selling team that plugs into our core functions. We'll be deploying a creator affiliate program to evolve our content mix and to expand our reach while generating diverse content formats. On the back end, we're enabling a tech framework for integrated cross-platform catalog management and order fulfillment. We'll also be implementing the latest tracking and measurement tools. I would note that we've been seeing really promising results in using AI both in video editing and in video creation. On the big screen streaming side, we're focusing on leveraging our unique strengths in hosted selling to amplify our own streaming apps and bolster our reach through our partners.
We're building on our flywheel that we've generated around hosted selling, which consists of exceptional storytelling by our phenomenal hosts and roster of trusted celebrities and partners, expansive distribution through understanding our loyal customer base in order to reach, captivate, and retain audiences, and we are seeing encouraging signals from our efforts with monthly active users up 100% year over year on our large screen streaming apps and total minutes viewed up 30% across all of our streaming platforms. Finally, to reach new audiences and truly be everywhere she shops, we are exploring distribution partnerships with players in other industries where our customers spend her time, including telcos, travel, and hospitality. We are thinking flexibly about ways to partner, including preloaded apps, streaming on partners' platforms, and FAST channel bundles. Now on to our second strategic priority: inspiring people and products. We're fundamentally reimagining how we create content.
Today, we mostly create content as a specialized studio designed for linear television production. And frankly, we're great at it. We're building something more akin to a factory designed to efficiently create content across media types and formats. For example, a new product might enter the production line and go from still shots to the TV studio to a live TikTok set. And a celebrity might go from a Facebook chat room to a podcast before being on air. We're building on our lead in linear TV. This will allow us to create and distribute more social shopping content than anyone, and we will distribute it everywhere, and we will do it at a scale that is without peer anywhere. In addition, we'll be working with leading creators to develop content and connect our product to the largest audiences possible.
Our final priority is new ways of working to ensure we carry forward the rigor and discipline of Athens into our next chapter to unlock over $100 million of an incremental additional EBITDA opportunity. We will achieve this by delivering additional operating efficiencies at QVC and HSN and continuing to transform the Cornerstone Brands business, both of which will lead to further Adjusted EBITDA growth despite investments in priorities one and two. As I wrap, I want to take a minute to emphasize why we're uniquely placed to be successful and deliver on this strategy. Live social shopping is not a huge leap, but rather a natural evolution of the capabilities we've spent decades honing that lie at the intersection of live content production, retailing, building human connection, and holistic content distribution. We have already mastered live shoppable content with an extensive roster of hosts and celebrities to tap into.
Our retail model is fit for purpose, having already fine-tuned the ability to create a variety of products from our trusted brands and quickly mass distribute SKU of the moment. If you take a look at what we've done historically, the Today's Special Value, which is a specially priced, limited, often exclusive item of the day, has been at the center of our business model for decades. In essence, this business was built to create demand for a specific product every day. Previously, we did that on television. Now we're going to go and we're going to do it everywhere. And when it comes to content distribution, we've been building towards a surround sound everywhere she shops ecosystem of distribution points across various media platforms and partnerships. We just now know enough to reach the full promise of this strategy and to bring social fully into our ecosystem.
We have an exciting, I think, transformative era ahead of us as we commit to delivering both top and bottom line growth as a result of this strategy. We will hit a $1.5 billion run rate of revenue from social and streaming together within the next three years. In parallel, we will continue to sustain stable double-digit Adjusted EBITDA margins that have proven possible through Project Athens and commit to at least a 2.5 times or better long-term leverage target. So what does this look like for us to be a live social shopping company? Whether it's at home or on the go, we'll be there. On linear TV, online, through streaming on social, and embedded in creator communities, both through our own platforms and through the platforms of our ever-expanding network of partners, we will be everywhere she spends time consuming content of all types.
While we will be leading the industry with this new strategy, the truth is we're following. Following our customer, that hero, that woman in her 40s and beyond, who has remained a loyal television viewer but now spends more and more time everywhere a modern woman does. She is already there, and I remind you, this is the fastest-growing segment of the population, and we're going to be there to meet her, and that is how we're going to grow and how we're going to win. Most importantly, this strategy builds on our existing foundations and capabilities. That means that we are uniquely positioned to capture this opportunity, and in fact, no one else is close. Thank you for your time today, and I look forward to continuing to work with you.
Imagine a world of innovation and progress where potential is made real, where possibilities are endless.
Welcome to the future of Spectrum. Welcome to Life Unlimited. I want chills, I want the static. A new customer-centric platform for unmatched connectivity and seamless entertainment solutions. I want the magic. Backed by our new customer commitment, which puts renewed focus on reliability, transparency, and outstanding service while offering more freedom and more choice. And who wouldn't want that? It starts with delivering free internet speed lifts and new bundled pricing that enables seamless connectivity for everyone. I have to take this. With nationwide reliability, customers can go anywhere and do anything. Oh, that's cool. Spectrum Internet and Spectrum Mobile are designed to work even better together for an experience that is faster, more consistent, and more secure. There are so many more ways to watch with Xumo Stream Box and bigger access to the best in streaming, making seamless entertainment easier than ever.
It's about unlocking unlimited potential everywhere, which means providing fast, reliable connectivity services for small businesses and delivering solutions to scale and secure America's largest businesses. While continuing to lead the way in advertising innovation, Spectrum is more committed than ever. I want the magic. Because it's not just what we make, it's what we make possible. That's Life Unlimited. That's Spectrum. I want the magic.
Good afternoon. I'm going to try to figure out how to get onto the next screen here. There we go. I thought I'd spend a minute just kind of reframing for everyone the size and scale of Charter, which operates under the brand of Spectrum. So Spectrum has significant assets and scale. It gets widely understood. But we have the fastest internet speed. We are the fastest-growing mobile provider in the country, maybe not known.
The reason that's the case is because we have the fastest overall speeds for Spectrum Mobile because we use our internet to offload that traffic and have gigabit wireless everywhere we operate. We save customers significant amounts of money. That's put us in the position of being the fastest-growing mobile provider. The network and infrastructure that we operate every day is actually significant: 900,000 miles of physical plant and infrastructure. Just a few years ago, to give you a sense, that was 750,000 miles. It's a lot of plant to build. It's because we're building out rural and in areas that we hadn't built out before, but it's significant. 58 million homes and businesses in 41 different states. There are 500 million unique devices that connect to our network every single day. They do that over 43 million wireless access points. How?
Because it's not just inside of our footprint. It's together with our cable partners, with Comcast, Cox, and others. If you take a look then, another not well-known piece about the business, we're probably the third largest fiber operator in the country for enterprise. So we have over 300,000 fiber-led buildings, and that's growing at a rapid pace. And then what I think is one of our secret sauces in terms of scale, we have 75,000 frontline employees, in-house, U.S.-based, that are owned employees who have a career and tenure with the company that provide us a competitive advantage. So if you then take a look at our customers, 32 million customers, and our customers have nearly 10 million mobile lines now. So that's growing fast. And data, clearly, as the internet provider, we produce and our customers use a lot of data, 750 gigs per month, and that's growing.
They do that on 16 million of our advanced Wi-Fi devices that have sophisticated telemetry that allows the customers to have a control plane and security inside their home, but also allows us to manage the network and the service level in a very different way. And as I mentioned, that's what enables us to offload 87% of the mobile traffic. Actually, it isn't on our 5G backup radio. It's actually on our network. It's on our Wi-Fi. And so that's how we get the fastest speed claims because it's, for the most part, not running on 5G. That's just a backup radio. It's running on our Wi-Fi. Over the past few months, there's been a lot of chatter, a lot of talk about the importance of wireline assets. It's flattering because we have a lot of that.
But there's also been a lot of talk around convergence and the need for convergence to how that product set's going to be meaningful. And we keep looking and saying, "Well, how's that going to work for others?" Because we're the only one inside our footprint that has seamless connectivity. Obviously, Comcast has the same through Xfinity. But we have 58 million passings. And what's unique is that everywhere that we offer wireline services, we offer mobile and vice versa. So today and in the future, we are the convergence, what we call seamless connectivity play. Even AT&T, people think about how big it is. They operate mobile in 100% of the country. But today, they can only do convergence or seamless connectivity in 18% of the country. And maybe if they deliver what they said, 26%.
Same thing for Verizon, even with Frontier and the expansion goal that they have, which is an undefined period of time, maybe they get to 23%, and T-Mobile really doesn't have a wireline infrastructure today and is in the process of trying to roll up some additional assets that might get it to 8% on the stated target, so we are the seamless connectivity provider, and we have an ability to provide not only the fastest speeds on mobile, but ubiquitous coverage of gigabit everywhere we operate. We're upgrading that to multi-gigabit, and so what I thought I would do is say it's not just a function of the quality of the product and the fact that it's a product that others can't match because it is seamless connectivity. We actually save customers tremendous amounts of money.
