Nexstar Media Group, Inc. (NXST)
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May 8, 2026, 11:18 AM EDT - Market open
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34th Annual Media, Internet & Telecom Conference

Mar 9, 2026

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

Good morning, everyone. My name is Benjamin Soff. I'm the equity analyst at Deutsche Bank covering TV broadcasters, and I'm very pleased to be joined today by Nexstar's Chairman and CEO, Perry Sook, and CFO, Lee Ann Gliha. Thanks for being here.

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

Thank you for having us.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

You reported 4Q earnings a couple weeks ago. Looking back to 2025, what were some of the highlights for Nexstar, and what are your key priorities for 2026?

Lee Ann Gliha
EVP and CFO, Nexstar Media Group

I'll, maybe I'll kick that off. You know, we had a, I think, really good 2025. We had record odd year revenue, which was fantastic for us. We had in the fourth quarter, we actually generated a positive 4.5% growth in our non-political advertising revenue, which was an improvement from what we had thought at the time, when we did our third quarter earnings, which was a positive, you know, positive signal regarding the advertising market. Again, in 2025, we were able to reduce our overall operating expenses by being very focused on making sure that we were streamlining operations where we could. We were able to actually reduce costs, benefiting the bottom line.

Going into 2026, we're very, you know, we're very excited about the opportunity that is coming for us with respect to the TEGNA acquisition. Beyond that, you know, at the end of 2025, we renewed about 60% of our distribution deals or distribution deals representing 60% of our subscribers. We will have the benefit of that going into 2026. We're looking forward to the election cycle. We generally generate about a half a billion dollars of incremental revenue during those the last three cycles. That is a positive for us going into the year. This year, in particular, we continue to be very, very focused on digital advertising revenue growth.

That's been something where we're able to just, you know, take our local sales force and not only sell our own digital inventory but sell third-party digital inventory as part of audience extension strategies. This year, excuse me, we expect to have digital revenue that should surpass our national advertising revenue. That'll be, you know, better for our long-term trajectory. I apologize, I've got a little bit of a cold, as you can tell.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

That's a great summary, we're gonna get into a few of those topics. I wanted to start with deregulation. We've had a number of developments recently on the regulatory front. The President posted on social media in favor of your deal. Congress had a hearing in February to discuss refreshing the broadcast rules, and it sounds like your conversations with regulators are progressing. Can you provide us with an update on the deregulation process, and do you have a view on where we might see a potential rule change?

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

I think the administration is committed to deregulation, and particularly at the FCC, Chairman Carr, is committed to moving forward with eliminating outdated and useless rules. I think that the national ownership cap and the local ownership rules fall into those that category. As you know, any rulemaking today has to go through the OMB, which on, you know, the rulemaking to eliminate the national ownership cap, should the Chairman decide to move forward on that soon, which I believe he will, it will go to the OMB, which will be, take 30, 60, who knows how many, maybe 90 days at the outset for them to review the impact on budgets and the economy and all of that. Then he can move forward with that relatively quickly. The same with the local ownership rules.

They've gone through the notice of proposed rulemaking or request for comments, and so comments, reply comments. The pleading cycle is over for that as well, and it's now just a question of when those become actionable at the commission level and then could be turned into regulations. I think that those things will happen this year. It depends on how long it takes to clear OMB to before then they could be acted upon.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

You're currently working through your pending acquisition of TEGNA. What made this deal so strategically important, and how does it position Nexstar to compete more effectively, especially as we see consolidation pick up across broader media?

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

Well, as you know, there were a number of potential M&A conversations going on about this time last year. There were a few companies in the marketplace looking to sell or decide what they wanted to do. As we surveyed those opportunities and what they could mean to Nexstar, it became relatively clear as Lee Ann and I did our analyses, that the highest and best use of our capital and our time would be to attempt to acquire TEGNA. It was the biggest of those opportunities out there, probably the best run and also, you know, had the best balance sheet.