This chart shows that we can save customers hundreds or even thousands of dollars. So what we did is I took a two-line household. Most households have actually more than two mobile lines in it. But just to be safe, I took a two-line household. And I didn't pick the 500 Mb service that we have. I picked our one gigabit per second service, which is a little bit more expensive. And then I compared that across the board, including to cell phone internet from Verizon and T-Mobile, which doesn't have guaranteed speed, has variability. And so we take our gigabit reliable service that's available on 100% of our footprint. You add two mobile lines, and what you get is $100 per month. No taxes and fees, no contract.
And even after the promotional period, a persistent price down below, which you can see is across the board, we save competitors hundreds and thousands of dollars. This slide is what admittedly the cable industry hasn't done a great job articulating to customers, which is you may think you're getting a cheap cell phone internet, and you may think that you can deal with the reliability issues, but you're actually paying more money because I guarantee you're paying for $60-$70 mobile lines inside the household because that's the only way you can get that product. So we got to do a better job of that. But ultimately, the economics prevail. So you could sit back and you could say, "Should cable, should Charter operating under Spectrum, should we just sit back? We've got the best network fully deployed, gigabit everywhere we operate.
We have seamless connectivity that nobody else can match. And we actually, even though customers don't understand it today, we save customers lots of money. So you could sit back and say, "Wait for the wave of new competition to fade, and it will. And we'll be back to where we should be with steady, healthy broadband growth," but we're not standing still, so in September, we launched our new brand relaunch, Life Unlimited, in September. It wasn't just fancy creative. We paired that up with hard customer commitments. So if you have an issue, we'll be there today if you call before 5:00 P.M. If you're installing, we'll do a professional install, self-install, but we'll do that within a day. Transparency at every step. Greg covered a lot of our customer commitments, so I won't beat on that. But it's unique. Nobody else is doing it. Why?
Why would we do it, and why is nobody else doing it? Because we can. Because we're already doing it today. That service level agreement of being there today, we're already doing it in the vast majority of our markets today. And so why not stand behind it? How can we do that? We've already made the investment. 100% of our sales and service employees are based here in the U.S. They're our own employees. They're committed to this company, and they're committed to the customers because they don't work for a contractor. They don't work offshore. And we made that investment. It's not like this is a future investment. If we don't get it right, which does happen, we'll make it right. We'll first fix the issue, but then proactively, we're giving out credits day by day if we fail to miss the mark.
We've got a big flashlight on ourselves to make sure that we know exactly where those issues are. Nothing solves those issues faster than seeing the credit on the P&L and gets you focused on where you've got to get better. We're doing that. That was launched in September, and it's going well. We paired that up at the same time with new pricing and packaging. What we really were doing is taking a look at over time because video had become burdened with rate increases and with products in direct-to-consumer programmer apps that were actually better, deeper, cheaper, and had less advertising. Our customers didn't have that, and they were being asked to pay twice. The video product kind of lost its value in front of customers. It lost its utility because you had to go everywhere to go find the product.
And so what we did is we're in the process of transforming video and fixing it. We felt we were far enough along that we could start really pushing and leaning into video again. I'm here to tell you that our sell-in rate of video is up dramatically since we launched the pricing and packaging. Our mobile lines per customer is up. The gigabit per sell-in is up dramatically because we took the very best products that we had, we put them together, and we allowed customers to save money. So even though we are lowering the pricing at both promotion and persistent rate on a per-product basis, we're actually earning, not taking, earning more revenue per customer at the time of sale and more revenue per customer overall because they're taking more product. And they're taking a product that's essentially unassailable with gigabit, seamless connectivity, and seamless entertainment.
And so you get the best products that you have in the door. You grow the customer arc now and in the future. And then as a result, because of that, you reduce your billing charges. You actually have less service calls because there's nowhere else to go. You don't have retention calls. And you reduce churn, which means the investment that we've made in the plant and the investment that we've made in the customer actually sticks. Better return. We're not standing still on the product either. So in addition, you could sit back and say, "We've got gigabit everywhere we operate, 100% of the footprint. We do not redline. Our competitors do.
But we deploy a gigabit service everywhere we operate, wealthy neighborhoods and not. What we're going to do over the next three years, and we're already well on our way, is 100% symmetrical and multi-gig speeds in every single one of the communities that we have. We took up at no additional charge the existing customers, not under the new pricing and packaging, but I didn't know if that sounded like John Malone there for a second. I got feedback. It is John. Oh, I recognized the voice. I'm going to continue. It's not often in my career that I'm going to talk over John Malone, but he's left me no choice. So in addition, the convergence features that we have, we're not standing still just with the seamless connectivity.
So we've got Speed Boost, and you've got Wi-Fi anywhere inside the country because of the partnerships that we have and Anytime Upgrade, all additional features. Now, one thing that I want to spend a little time on, Greg gave a preview, is because we have more confidence now in the quality of the video product, we're getting behind it, and we're selling more. And we're working with programmers to actually make that happen. So we've launched seamless entertainment, and it'll be fully deployed really in the first half of next year when we make it easier to access. But today, the deals are all done, and they're in different stages of launching. So everything that's on this page, this slide, is not fully launched today, but it will be by the end of this year and into Q1 for Peacock.
It's up to $80 of value, retail app value for the customers. So I mean, I could take a survey here, but how many people pay for linear TV and separately pay for the direct-to-consumer app? It doesn't make sense. You've already paid for it once. So we're telling customers, "You don't need to pay twice." This is the best video ecosystem for our customers, and it's the best video ecosystem for the programmers as well because the churn is low. We manage the relationship, and the revenue is at a 100% margin for the programmer when it flows through. More importantly, we'll make this easier in the first half of next year in terms of subscribing. Today, you have a multitude of different passwords, credentials, authentication. We actually have, we know who you are. You sit behind the modem.
And so we can have authentication behind the modem, and we're going to work with programmers to get that type of activation process, make it easier for customers in a front store where they can manage all their subscriptions. And it's not just managing the subscriptions. It's actually managing the video viewing. So if you think of Xumo, that was the other issue we had. It wasn't just a value equation. It was that the utility of the video product had declined over time because you didn't know where to find the product. Where's the game? And so Xumo, we partnered with Comcast. We made a 50% investment in Xumo.
And so what you have now is unified search and discovery of all of your live content, whether you take that from us or not, together with all your SVOD, DTC, every other acronym that you can think of how you watch video. And it's there, and it's in unified search and discovery. So you don't need to worry about flipping inputs, going to another app or whatnot. It's all there. And it's done with a voice remote, a world-class leading remote that came from Comcast as part of Xumo with a voice remote. So the value is compelling. We're just getting started. The take-up already is great, but it's really going to be set to get better. So our operating strategy, it hasn't really changed. Have the highest quality products, invest in your network, provide value that your competitors can't replicate.
The one thing that we're accentuating is standing behind the products with a commitment to service and standing behind it with credits if we don't get it right. We're at that point where we can do that, and it can be a competitive advantage. We also have the three E's, which are strategic initiatives, evolution, expansion, and execution. So evolution is the network evolution, which I talked about. It's the convergence of the networks, the wireline and wireless networks, and it's the video transformation. Expansion, which I haven't really talked about, is the significant rural build that we're doing and completing with RDOF in record time and doing it with state grants as well. And execution, the obvious mother and apple pie of executing well, but it's more than that.
It's actually investing in our employees so that they have higher tenure with the company, so that they get more experience, provide better customer service, and frankly, end up becoming the next management leadership team of the company. People understand the business from the inside out, and then we're investing in digital systems, not just to use AI to make it more attractive for the customer to do business with us, but actually to improve the job of the frontline agent so the job gets easier. See, if the job is easier, the quality of the service is better. They're able to listen more. They're able to have more empathy. Customer feels better about it. The issue gets solved the first time. They don't have to call back, and it gets solved in a faster point in time. Put in financial terms, no repeat calls.
Average handle time goes down, and your churn goes down as well. But it really is about gearing that towards simplifying the job. And these are hard jobs. Simplifying that for the agent or for the field tech. Creating shareholder revenue. For us, it's a proven recipe. Generate and make the investments to focus on long-term revenue growth, long-term free cash flow growth. After 2025, we're coming out of a period of unique investment cycle that's set to unwind. And as I think Greg would call it, an explosion of free cash flow is upon us. And it's now around the corner, and it feels good. But it's painful to go through that. These were the right investments and are the right investments to make to position the company for the long term. You then pair that with a prudently levered balance sheet to get levered equity returns.