It was merging two companies from a position of strength or acquiring, you know, two strong companies, putting them together, and everything else would have been kind of a mismatch of strength and weakness, potentially. It increased our size, both in geography and national reach and in financial wherewithal, more than any other. At the end of the day, we were able to negotiate a transaction that will be roughly 40% accretive to our shareholders. It's absolutely work worth doing and why it was the best strategic fit for us. We thought the cultures at the operating business level are roughly similar. There are things that we like that TEGNA is doing that we're not executing to that level in Nexstar and vice versa. We literally think it's putting the best of breed and best practices together under one roof.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

Remind us when you expect to close that deal, and where are you in that process?

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

Sure. Well, I mean, we're engaged in active discussions with both the DOJ and the FCC. We are permitting them to talk to one another, and that's usually so they can coordinate on process and timing and decisions as we get toward making the, you know, earning final regulatory approval. No one agency wants to be too far out in front of or behind the other. We view all of those as good signs. We have said it will close, and I guess I should be clear on this, so there is no confusion. We expect the transaction to close before the end of second quarter.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

You have a pretty good track record creating value for shareholders in your previous broadcast mergers. Remind us what you're expecting for synergies in the TEGNA deal. Is the broadcast M&A playbook evolving now that it's theoretically possible to create in-market duopolies?

Lee Ann Gliha
EVP and CFO, Nexstar Media Group

So we put out a target, or we had in connection with announcing the transaction, we said that we had estimated there would be about $300 million of synergies, based on the 2025 estimates that we had at the time. That really is a combination of net retrans synergies and operating expense synergies. It's as a percentage of the EBITDA, it's very comparable to what we have been able to achieve in the past in terms of Tribune at the prior transaction, which was about 35% of EBITDA. The focus on the expense synergies in terms of the in-market, is that those in-market synergies are really the lion's share of the operating expense synergies.

That really is, you know, beneficial because there's 35 of the 51 markets are overlap markets and are gonna enable us to really create, you know, better operations in those markets. That, you know, it's we're no stranger to having more than one station in a market. Over 50% of our markets are duopolies today. The, the difference here is just that we have, you know, two potentially Big Four affiliates in each of these markets that would be incrementally helpful because there's just more operation there to deal with.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

Perry, you just said you expect the deal to close by the second half of 2026, by the end of 2Q. That's coming up in just a matter of months. I wanted to take this opportunity to ask how you're thinking about capital allocation post-close. In particular, how do you think about balancing the priorities between delevering the balance sheet versus being opportunistic if and when the ownership rules are rolled back?

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

I think you know, we have been pretty public about our, you know, opening leverage pro forma for the transaction being roughly 4x . We are currently today at the lowest leverage point in our company's 30-year history. So levering up to 4x . I remember when we used to want to lever down to 4x within 24 months after closing the acquisition. So different time, different world. But again, that speaks to the strength of our balance sheet, that we can make a $6+ billion acquisition without any equity and lever up to 4x the trailing LTM EBITDA. And so, as we look forward, there are other. Those, those two processes I spoke about at the beginning of our conversation are still available, right?

They're kind of back in the queue, there are opportunities there. I think it's going to be governed a lot by our leverage. You know, if we delever by half a turn, I mean, that creates an incremental $1+ billion borrowing capacity just on our balance sheet to still remain below 4x before we lever the acquisition target. There's opportunity out there, but it's got to be an accretive deal. It's got to be an actionable transaction. There's got to be industrial logic, and it's got to be, as I said, substantially accretive to our shareholders over buying back stock. Our filters don't change. It's just obviously we see, you know, because this administration has been so pro deregulation, we wouldn't be attempting the TEGNA transaction in the previous administration.

It is President Trump and Chairman Carr and our Attorney General that are supportive of moving forward to develop a strong local antidote to big tech incursion into our businesses and our daily lives here. You know, the bigger we get, the more level the playing field is in a local market basis of trying to compete against them and maintain local journalism, which is really what we're all about.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

Pivoting to the core business, we've been seeing the pace of pay TV subscriber declines moderate over the past year or two, and it seems like that's beginning to have a positive impact on your business. What do you think is driving that improvement in sub trends, and what are the implications for your distribution revenue?

Lee Ann Gliha
EVP and CFO, Nexstar Media Group

Yeah. We're really happy to start to see some positive momentum in the reduction of the rate of decline in the pay TV universe. We think this is really due to, you know, a variety of different things. Number one, we did some work with a consulting firm, Altman Solon, a number of years ago, where, you know, we really just looked at what percentage of the pay TV subscribers really had no interest in news or sports, which are the two main components of broadcast television. Those folks that are not interested in those categories are mostly out of the ecosystem at this point. The rate of further attrition doesn't really need to continue to increase given that those folks are gone. That's point number one.

Point number two is we've seen, you know, companies like Charter do great things in terms of making their packages more beneficial to the consumers. They've, you know, Charter went around and rebundled all of these direct-to-consumer services into their core package and are providing the consumers with a much better benefit for the cost that they're charging them. As a result, you saw Charter actually sequentially from Q3 to Q4 show growth in number of subs. The rate of that sort of improvement has been great. I went back in time, and I graphed over, you know, the rate of decline has been a long sort of rate of decline, but now the recovery seems to be happening pretty quickly. That's, that's gonna be very positive for us.

We've also seen the advent of some skinny bundles out there that are really focused on broadcast and news, in which Nexstar is a core component of those offerings. All of those things together, we think should have a positive impact on the rate of pay TV attrition going forward, and that will be positive for our stability of our top-line distribution revenue.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

You just completed a major round of distributor renewals for 60% of your base, and you have another 30% renewing later this year. Talk about your pricing power in these renewals, and in particular, what are the factors that allow you to capture price increases to offset subscriber declines?

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

First and foremost, these are all market-based negotiations, you know, two parties have to agree on a deal or there is no deal. You know, we've always been a leader in generating distribution revenue from our portfolio. You know, we began to generate revenue from CW and MyNetworkTV stations, I think before they were in the main. We're always looking for opportunities to advantage our company and improve our offering to the consumer, whether it's through DigiNet's FAST channels or additional adjuncts to the pay TV ecosystem. Again, I have been involved in those negotiations either directly or now, you know, through a kind of a supervisory role. You know, I think the CEO's impact has some value there. I would like to think I have.

I mean, we've been able to generate sustained growth in distribution revenue and have been able to outrun the rate of attrition even when it was at its worst and show net, you know, retrans growth. I think, you know, we're still in a position to do that. One of the areas, one of the happy byproducts of The CW acquisition is we were able to convert a number of stations that were either independents or of some other, de novo affiliation to CW affiliates in our portfolio, that generates substantial distribution revenue increases, by having them as stations under our contracts and having them become affiliated with The CW .

We don't count any of that against The CW , road to profitability, but it's been a, you know, substantial double-digit millions, increase to our revenue base for those stations.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

You recently guided to low single-digit distribution revenue growth and mid-single digit net retrans growth for the year. That implies net retrans margins are expanding. What are you seeing across the reverse compensation landscape, and what does that mean for net retrans over time?

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

Well, you know, I think that when we sit down with our Big Four network brethren, you know, one of the first conversations in a distribution renewal for affiliations is, you know, I pay you for the product, the programming. I also pay you for exclusivity or have historically. The fact that this programming is less and less exclusive in my geographies, it's worth less to me. You know, once the bid and the ask are established, we can actually sit and have a negotiation at that point. I think you're seeing, you know, for us, and again, by virtue of those CW affiliations moving into the Nexstar umbrella and Nexstar tent, you're seeing us continue to grow distribution revenue.

I think you'll continue to see downward pressure on that expense line in our P&L and as a product that the margin will continue to incrementally grow better for us.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

Switching to advertising, you posted healthy growth in non-political advertising in the fourth quarter, and you guided to flattish growth in 1 Q. Can you give us some more color on the trends you're seeing across your advertising business?

Lee Ann Gliha
EVP and CFO, Nexstar Media Group

Fourth quarter, just to remind people, was also positively impacted by the lack of crowd-out. In political years, in the third and fourth quarter, mostly the fourth quarter, there's a negative impact on our traditional non-political advertising revenue because we're just allocating so much of our inventory to political. What we saw kind of in the back half of the quarter really was more later buys than what we had typically seen, and we've seen some large advertisers kinda come back in the market that we weren't expecting. We really saw kind of across the board positive momentum across all of our different advertising categories.