That is the Charter story. The one thing from a product and marketing and operation standpoint, I'd tell you, if you believe that broadband connectivity is seamless, that when you leave the house, you go to the driveway, you go on the road, and you come into a building like this, that your broadband connection should follow you wherever you go, there's only one company inside of our footprint that can make that happen. It's us. And there's only 8% of our passings that actually take that combined wireline and wireless service from us. So the opportunity for growth is pretty significant, and we're excited to keep on delivering value for our shareholders for the next two and a half years through Liberty Broadband and our other public shareholders, and ultimately for the shareholders of Liberty Broadband when it's merged in together. Good. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon. I'm happy to be back here to remind you about Alaska and what we do up there. Bob Walp and I started GCI 45 years ago with an investment from John Malone through WTCI. We became a public company in 1988 through a—excuse me—in 1986 through a spinout of WTCI and operated that way until 2017 when Liberty's search for ATBs took them all the way to the top of the world, and we reunited with the family. Now Charter tells us we're a disposable asset. It's okay, Chris. I took it personally at first, but I'm over it. And it looks like we're headed off to be independent again. That's okay. We're looking forward to it. And as Greg mentioned, you have to remember we're the only remaining upside in the transaction. Whoops. Can I go back one? There we go.
Alaska is a big state, and it's a big place far away with not many people. The vast distances, the challenging climate, the rugged terrain, and small remote communities combined with a lack of physical connectivity increases the dependence on virtual access, and that's good for our business of connecting Alaskans. I emphasize how big Alaska is because it's essential to what we do, and it's all too easy to underestimate. So with apologies to my friends in Texas, I need to remind you that if we split in two, Texas would be the third largest state in the country. Now, Texans are pretty competitive, and they're going to remind me, "Oh, well, you guys have a lot of neat stuff up there, but we've got this really great race in Austin, and you can't possibly match that." But we can. And we're going to pitch to Greg.
I was sorry to hear him tell Roger that they think three races in the U.S. is enough, but many of you don't even know Alaska's part of the U.S., so maybe we could be part of the international circuit. But look for Denali Formula One. Big state requires a big network, and we use almost every technology out there to deliver service throughout the state of Alaska. We operate fiber, satellite, microwave, HFC, and mobile wireless on a statewide basis. Our fiber includes 6,000 miles of undersea fiber, a substantial portion of which is locked under the ice for six months of the year above the freezing range in the Bering Sea. We operate both geo and LEO satellite networks. Our HFC network serves more than a quarter of a million homes and enterprises, and 80% of those have access to two and a half gig or better.
Our mobile network covers 97% of the pops in the state of Alaska, and as Greg noted, GCI 5G is the fastest anywhere in Alaska. We've invested almost $5 billion in building that network, and we continue to build out. Our roots go back to competitive long distance, and I see a few gray hairs in this audience that may remember when long distance was a product, let alone something that you had to charge for. We evolved from there into conventional cable and entered the local business in 1996. We were among the first to offer high-speed data on a cable system back when high-speed data was a 256-kilobit cable modem, and we've come a little way since then.
We've deployed almost every technology in existence between here and there from RF, DSL, MPLS, IP through the data networks, EDGE, CDMA, GSM, LTE, 5G, and whatever's next on our wireless network. We've ridden the DOCSIS wave all the way from the original DOCSIS to DOCSIS 4.0 as we continue to evolve the network. We've shut down old products along the way, and we've added new ones to the mix. We announced just this week that we're going to add video to the list of products that we no longer provide. We simply don't have the scale, and the market has moved beyond us with better products for our customers. Today, we operate a converged data and wireless network serving all of Alaska. We're the backbone for the state, having invested more in undersea fiber and middle-mile facilities than all of our competitors combined. Excuse me.
We're building fiber deeper, both middle-mile and local, and we're using DOCSIS 4.0 with a high split to move to 10 gig and beyond on the HFC platform. We serve everyone from consumers in tiny villages to the largest enterprises in the state. Many depend on our services in remote and challenging locations. We serve 200 rural schools and more than 200 rural health clinics that simply wouldn't have service without GCI. We have a number of competitors in our space, but none span the state or the services the way we do. AT&T and Verizon compete with us principally on the mobile front. The largest LEC in the state, ACS, offers consumer data and enterprise data.
The newest competitor on the horizon is Starlink, who is relevant in the rural areas, but nobody offers the footprint that we do, and nobody offers the full suite of services everywhere in the state. Over the last year, our metrics have been flat on the consumer side. If you adjust for the losses that we've had from ACP, consumer data customers are kind of flat. Wireless growth has flattened out, although we're continuing to increase the percentage of postpaid lines in our mix, which is good. Our flagship product is GCI+ , which combines wireless and data in a screaming deal, and we've grown that to almost a third of our data subs and more than 50% of our wireless subs. Churn for the integrated product GCI+ is 40% lower than the standalone churn.
On the bottom right, you see video gradually marching down in the way and out of existence. Consumer revenues have followed the consumer subs and are basically flat, although if you look over the last four years, there's a lot of turbulence below the surface of those flat revenues. Since 2021, data and voice are up $30 million, while video, excuse me, data and wireless are up $30 million, while video and voice are down $50 million. So the market continues to evolve. The strength of our businesses today is on the enterprise front, where strong growth and government-supported services to healthcare and education have been driving rapid revenue increases. Those two patterns combine to lead us to significantly advancing OIBDA. In Q3, revenue was up $22 million over the prior year, driven primarily by the strength in data from the strong upgrade cycle in schools and healthcare.
Adjusted OIBDA increased by $11 million. And while that was only up 2% year over year, it was concentrated in the third quarter, where we were up 12% over the prior year. Excuse me, I hit fat-fingered here. We're a significant participant in the grant programs in Alaska. Alaska has received $1 billion to date under the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, and we expect another $1 billion to flow into the state over the next several years. GCI is the largest single recipient under those grant programs, having taken down $179 million to date. We've yet to have a grant application denied, and we look forward to using the BEAD program to help us build out critical infrastructure in places where the market levels simply don't support the investment. Alaska is the largest single recipient of the Universal Service Fund today.
Universal Service Fund revenues are critical to supporting the ongoing operation of the network in rural Alaska. Some of you are probably aware that those programs have been under legal challenge for a while. There are three cases pending before the Supreme Court now for certiorari. We are following those closely and working diligently to assure that the Universal Service Platform that we use to deliver service throughout the state continues. Some of you may have seen that we recently got prime billing in a documentary that was put together showing the challenges of connecting the smallest places in the country, and we have a short clip for you here from Every Last Mile, which features some of what we've been doing out in the rural areas.
Accessible only by air and sea, King Cove is home to Alaska's largest salmon canning facility. The community's economy relies on year-round commercial fishing and has about 800 full-time residents, many of whom are from one of over 200 federally recognized tribes in Alaska.
Remote Alaska is beautiful. The benefit these communities get from not just having fiber optic internet to the homes or on their phone or something like that, but the schools and the clinics and the hospitals here, their ability to access internet of this caliber is essentially life-changing for these communities.
I just arrived in King Cove, currently checking out the work that's being done in my hometown. I'm actually out on my grandma's porch right now.
Clinics done. Everything's complete and wrapped up.
You're buttoned up. You're backfilled?
Yep. All the conduits in the ground and waiting on the drop.
Hey.
Good job. We made it.
We did it, chief .
All right.
So we wrapped up the school. We've got the service inside the school, which wraps up the deadline. And then that's just this community. There are several or dozens of communities just in this part of Alaska alone that will all be undergoing this process as we bring broadband internet to rural America.
So that's the view from the top of the world, where regardless of what our ownership structure is, GCI will continue to be connecting Alaskans. I want to do like everybody else and thank Greg. It's been a fun, challenging, interesting seven years. We didn't know what to expect when we came back into the family after 25 years on our own, but it's been good for us. We've learned a lot. We've grown a lot, and we've really appreciated your leadership. I'm not sure what I'll do with those 6:00 A.M. slots that we've been using each week, but I'm sure somebody will fill it up. Thank you very much for all you've done, and thank you.
Please direct your attention to the forward-looking statement on the screen.
Birds flying high, you know how I feel. It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life, and I'm feeling...
We have left off. This day is gone. And you can kiss it goodbye and let them watch it off.
The road is broad and I know how I feel. It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me.
Here it comes. He is safe at home, but it is gone. Kiss it goodbye.
All right. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm going to start with a little bittersweet news for those that don't know. With our ability to be self-sustaining, this is going to be our last Liberty Media Investor Day. So it is very bittersweet. I hope to see all of you hopefully next year when we invite you down to Atlanta. Shane, I want to thank you and your entire team in particular for all your help on that. And I think I want to join everybody else in thanking Greg. Greg, congratulations on your entire tenure. Obviously, we've had a long roll with you. We were going to give you a gift, but I figure nothing can beat that 2021 World Series ring. So expect to see that on your finger whenever I see you next. But thanks and congratulations to everything that you've meant for our business.