In the first quarter, you know, we anticipate flattish, in terms of the overall, you know, growth or lack thereof in the first quarter, which we still think is a positive signal. You know, we haven't really had anything major be outliers with respect to categories. We've got, you know, auto is doing, is less of a negative impact, and we've been really working hard to develop our digital solutions for the auto category, which have offset some of the pressure on the TV side of the business. We're feeling like, you know, there's not really kind of any major standout positive or negative with respect to categories, but we're feeling, that the market is just fine in the first quarter.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

We obviously have a midterm election coming up later this year. That should be a big tailwind as usual. Can you remind us what you're expecting for this election cycle and what share you think Nexstar can capture from within the overall pool?

Lee Ann Gliha
EVP and CFO, Nexstar Media Group

Our political expectation for the year is that we will do like a low double-digit percentage of whatever is ultimately spent on broadcast television. Because our portfolio is so broad, we generally are in 80%-90% of the contested election markets. You, you pretty much can be sure that we'll collect a decent percentage of the political advertising because, you know, no matter where there's gonna be a contested election, we're usually there. In the past few election cycles, as I mentioned earlier, we've generated about a half a billion dollars of incremental revenue. We'll, you know, what we end up doing this year will be dependent on what actually gets spent in broadcast.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

You mentioned digital a minute ago. That business grew high single digits in 2025, and you said you expect digital advertising to surpass your national business this year. Can you provide some more detail on your digital strategy and the factors driving growth in that business?

Lee Ann Gliha
EVP and CFO, Nexstar Media Group

Yeah. Digital, if you think about it, is really broken down into a couple different components. We've got our sale of digital inventory that is our O&O inventory, so that will be our, you know, our websites, our apps, The CW app, it'll be the NewsNation app. It'll be videos that we are able to monetize on third-party platforms. The other component of our digital revenue is selling third-party services. To the extent that we can, you know, utilize our really great sales force to sell additional inventory, you know, we've got an advertiser, we've got a relationship with them. They love the news product, but maybe they want a little more entertainment or they want something else. We can go get that and create it as an audience extension strategy for them.

That business has been really something we've been leaning into, and at the local level has been, you know, growing kinda high, high single, low double-digit rate of growth, which is, you know, really kind of benefiting our overall digital breadth. That's a little bit counterbalanced by we've had some reductions at The CW, and that's by design because we've changed the programming there to be more focused on broad-based and sports programming, which is not as attractive in the OTT environment.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

TEGNA has its own digital business, Premion. I know it's early, but I wonder how you see that complementing your platform?

Lee Ann Gliha
EVP and CFO, Nexstar Media Group

I think what's interesting there is right now we use a third-party service to access third-party CTV inventory. They obviously own Premion and have their own DSP, which we think can be, you know, competitively advantageous. We think by putting, you know, our inventory together with TEGNA's inventory in this, in the local market could really help us be more focused on that segment of the business, reduce, you know, the ad tax because we've got our own DSP and really drive growth by providing a bespoke service to our customers.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

You recently guided to around $2 billion of EBITDA this year. We talked about some of the revenue drivers, but it sounds like you're working on some initiatives to bring down expenses as well. What are some of the areas of the business you're focusing on, and can you help frame for investors the potential impact from these initiatives?

Lee Ann Gliha
EVP and CFO, Nexstar Media Group

Yeah. You know, we are, you know, every year we kind of just relook at our budget and I think we're a little bit unique in that we do almost like a bottom-up, zero-based budget where we kind of go back and we say, "Okay, can we be doing things better? What are we doing with spending with these vendors? How can we, you know, really kind of rationalize our costs and make sure we're doing the things that are the most efficient for the company?" The last couple years we've taken, you know, a couple of different actions to really try to, you know, benefit from the scale that we have and really take advantage of looking at where best practices are.

This year we're doing a few things like we have some very, very large organizations in our large markets that don't probably need to be as large as they are in order to generate the revenue that they've been able to generate, so we've taken some actions there. We're doing some additional consolidation of our marketing departments. Do you need to have, you know, creative people in every single market or can they be in a hub? These are the types of things that we're realigning the sales compensation a little bit to be more focused on what driving and being compensated on what we are trying to achieve. There's a, you know, variety of different actions there, and we do expect our overall expenses.

If you take, you know, w hen I say overall expenses, I just mean everything. Direct OpEx, SG&A, corporate, amortization of programming costs to be down, you know, not a huge amount, but low single digits, year-over-year in 2026.

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

We're also using AI in early days to reconcile payments and invoices. We think we can use it to streamline the research function in journalism to bring, you know, productivity enhancements, if you will, that ultimately could lead to either a rotation of jobs into either revenue or content creating as opposed to support functions, but also just overall efficiency of transaction friction and things like that. Early days, we're also trying to develop a tool that will allow a reporter while he or she is, you know, creating a story that would say, you know, "Have you considered this context?

This appears to be, this adjective appears to be biased in one way or the other." Just something that could give the reporters more to think about, not to dictate what they write, but to say, you know, "Is crime up or down in D.C.?" Well, it depends on what statistics you look at and how you frame the discussion. Again, to drive toward that North Star in the company, which is unbiased and objective reporting. Those are all things that are productivity enhancements that are part of this overall impetus to continue to do things as efficiently as we can while maintaining and improving even the quality of what we do.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

It's been a few years since you acquired The CW, you've since revamped the network's programming strategy. Live Sports now account for almost 50% of the slate. At the same time, you've reduced operating losses in that business pretty meaningfully. Can you reflect on the progress you've made with The CW and talk about how that asset fits into the broader Nexstar portfolio?

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

Sure. Well, our, you know, our interest in The CW was started with the fact that we were the largest distribution outlet for The CW. At that time, 35% of the U.S. was delivered by Nexstar stations. That number is now 50%. It, you know, for us, it was anything that can improve The CW can improve the fortunes of those stations, and I think that's a fundamental difference. We approach the network as how can it do more for our stations as opposed to a network top-down approach. In addition to the distribution value that comes from being a part of The CW and Nexstar, you know, we've given 800 hours of sports to stations that have never had been able to compete for sports dollars in their marketplace, either locally or nationally.

I think we've got most of the embedded overhead costs through the system. There's some money that was spent early on and prior to our arrival on content to drive app views for The CW that proved to be unprofitable. We're, you know, as those agreements unwind, we're kinda letting them go. I think at this point now, it is improving distribution, improving distribution revenue. You know, we're not on in this hotel, for example. It is looking for opportunities to expand our sports portfolio and continue to refresh that product. Selling sports better. I mean, you know, we know what the gap analysis is between the number of eyeballs we deliver among all of the networks and the number of dollars we receive on a percentage basis.

Our job is to close that gap and then continue to drive the top line. Most all of the high dollar program expense is through the system. You know, we're, you know, we're in the last year of the legacy agreement. You know, what we're finding is the things that's performed very well for The CW for us in terms of building a linear and digital audience are obviously sports on the linear side and the game shows. You know, we are doing Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble, and Scrabble is now hosted by Craig Ferguson, who used to host The Late Show on CBS.

His hosting ability as well as his name recognition has helped us to grow the, you know, that game show now to, you know, 500,000 viewers every time it's on. It didn't hurt the fact that coming out of an ACC, you know, football game, I'm sorry, a NASCAR race, we aired an episode of that as, you know, the primetime show starting off our night that night. That flywheel is beginning to work to our benefit. The game shows, our police shows, obviously wrestling works very well on Tuesday night. Just, you know, building those green shoots that we can continue to build on. The bar is higher now.

Used to be, you know, 3,000 to 300,000 was a good night for The CW in terms of total viewers. Now anything less than a 500,000 is kind of a disappointment for us internally. We need to continue to raise that bar because there are nights that we beat, you know, the Big Four networks or one of the Big Four networks in an hour. You know, I think all of last year that happened, you know, a few times. It's happened in 2025, like maybe five dozen times. Our job is to make sure that's a much more regular occurrence. That's just, you know, trying to grow our audience in a mature environment.