Thinking about brand, right? The Braves brand's obviously really big and powerful. For the purpose of this presentation, I would tell you our brand represents consistent success and growth. We've got a lot of good things happening in our business right now. Starting on the field, looking at the team, we're really proud of the fact that we made the postseason, seventh straight year in a very competitive Major League Baseball world. That's relatively unprecedented. Obviously, we had a really good, strong team. I sort of kid and say we won the World Series this year, but unfortunately, it was the World Series and injuries because of all the guys that got hurt. Regardless, the fact that we made the postseason, I think, is a testament to the strength of the team, Alex Anthopoulos, his leadership, and certainly the players.
You can see there at the bottom, Chris Sale leads a very talented pitching staff. He recently got the Triple Crown awarded to him, and I would expect in short order, within the next week, he should hopefully win the Cy Young. So that's a really important and valuable award, and congratulations, hopefully in advance, to Chris. We've got a great lineup of pitchers, and pitching really is the key to success in baseball these days. You have to start with pitching, and so focus on this, and that's why we included it in this slide. When we look to the off-field, the strength of the brand is obviously ever present there as well. One of the things that we wanted to showcase is not only the number of known fans, and we obviously think the world of our fan base is much bigger than this.
These are the ones that know and actually attach to us in some way, shape, or form, whether it be social media or registered users. We've got a great deal of growth in the diverse audience that make up Braves' fandom, and that's really important. It's a reflection of Atlanta, and so really proud of highlighting that. And the Braves brand obviously is strong, but so is Major League Baseball. I know you've heard from Roger Goodell and the strength of the NFL earlier today, but I would put Major League Baseball up against any league right now. They've got a lot of good things going for it. We're obviously really proud of being in the baseball world of our association, what we represent.
Obviously, the number of fans that attend Major League Baseball games is unparalleled compared to any other sport, with 70 million + going this past year, I think for the second, third straight year in a row. Television viewership is all up, and obviously, you had a really strong World Series this year, so it showed the power of baseball as a whole. Dipping down specifically now into the Braves and some of our key metrics and the things that we watch, really proud of the fact that for the third straight year, we've sold three million + tickets. That's really the epitome of success in Major League Baseball, and bear in mind, most of the others that are selling that many have many more seats in their ballpark. So we're doing it with just over about 40,000 seats, as it says there, 92% of our inventory sold out there.
Then the other thing here is we're going to sell out season tickets going into 2025, but we sold out season tickets this past year, and we now even have 20,000 people on our waitlist to purchase some level of season tickets with us. So there's a lot of pent-up demand to come watch us and do the things that we do at Truist Park. Speaking of Truist Park, one of the things that we're really proud of, despite the fact that it's a relatively new ballpark, is we invest in it. And we're constantly trying to figure out how to make that experience even better than it already is. One of the pictures that we have highlighted here is the new Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Park. It's an expanded kid zone.
We have a huge percentage of our fans that are families that come with kids, and so we want to cater to those in new and different ways, bigger ways than we've ever done before. So we're relocating that kid space that we previously had, expanding it, excited about the opportunities. We're also adding some things like premium seating. Some of these things have some great return on investment as well, so we can charge more money, but also offer an amenity package that's better for the fan too. Switching to The Battery, The Battery is by any measure a huge success. It's obviously a mixed-use development that is anchored by a sports venue. We sort of led the world in coupling these together, building these at the same time. Our visitors to The Battery Atlanta are really tremendous.
One of the things that we have highlighted here is the amount of time somebody spends on our campus. We really set the stage or set the record for that. A lot of good things are happening there. Speaking of some of the good things, we've got that Truist Securities building that will be opening the middle part of this year. It's about 1,000 employees from Truist, all really high-paying jobs that are coming on our campus, going to be there all the time, taking part in all the activities of the Battery. Then we just recently announced that we're going to have a Shake Shack for those that are interested and excited about this thing.
This will be the first Shake Shack in North America or in the United States that has a bar, so you can come in and have a burger and get a drink along with it. We have also some new tenants that we're constantly exchanging, trying to increase the profitability, the efficiency of the Battery. One of the things that we also show here in a couple of these slides or a couple of these pictures is that we're creating another plaza, if you will, with some of the video board technology, which allows us to almost have think of like a Times Square since we're up in New York, a little bit of a mini Times Square that's happening right there in the Battery. We could do all kinds of different events as a result of that, as well as service advertisers and the like.
Both of these, the Truist Park and the Battery, are year-round destinations. We just recently announced we're going to have the Savannah Bananas kick off our 2025 season. It should be a lot of fun. If you haven't seen one of those matchups, it's a little bit like the Harlem Globetrotters for baseball, I'll call it. And it's a really fun destination. We're excited to partner with those guys. We obviously are also super excited about hosting the world, the baseball world, for the 2025 Major League Baseball All-Star Game and a lot of other events that go on in the Battery and the Ballpark. It really is truly a year-round destination. There are things that are happening each and every day in the Battery, in our plaza, throughout our various buildings and event facilities, in the Coca-Cola Roxy, et cetera. So a lot going on there.
So you're always supposed to come with a little bit of a surprise. So today, I'm going to come with a little surprise for you. If you didn't know, if you haven't been looking at your news feed, there's some announcements and some news that's been breaking over the past couple of hours. We are fortunate in that we are one of the largest territories in the world of television and sports. This basically makes up our territory. So we've been in an advantage position. We've told you all that we've been in an advantage position. But despite that, in the macro side, we have Diamond Sports Group, which was going through a bankruptcy for about the past year and a half. Earlier today, a couple of hours ago, the judge ruled that Diamond Sports was going to be able to emerge from bankruptcy.
We knew this was coming, and over the past couple of weeks, we have reformulated our deal with Diamond Sports Group. So we're really happy that they're emerging from bankruptcy, going to be able to service the partnership that was already established, but we've improved upon that. And the highlight that I'll give you there is the improvement is really what we're most needed, which is we've got to create more access, more accessibility to our games. We have to have more people be able to watch our games. And I'm proud to say that contract is going to grow, and the ability for our fans to watch the game is going to be even more than it was before. So some exciting stuff that's led by a direct-to-consumer streaming subscription service that we will offer for the first time to our fans.
So there's a little nugget for you, a little newsworthy nugget for you, excited about the future of what we have with them. And I'll close kind of on a couple of different slides. First of all, we were recently awarded, if you will, this distinction. Major League Baseball does this survey among all 30 teams. We are rated as having the number one guest experience in all of Major League Baseball, as well as, as you can see there, a couple of other tributes to us. Really proud of that. And again, I want to reflect back to we're continuing to expand and create even better experiences in the ballpark through some of the investments that we've made. So we're not just going to rest on our laurels. We're going to continue to make that environment even better than what it is today.
And also, I'll tell you, this is a really well-performing asset, really well-performing team as a whole. So you as investors should be proud of what you're getting as far as the Atlanta Braves. Our top-line revenue is something that we're very focused on, continuing to drive the increase in our top-line revenue. Obviously, we're not as concerned about some of the OIBDA stuff and EBITDA stuff that we have. Obviously, we got to maintain a certain level, but I think all of us would appreciate the fact that we are a sports team, first and foremost. We want to put as much back into the team as possible, try to create as many wins as we possibly can on the field, and maybe get Greg another World Series ring along the way. We'll see. I'll end with this.
Obviously, if you look over the past eight years or so, we've had terrific CAGR, and look forward to having continued success with that. So with that, I want to thank you all for, again, having us as part of this Liberty Media Investor Day. Thank you again for being part of us with this for the past several years, and again, I want to remind everybody that we've got the 2025 All-Star Game, so look forward to seeing all of you in Atlanta for that. We'll be selling tickets soon, as they say. Okay, thank you, everybody.
He's a savvy investor. He takes risks, but not without analyzing the cost. When opportunity calls and he's not home, opportunity waits. He owns real estate, castles, and farmland, and 7% of Maine. For me, I'd rather grow potatoes in Nebraska. He speaks the truth.
Somebody wrote that I was becoming impatient in my old age, and I think that's true, and he is a doctor. People in the company to this day, a lot of them still call me doctor. He is the Cable Cowboy and the most interesting man in TMT. Stay liquid, my friends. Okay.
Hello. John.
Hello, John. Can you hear us?
I can hear you just fine.
Okay, great. Good afternoon, everybody. We are.
Was I ever that young?
Glad you could see it too. We're excited to be here for a Q&A, often a highlight for everyone. So we did pre-solicit some questions. I'm going to start with one, but the goal is to get questions in the room. Again, please wait for mic to come to you. I'm going to start right away with one for both John and Greg. We had a question on what makes you most excited when you think about the motorsport businesses or Formula One specifically in a collapsed structure with no longer the tracking stocks. I don't know if operationally and corporate. John, you want to start, and then we'll go to Greg.
I think simplicity. In building our companies over the years, we've had to engage in extreme complexity in order to be efficient, get around regulatory barriers, and be able to stretch Greg a mile in every direction. Formula One, Liberty Media Corp will become, with a spinoff of Liberty Live, a pure-play asset-backed stock, and the business is 100% owned. It's the first clean, pure play, I think, that our shareholders have had in all these years. I'm most excited, frankly, about the quality of the brand and how far-reaching that brand can be developed.
Yeah, I think I'd echo everything John said and maybe add some of the points that were made earlier. Because of the momentum in the business, the increasing reach, increasing engagement, we've reached a certain apogee with both potentially media partners, but certainly with sponsors. And suddenly we have competition among all of our potential partners who want to benefit from associating with us. And that's allowed us to plan longer, do better, think about how to structure deals that work for us that are not just, "Do we make this year?" but, "How do we make all the years in the future?" So the business feels very solid out for a while with a ton of momentum.
I think the other point I should make is that while I am the controlled shareholder, I would pledge to my shareholders that I will never sell my control of the company away from a transaction that would benefit equally all the shareholders.
Going to look to the room to see for our next question. I think we can go Barton Crockett in the middle. And then we'll go to Craig, you after, so we can make it easy on the mic.
Great. Thanks for taking the question, Barton Crockett from Rosenblatt. With all due respect, I wanted to ask this question just to put it out there. With John, with Greg leaving, it does seem like you're losing something kind of meaningful for the company in a couple of ways. And I wanted you to address how Formula One Liberty can address this. One is deal-making. I think that's been an important part of the Formula One story, even with simplicity. And the other is, frankly, investor outreach, appearing at the investor conferences, doing the Q&As. I know you're succeeding him on an interim basis, but it doesn't seem like you'd be able to replace all of that. So I'm just wondering if you could talk about that.
I can't replace any of them, to tell the truth. We will find people to serve as a holding company CEO role. We will adjust the board of directors to be able to provide knowledgeable guidance to the management team that runs Formula One. Who knows? Maybe Greg, after he takes a bit of a rest, will want to come back to the fold.
I'm not exactly leaving the fold by any means. John's been kind enough to let me continue to have the roles, obviously, at Tripadvisor and Qurate, but also with Live Nation and with Charter, at least on those boards for a while. So I'm not quite out, and I'll be a senior advisor to him. So I'm not quite distant. I'm not quite removed yet.
No, Greg is clearly irreplaceable. And we're not going to pretend that that's not the case. But we'll do our best. And I think operationally, we have Stefano basically as the CEO of the operating business. We're going to have, as I mentioned, a strengthened board of directors that will be able to provide historical guidance. I can't talk too much about that yet. And we'll be looking for a good administrative operating executive for the holding company, for the overseer staff and the organization, which, by the way, will continue to be overseeing not just F1, but also for the next couple of years, Broadband and Liberty Live. So there's a continuing serious role for the organization. And hopefully, we'll build additional businesses that quite talented organization that Greg has built in the last 19 years for them to expand and operate.
Okay. And if I could ask a follow-on, when we're looking at deal opportunities and expansion and new business opportunities, I was wondering if you could elaborate on where you think the best opportunities are. I mean, is it more racing acquisitions or adjacencies to Formula One or leveraging on GCI? Where do you think the biggest opportunities are?
I think our lesson is now that we've got a pure vehicle in a specific defined area, we will continue to race to expand within that. I don't see broad diversification for Formula One. I see additional racing investment as it becomes available, exploiting the brand, merchandising, and continuing to develop the premium nature of the sport that Greg and Chase Carey have been able to develop.
Thank you.
We'll go to Craig. Thank you.
Hi. Thank you. Craig Moffett from MoffettNathanson. Two questions, if I could. First, the timeline on the transaction with Charter is very long. And so I wonder if you could just comment on how we should think about the pacing of the share repurchases to execute on that transaction over the next couple of years. And then maybe stepping back a bit, I wonder if you would just comment, if you would, under a new administration and so much talk about the possibility of transactions and M&A, what kinds of combinations within the cable industry do you think make sense? And what do you think could be approved, whether it's because, obviously, with the long time frame I just described, there's a long time for you to take advantage of that, whether it's through Charter or with GCI?
John, do you want Ben Oren to walk through the repurchase schedule, or would you want to do it?
Yeah. No, I'll just say briefly that Jordan's come up with a way to essentially pay their buyback of their equity in Broadband so that the transactions continue to be tax-efficient. There is no leakage for the sale of Charter stock by Broadband. But Ben should elaborate on that moment because otherwise the structure is a little complex.
I guess I'll try to demystify it. So we've agreed to a long close.
Ben Oren, our treasurer, for those who do not know. Go ahead. Sorry, Ben.
Thank you. So we've agreed to a long close, June 2027, but we should point out that away from the GCI spin, which is at our direction, and the shareholder vote, which will be at our direction, and also on the Charter shareholders, it's quite a lockbox in terms of the likelihood of a deal not closing by that time. During that period, Charter's going to provide for about $100 million a month in repurchase of Charter shares from us. But we've built a mechanism where every time that we need funds away from our liquidity, we can call on Charter for our liabilities to buy more shares from us, or in the absence of buying shares from us because it would take us below a certain threshold on the cap, or because of a liquidity event for them, they can loan us funds as well.
And so essentially, while they have the benefit of not having to put that debt on their balance sheet right now or until 2027, over time, they will address all of our liabilities. And so as Charter grows in value, you grow in value, the exchange ratio is locked. So you can effectively say, "I am now invested in Charter." And in theory, there shouldn't be any real argument for a discount pro forma for the transaction.
Maybe I could just add a word, or if John wants to as well, on why the deal closed. Some of it's around the complexity of what to do with GCI. Some of it's around this paydown schedule, which will make Liberty Broadband less levered at the moment it eventually becomes consolidated. And third, Chris and team, I think, appreciate having Liberty's participation as a shareholder and board representation and having us around till.
Put me on the spot. You put me on the spot, but the answer is yes. Look, to have long-term strategic capital around the table has always been an advantage for us. And so when you have the combination of John Malone as a shareholder, not only through today, but through this transaction, and John has said publicly intends to hold the stock even after the Charter merge is complete, but then having Greg and the other Liberty Broadband board members representing at the table, this is a very highly sophisticated, savvy group of people who adds a lot of value to the business. And yes, we're very much interested in helping collapse the discount at Liberty Broadband and capturing some of that discount for Charter shareholders. But there is real value to the participation in the past of Liberty Broadband, and there still is going forward.
We wanted to hold on to that, frankly, as long as we could, while still getting the best outcome for our shareholders. Both of those are actually in the interest of shareholders.
There was the second part of that question, which was about the regulatory limitations. I think governments, regulators would be prudent to take into account a couple of things. One is the world has changed. The idea that Charter should be limited to a 30% of the U.S. terrestrial footprint, while the big tech guys have the globe and even Elon has the globe, wireless companies have national footprints, I think is silly, and you saw in Chris's presentation earlier why Greg and I have been so enthusiastic to be supportive of Charter and its management and its strategy. I think that Charter should be allowed to merge with Comcast or Cox or T-Mobile or anybody that would reduce capital intensity, improve efficiency, maintain competition, and improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of the services they provide. That's my point of view.
I think tying an industry's hands behind its back and allowing big tech to run wild in every direction that they choose to run in, I think is inappropriate.
You and Ben, really quickly.
I wanted to add two more items. Another reason why we like the agreement that we've struck is all of the proceeds from the share of sales is going to be tax-free. So the leakage that we would have otherwise had in a transaction that would have been delayed to announcement where we were selling back shares, we would have had to pay taxes on those. The second point is you'll notice in some of the arrangements, we've got a 26% cap currently, but there is an agreement that if we exceed a 30% cap, if the deal were to terminate, which we don't anticipate, there would be scenarios where we'd have to come back to 30%. That is just me highlighting that Charter does anticipate buying a significant number of shares from the rest of the market during this time period.
I think most importantly for Broadband shareholders, the certainty of the outcome and the exchange ratio being fixed permits Broadband shareholders to trade in the equity of Broadband as if it was Charter equity.
I'm going to go to one of the pre-submitted. We'll switch companies here and we'll actually turn to the Braves. More of a question for Derek, but others, please chime in, John and Greg. The question was, does trading as a standalone public company or being public in general, has that changed anything philosophically as you think about payroll or just deploying capital towards talent, especially now with the transition completed to being run by your team in Atlanta?
Yeah. First, I think context of where we've come from is important. I've said this to a few people over the past day or two, is we were originally part of Turner Broadcasting and then later, obviously, AOL Time Warner, until Liberty and John purchased the Braves. I bring that to your attention to say we've operated, in effect, as part of a public company for a long period of time. So we have a financial discipline and a perspective on things that I think was started long, long ago, and we've maintained that. I don't think there's anything changed about how we'd approach things. You heard me say we're obviously focused on top-line revenue growth. That's going to continue to be the case, and we are going to continue to try to field the best team.
Because if you were to say, "What is the number one goal of the Atlanta Braves?" It's to try to win the World Series every year. So everything that we're doing is to try to win the World Series. And also, while John is now here, I wanted to thank John and everything that he's done. I'm up here representing Terry McGuirk, and John and Terry have worked out this arrangement. So I think it actually, with what they've recently done and what we've announced, it actually aligns all of what we're doing with not only the shareholders, the investors, but quite frankly, the fans. So everybody should win out of what's recently happened.
Yeah. I go back. I know that financial return goes back to Ted Turner days. And I remember finally sitting on the Turner board with Hank Aaron and Rubye and Ted and Terry. And Ted didn't have any money. So the team had to make itself work and be disciplined. And I think that wonderful performance on and off the field really is a discipline that's been going on for a lot of years now.
Okay. We'll switch companies again. I'll go to one more that we received, MotoGP. Greg, I'm going to ask you. First, the question was before we announced that we'd submitted for approval. So we've covered that. But how do you feel about a year-end close? And then when you think about opportunities at Moto, has anything evolved in your thinking over the past year as you've maybe seen more of the asset develop, seen this year that you're excited about for the future?
Yeah. I think we remain optimistic that on the time frame we filed with the EU, we should have approval prior to year-end for a close. That's still our design timeline, and we're confident we'll get to that. Having spent some time with the MotoGP management team, obviously, we were limited because of gun jumping to certain things we were allowed to do and not to do. But we spent some time to learn more about the business, done obviously some preparation around the potential of combination from a financial perspective, appropriate planning. But I'd say we've learned this is, as it reiterates, exciting sport, just not as well known in the U.S. and other markets as it could be, ought to be. I think the sheer presence of Liberty being behind it will help in many ways.
Opening the door with sponsorship, I think Dan Rossomondo is really powerful, but giving him more resources, giving him more contacts will be a positive. Having our presence around potentially in some of these negotiations with broadcasters as they renew, the idea that there's going to be more excitement around the sport, I think, or more energy around the sport and marketing will be well received by those broadcasters, and we're likely to get more favorable deals, and the opportunity to potentially grow in the U.S., still there if we can find the right situation, as you know or may not know, but you may know. We can't do a street race for these. It's too dangerous. You need to have runoff areas for bikes. So we're limited on some of the tracks where we'd love to be. You won't see it in Vegas.
But there are other places where we race where you could imagine having. We already have it in Austin. And I think it's a great sport, so much potential. It will not happen in a week. The learnings from Formula One were the sales cycle on sponsorship takes a while, and there's a huge opportunity there. If you look at the endemic sponsors, many of them are high, but they really don't have that many of the kind of brands as number of brands that we have in Formula One. But that'll take some time, but I'm very optimistic that MotoGP will make it happen.
John, you made the case for consolidation on the distribution side. I'm curious your assessment of the content side and the new regulatory regime where you see the most value, obviously, Comcast exploring cable network divestitures, and then when we think about sports rights, media rights, do you think it makes more sense to stay with traditional players or some tech players?
Very clearly, the tech players, given network neutrality and the fact that they have access to distribution platforms at no cost to them, really favors a shift to streaming technology for that simple reason. It's free compared to making a deal with linear transport. I make the point that it only takes one channel to distribute a live event. The use of 40 million channels on the internet puts a lot of capital pressure on the internet and on those who provide the internet to be able to handle the capacity. Distribution technology is going to favor streaming on the internet because it's incrementally free. I'll just start there. That gives an edge to the Amazons of the world versus the broadcasters. The broadcasters will morph into streamers.
Okay?
I think if you look at any strategies of important programming, you're going to see it's going to be hybrid initially, and eventually it'll be streamed. It may be curated streamed, but it'll be streamed. Obviously, sports investment right now is the best because it works really well across both platforms, and it is going to be the essential reason why broadcasting lives longer than it otherwise would. But I'm afraid that the damage will be done to localism as important programming becomes national or global and streamed. So pardon the expression, but Comcast with the NBA is hoping that NBC will essentially evolve to a hybrid and then to a streamed subscription service as a strategy, for instance. I do believe that an easier regulatory environment would lead to faster consolidation of the creators of entertainment content. Sports content, I think, is doing quite well.
I'm going to go to another one we have for pre-submitted. I can't quite see what the glare. This is an interesting AI, obviously a buzzword everywhere. So for both John and Greg, the question was, thoughts on AI capabilities potentially within the Liberty companies, but even more broadly, anything that interests you as you think about the potential there. Let's start with John and Greg.
John, why don't you go first, and I'll follow?
It's not that new. I did my doctoral dissertation in AI almost 60 years ago. So it's been hanging around as computer capabilities have grown enormously and more and more deep database analysis, correlation, and so on has come along. It will affect everything. It'll make a lot of things much more efficient, more affordable, applications in medicine, efficiency of spectrum allocation for the cellular guys, making your customer service interaction much more efficient and personalized. The applications are enormous. And obviously, the guys who have giant balance sheets are going to be the biggest participants in it. And once again, we're going to get into some level of regulation versus free market in the evolution of how these AI services are performed and by whom.
I see the power of it clearly at some of our companies and companies I'm involved with, what's happening at Charter, capabilities in Formula One to do predictions on when overtaking is going to be occurring. On another board, I'm on Zillow, looking at efficiencies in coding. But it is also a changed world, as John rightly noted. I was recently at a tech conference for Citi, and I saw Satya Nadella of Microsoft, who I've known back to when we were both there. And Satya was laughing about the P&L when you were CFO, Greg. If you spent $100 million in CapEx over a couple of years, that was a lot. Now we're looking at spending $100 billion. And it's a different and changed world. A lot to learn. We've been doing some studying.
Frankly, it's one of the things that after the end of the year, I'm going to go take a look at and try and understand a little better personally because maybe there's something interesting there.
The question was also asked of any of the CEOs if you want to chime in on anything related to your business. It's not to put. It's only if you would like to offer anything. So before the next question, I'll offer that. The mic is getting passed hot potato, so we don't have to.
I apologize. I was multitasking. What was the question?
If there was anything specific to generative AI capabilities that you were looking for.
You didn't know this is like business school cold calling in terms of our seats.
I thought you were talking about your next career for a while, so I tuned out.
Since I don't have one, it was a short talk.
That's the last thing I heard as you were talking about that. So look, I think I'll give you a couple of use cases. Bear with me. Some of this has been put in place the last three months, and some of what I'm about to describe is going to be put in place the next three months. And sometimes when you're working on all of it, the exact timing isn't clear. But today, you call into the call center. Your voice is your ID. And when you talk to AI-driven conversational IVR, it's now live. It's taking 10% of our calls. That'll be up to 50% at the end of this year. And it's doing a great job, so much so that the customers at the end are saying, "Thanks for your help.
Can you remind me your name again?" And when we listen to the calls, and the AI is that good. When it does get to an agent, it gets to the right agent. And in front of the screen, instead of having 13 different devices, the agent is taking a look. The telemetry on all the equipment in the home is in front of the agent. The sentiment of the customer based on their voice is in front of the agent.
The AI is listening to the phone call, the customer in parallel, checking the telemetry, last billing call, last repair call, and prompting the agent based on the tone of the call, based on what the customer's saying with real live voice-to-text translation, feeding to the agent and says, "This is the next best action." And so the agent, instead of hopping around in 13 different systems, trying to listen, trying to have empathy, trying to make a note, is actually able to listen to the customer, have empathy, has the next best action in front of the agent, gets to make the call still as to whether that is the next best action, and move on. But we deal with millions and millions and millions of transactions every day. We don't need to have an agent try to figure out each individual one of those transactions.
The machine can, for the most part, do that and provide better service, get the customer off the call faster, which is in the customer's interest. The agent finishes the call happier. The call summary is then not only is it transcribed live so that you can have it and it can be used with the AI tool, but the call summary takes place so that when a field tech goes out, how many people have had an HVAC issue? And you spend 20 minutes on the phone with the HVAC company. I go to work.
HVAC person shows up at the house and says, "What am I here for?" And my wife is very frustrated and said, "I don't know, but it was a 20-minute phone call." We don't have that problem anymore because as of this past week, now the field tech has a call summary from the call right in front of him or her so that you can address those issues. So we're using it. Of course, we have chat and bots and AI conversational IVR that's really customer-facing. But most of what we're seeing, the benefit, is to make the job better, easier, and more effective for the call center agents and the field techs as well. I mean, I could go on and on. I won't, but applications are pretty limitless. Sorry, I was daydreaming a little bit at the beginning.
All right. I'm getting off the comp committee. It won't matter. Go ahead.
I won't do it again.
Hi. So my question is actually inspired by the recent Sunrise spin and how they've decided to lean into wholesaling some of Swisscom's fiber to the home as part of their product portfolio. I guess I'm just wondering, especially with AT&T leaning more into open access, is that something you could see Charter utilizing in the U.S. context, either in footprint or out of footprint?
Probably best, John, to start on the implications of Sunrise from you. Yeah. And then maybe.
Yeah. No, I mean, Sunrise is a great example of an environment and a regulatory mentality that says it's fine to work with your competitor if you can drive down combined capital investment without adversely affecting retail competition. And we're hoping that this is something that can be replicated because the EBITDA, there's nothing wrong with the EBITDA that these businesses are generating. The problem is the CapEx that is required has really destroyed free cash flow characteristics. So the degree to which cooperation can ensue between competitors. When the government allows the discount airlines, they don't require everybody to build their own airport.
And the ability to share base CapEx, they do it in the cellular businesses in Europe where you might have four competitors but two actual networks. So there is precedent for competitors getting together and figuring out how to reduce the total CapEx requirement in an industry.
I think that would be very beneficial not only to profitability but also to the consumer because it would permit lower prices and perhaps better service.
Chris, you want to add anything? We're going hard to you today. Don't worry.
Yeah, I apologize.
Oh, no. Don't. I'm happy you're here.
It's been, what, 15 years now since I was in Switzerland and Germany, but the regulatory environment is a little different. I think if you take a look at the unbundling of the local loop, which preceded all of that, that was a very difficult time for a lot of different telco operators, and so we've been careful to think through how that could take place. I think one of the areas that we are taking a look at actively doing something along those lines is around edge compute.
So if you think about the AI data-driven needs and the need for low latency being closer to the customer, one of the additional benefits of the network evolution project that we have is we are very, very close with tons of hubs and headends, all of which the space inside is being vacated because the original iron that was in there is being pulled out and is all being driven by software systems. For those who know cable, it's a virtual CMTS. All that comes out. So you're left with a tremendous amount of real estate space with space, cooling, tremendous amount of fiber that's there. And the ability to monetize that and to create a business from edge compute, we're going to have a pretty big asset in front of us.
In fact, we've been very careful about not collapsing hubs and headends because we do want to be closer to the customer. We are going to have excess space, and we're going to have the ability to provide that as a service to different enterprises. And it's not limitless, so it comes with a rate. But I think there's an opportunity there. And that's similar to what John was saying, but more of an enterprise capacity.
David .
David Joyce with Seaport. In thinking about Formula One pro forma for MotoGP, it's a healthy margin and free cash flow near business. How should we think about the appropriate leverage, capital returns, and reinvestment in the business? And what kind of projects might you be looking to reinvest in?
I think we've set the investment schedule at Formula 1 pretty well, and we've done some big investments, things like Las Vegas, like upgrading our media center down at Biggin Hill, so there's probably not a ton that stands out. We are continuing to reinvest in some of the things we've talked about with much more direct to consumer, understanding better who our customers are, and that involves some system investments, but all that's very manageable inside the P&L. I expect Formula 1 will continue to be a large free cash flow generator. The shape of the curve at MotoGP is likely. This is a solid grower. Might we be doing some incremental investment, in fact, to slow that growth over the next couple of years in terms of profitability?
I could see that happening just because I think there are investments that are going to be made that will have good payoffs. But again, they're going to be easily manageable inside the P&L. The margins, the EBITDA margins at MotoGP are higher than at Formula One because of the nature of the P&L where we're not sharing the upside with the teams in the same way. What we'll do for a we're going to come out at between 3.5 and 4 times. I think that's a very manageable level. And we'll see what we do with the free cash flow, whether some of the opportunities John talked about around motorsport adjacencies arise or whether we want to have return of capital in some way. I think we'll have opportunity to do a lot of things. I don't know if you want to add any more, John.
No, it seems like three and a half times is a very stable debt leverage for a business like this. And growth always comes first. If you have synergistic growth in the category, that always would come first, I think, with a board in this kind of a business. And I think it's the kind of a business that it's going to be fun to be a board member because it's going to have a lot of free discretion in terms of how to use excess cash flow.
I'm going to switch gears. We got one on Tripadvisor, Greg. We'll give Chris a break, I guess, too. The question is, when you think about Trip, it has underperformed recently in the market. How big of a holistic shift do you think they may need in strategy? Do you think the question is about consolidation? How do you really showcase the value in the segments within that business to help it get better credit?
Yeah. I think, as I said earlier, I mentioned we went through a fly-by on Trip. They've got two very strong brands, one of which is a good grower in The Fork and one of which is an excellent grower in Viator. The experience is coming online. It's not to say there isn't competition, but Viator has an excellent market position and is gaining share in a growing category. So you feel very good about that. And there is some discretion between how much you're going to pursue growth and how much you're going to have profitability. The brand Trip is obviously the one that's challenged. There's been a lot of reinvestment in that and improving the experience. And I mentioned that the MAUs, the monthly active viewers, is growing again. But there is a lot of competition both at the SEO level and the SEM level.
And I think you're going to continue to see fundamental need to reinvent that category, that part of the business. And I think Matt and team are very focused on that and some of the things that I mentioned, like the AI-powered itineraries, like the direct book inside the app. All of those are things which make a much higher utility for consumers. To the degree that we can get the app to be something that consumers want to go to, our costs of customer acquisition go down, customer repeat business go down, margins go up. So that's really one of the goals and how aggressively Trip can pursue that. It has a strong balance sheet. It has capabilities. It has a strong management team to think that through.
But it is not without its challenge in that part of the business just because of the presence of Google and others.
We'll continue the drive by through the companies, if I may. We got one in queue, so I'll go to both probably Greg and maybe David as well. We've seen some pressure in the customer file. Do you have any sense of where you think you're losing customers to and your ability to potentially stabilize that or grow the customers? And maybe even with strategy announced today, the interesting appeal and the broader customer base that you could go after.
Yeah. So I think the obvious answer is cord cutting has had an effect on our customer file. We've substantially outperformed the cord cutting in the market. And so I think we've been a lot less impacted. Some of that's been age-related lag because we tend to have a slightly older customer. They've been slightly less inclined to cut the cord. But you're now seeing those dynamics come more powerfully into our customer base. So I think that has more explanatory power than it probably did in the past when people thought it had a lot of explanatory power when it probably didn't yet. So that's a factor. But I also think the dynamics of how our customer spends time have changed dramatically. And we've just only been in one part of the customer journey. And so we now have to go there.
Our customers love us when they find us. They continue to be extraordinarily loyal. They just haven't been able to find us in nearly enough places. One of the things that's been interesting for us, because cable was such a powerful system that everybody was on, even if you weren't a QVC customer, you saw QVC all the time because you just had to pass it in the channel guide to get to wherever you were going. And so it drove essentially 100% awareness, even for non-customers. Without so many people in the cable guide, we've had to think about awareness and driving awareness for the first time as a business in quite a long time. And so I think there are some elements like that that we would have to think through.
I would also remind you, though, if you go back a couple of years when we had the Rocky Mount fire, our best guesstimate is we lost somewhere between 800,000 and a million customers as a result of that fire. We had to do things like subscription services where we had inventory consumed in the fire. We had to turn the subscription off and essentially fire that customer because we could no longer meet their needs. So we went through a big loss in customers coming out of the pandemic and after that. If you look at our customers file now, it's actually quite stabilized. I think for the last couple of quarters, the sequential change in the file has been less than 1%.
And so we feel pretty good that we now have we’ve sort of reached the level of stability in the customer file in the U.S. for QxH. That’s about eight million customers. We think we need something like that to have a stable business at a scale and with profit dynamics that are defensible. And now I think we have the ability with the push in the social, the continued growth in the streaming to start growing our customer file again. When we launched Project Athens three years ago, I explicitly did not talk about revenue growth, and I explicitly did not talk about customer file growth because I knew we were going to have to spend a couple of years working on cash flow, cost, and margin opportunity. And so while the customer file always matters, it’s not been a focus for the last couple of years.
I would say revenue growth and customer file growth will now firmly be in focus for the go forward for the company. Oh, Greg, I don't know if you want to add anything.
Nope. Thank you, David.
Right there. Neville.
Thank you for taking my question. My name is Antonio Meritzi. I'm an investor in the company and Qurate itself. I was curious, how valuable is the support of the celebrity hosts? And are there any recent examples of them providing their support to the platform?
Yeah. So hosts are massively valuable. And I think if you zoom out, there have been a bunch of reasons why previous attempts at bringing live shopping to the United States haven't taken off quite as quickly until now and not as quickly as it did in Asia. I think part of it is previous attempts to do it outside of our ecosystem didn't understand the connection that our hosts and our personalities drove. For a lot of people, they spend hours and hours every day with our host in their living room. They feel like they're an extended part of the family. They feel like they know them, and they trust them. And that's why our average existing customer is willing to spend $1,700 a year on the recommendation of this person in their television because over time, they've built a relationship of trust.
That really is a foundational driver to the ability to move content onto the platform. So I think the hosts drive an incredible amount of value. I think they're going to be able to increasingly drive that value as we go into social, and they're going to be a big part of it there. I also think that there are other people who are working with us can learn to create that kind of connection that creates the path to commerce as well. So one of the conversations we've been starting to have is to say there is a very special, very delicate thing of creating a connection while also trying to move product, but not doing it in a way that feels like you're constantly making a sale, right?
You're preserving the relationship while also introducing them to a product you think will help their lives like a friend would. But that's not so easy to replicate. As other people have tried to replicate it, they're increasingly coming to us and saying, "Hey, how do you do that?" And so we think there are opportunities to continue to bring others on our platforms and help them learn how to do what our hosts mastered doing decades ago in this business.
Makes sense. Thank you.
Over there, reach for the banister. You should be good.
Hi. Thank you. Mike Connor from Truist Securities. I heard in the very beginning of the investor day today when John Malone was speaking, I thought I got the sense that his tone was that this is a GCI question, that GCI is still kind of going to be part of the Liberty Media portfolio that had a valuable tax asset that could be used to roll up other businesses. I just wanted to know if you could expand on kind of the post-spin GCI, the plan for that. And then the second part of that question, I just wanted to ask Chris Winfrey, why not include GCI as part of the transaction? Thank you.
Maybe we'll let Chris go first.
Particularly to Ron, I want to say what a fantastic state Alaska is. And he and I have talked about it as well. I think that GCI is a fantastic infrastructure asset. It is one of its kind across the Alaskan footprint. When you take a look at what they have, nobody else is going to be able to replicate that forever, from a wireless infrastructure, from a wireline infrastructure. But to put a little bit in context, when you think about how we've done M&A at Charter, we look for the ability to scale our operations, do everything virtualized, national, centralized, and have a consistent operating strategy in rural, suburban, and urban markets as it relates to pricing and packaging and service. That's good from a regulatory standpoint. But Alaska is a completely different animal. You have, what, 250,000 internet customers?
So just to put that in scale, if you saw two and a half times the size of Texas, 250,000 internet customers, we probably have more than that in Raleigh, North Carolina, and so from us, from our ability to scale and to run the business that we do, you need a management team that is exclusively focused on Alaska, doing things the way that Alaska needs to be done because it is unique from a regulatory standpoint, from a funding standpoint, operations, construction, getting out to the Aleutian Islands. You referenced the undersea fiber. Our management team, I think, is very capable, but our ability to scale into that footprint is not the same as we're much, much closer. The state of Washington that we operate in is much closer to Manhattan in terms of the way we operate it than Washington and Alaska by a long mile.
Totally different. And so we looked at it and said, "It is a fantastic asset." As a private investor, I'd say 100%, great free cash flow, the inability to go replicate the asset they have. But if Charter were to buy an asset like that and try to turn it into Spectrum with our pricing and packaging, our go-to-market, all of that, it just wouldn't work. And you have a very talented, very capable management team at GCI that understands Alaska and needs to run it as Alaska. And they would tell us to buzz off, probably appropriately, because it wouldn't make sense to run that the way that we do. And so I think it's one of those classic cases of knowing the difference between a great asset and who's the right owner for that asset. And that's really what that came down to.
Maybe I could just touch on, make sure we're all on the same page. So GCI will be outside the Charter transaction. It's expected that we will spin that away from Liberty Broadband. Yes, it's overseen by Liberty Media in terms of shared services, but spun away from Liberty Broadband, not media. Any tax that is recognized upon that at the corporate level will be handled up to a number by GCI. And then the shareholders will receive their own tax upon the distribution, probably some sharing between their allocating some basis between the GCI stock and their Charter stock that they'll receive. The point about the basis is, as part of that, we're likely to get a step up in basis and have pretty good protection on the taxes that are generated by GCI in terms of the ability to shield the income that GCI generates.
Whether something else could be added into that, that's interesting. That's the creativity to come.
Just to clarify before John jumps in, I think tax is borne by Charter on the GCI split.
Yes. That's why I'm sorry. Yes.
It's contributed to.
I think the point being that it's a bit of an odd duck, and Ron is a bit of an odd duck, but it's a very interesting asset in the sense of how it could be used to build an additional collection of assets because it will have tax attributes that exceed the need to shelter its own cash flow, and so for a profitable enterprise that can handle an unusual set of assets, it probably is more valuable than you would think. It could also be thought to be a core of a private or semi-private effort to build a new venture undertaking. I think I was referring to that, that yes, if somebody is willing to buy it, some strategic is willing to buy it at a full valuation, we probably end up selling it.
If, on the other hand, it doesn't command for the reasons Chris just explained, what we think it's worth as a core for a new development effort, then we'll keep it and we'll treat it as a core asset around which to build other assets.
Ron, if you wanted to comment on anything, you are welcome to, but I think there may be one in the back, but.
There is in the.
All the way up.
Up in the.
Hi. Vikash Harlalka from New Street Research. There's been a lot of chatter around Elon Musk's influence on Trump, and now he's obviously part of the government. There's been a lot of discussion around Elon trying to get access to the BEAD funds so that the unserved locations can be served by Starlink and not by fiber. Would love to get your thoughts on that. Thanks.
Ron, you want to lead with that, or you want to touch on Elon or John? I don't know.
I won't touch either Elon or John, and actually, Craig Moffett, who's sitting behind us in the audience, may have a better answer to this. Our experience has been that Starlink works until you get too much density, and what we're discovering in Alaska when we had a massive undersea cable outage last year and the number of our northern communities got driven back to dial-up speeds for a period of time, and they'd sell 60 or 70 Starlinks right in the same community that they congested, and they had to shut down the sales. They had to put a waiting list out. Starlink, because of the capacity limitations, works really, really well in the Wyoming model where you got 20 miles between each terminal, but when you put 100 terminals in the space of a half a mile diameter, you get the congestion, and it doesn't deliver the speeds.
Now, some of that will change with the next generation satellites if they can offer the inter-satellite links, and they'll pick up capacity. But we see it as a competitor in the rural areas. It's very hard for me to imagine that it can ever match the speeds or the pricing that you get in a dense area, particularly as the cable plant marches to 10G and beyond. So we're not worried about it in our urban areas where we're clearly on a path to build to 10G, and we don't see it being an issue there. But in the very diverse rural areas, it is a better deal, and it's better than us building fiber to little teeny, teeny places out in the middle of nowhere.
I think Bentley over there.
Previously, you guys talked about potentially building some venues within the Liberty Live tracker. Obviously, those guys are pushing the gas pedal and doing it themselves. Given the tracker has spun but still not having a whole lot of extra cash sitting there, how are you thinking about the evolution of that tracker into the SpinCo? And is there anything there to be done beyond just a holdco?
I think actually the balance sheet of Liberty Live is going to be pretty strong post the transaction. The opportunity to do things in conjunction with Live, they do have an aggressive venue strategy as they know. Probably at the time before we had Quint decided to be the ATB, we might have had other dreams about how to work with them and do more. I think making sure that Quint is something that fits well with them, making sure that there may be other cases where we can work together, that would be the primary focus. I won't say no, we will never do a venue there post my time, but my sense is we've solved one of the problems of that, and really we want to do things that fit well and are working in conjunction with Live Nation.
I would say that we plan to run the balance sheet of Liberty Live aggressively. Take that for whatever you want, but we don't intend to be passive for the next few years.
Okay. I think I have one more that I'll offer it just in case. If not, I'm going to ask my closer here.
We're good.
So every time we have a conference, Greg gets asked for his favorite child. And we're not going to ask him his favorite child because he's never allowed to answer that, or he is.
No, I'm super excited to see what Liberty does going forward. It's going to be a far more cost-efficient organization without me at the top. So I'm excited to see what comes, and I said earlier, it's a great team. I am so proud to have worked with them for 19 years. As I said, I hired a high percentage. I've worked with pretty much all of them. I know under the leadership that's there, John and whatever else comes, it's going to be great opportunities, and super excited to watch and remain a large shareholder. Thank you.
So on behalf of all of us, I will say thank you to John.
Thank you, John.
For Investor Day and everything Liberty. Thank you to Greg. I want everyone to join me in a big round of applause for ending a.
Thank you.