With both NewsNation and The CW, we've been able to architect a story of growth in a very mature operating environment. We're kind of a positive outlier to that effect.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

Speaking of NewsNation, in recent years, you've achieved wider distribution and healthy growth. Can you talk through some of the recent wins for this business and your vision for NewsNation going forward?

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

Sure. We just recently in February, expanded our live programming to 18 hours a day, Monday through Friday. We're only in repeats overnight like every other cable network is, and we cue those talk show numbers, and that's what we sell into the, into the advertising marketplace. Same story there. If you look at February over February, we're up 40% in total viewership and in the 25-54 demographic. We keep track of the number of times that we beat one of the legacy cable news networks. Again, I think in 2024, that happened maybe 30 or 40 times. In 2025, that happened over 240 times. It's again, green shoots showing, you know, our opportunity to continue to break through.

I think it's our objective reporting, our unbiased reporting, the fact that we're live in news on the weekends when some of our more mature legacy competitors are in taped programming. When things have happened on the weekends, we've been there live, and we're seeing that people are turning to us now for breaking news. Our audience grew during the State of the Union. They didn't abandon us for a legacy cable news network. Again, our job there is to continue to grow that audience. If I can put stack 40% on 40%, you know, for a few years, and now we're rivaling some of the networks that have a 25 to 50-year head start on us with building an audience with viewers. We're very pleased.

I say I've made a career being often pleased but never satisfied. You know, that's the same for NewsNation. I will tell you that we are very pleased at the growth that we're seeing recently, and our job is to make sure that streak continues.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

Sounds like the NFL negotiating window could be opening up later this year. Given how important that programming is to the broadcast ecosystem, I wanted to ask if you had any thoughts or predictions on how that might shake out.

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

Well, sure. I think that the NFL is gonna get their collective bargaining agreement done, so they know whether they have an 18th game to put into a package or whatever. Having said that, I think that each of the legacy networks has a perfectly good binding contract through 2029 season. I think, you know, there's no catalyst to tear that up unless there's an incentive to tear that up. You know, I have been negotiating NFL and what that means to Fox affiliates before Nexstar since the first NFL deal on Fox for the 1994 season.

You know, there's always a, "We're paying for this, we want you to help." You know, affiliates have contributed roughly, you know, in totality, 15% of the rights fee that the networks pay for the NFL collectively, the affiliates have deferred, which kinda tracks what we get about 10% of the inventory in an NFL game. I don't, you know, I don't see any of that changing. I think that, you know, in an, in an ordinary course negotiation for the NFL, they begin to talk about a new contract, you know, 18-24 months before the current contract expires, which means for a 2029 expiration, they begin to talk about it in 2027. Maybe we're six months early to when that would normally start. I don't know what the outcome will be.

I would predict the outcome would be that the Big Four networks would retain their legacy packages, that, you know, games could get skimmed out of that, not reducing the total number. You know, CBS on, you know, the 1:00 P.M. game on a Sunday could have seven different games going out to different parts of the country or five. Maybe now it's four because one of those went into an international package that, you know, comes on the air, you know, at 9:00 A.M. or 8:00 A.M. on Sunday morning, which is hard for local stations to clear 'cause they're in news or contracted religious programming or something of the other.

I think the downstream effect is if the costs go up on a step function to the networks, that each of them may be looking to rationalize their entire sports portfolio to pay for that, and that could create opportunities for The CW and our local stations. You know, this happened with NBC during the 2024 Summer Olympics from Paris, that they literally had no room for some of their NASCAR telecasts. They sub-licensed to us on a very attractive basis, seven races that we were able to use to get NASCAR up and running on The CW.

Whether it's through the linear packages or the digital packages, I think you'll see more opportunities for us to co-venture, perhaps joint venture, perhaps windowing, you know, certain assets that creates more original supply for The CW and our local stations, both of which could be a downstream benefit to Nexstar.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

To wrap up, I wanted to ask about ATSC 3.0. It represents one of the more exciting levers for longer term growth for your business. Can you talk about the progress you've made with ATSC to date and how you think about the path towards commercializing that opportunity?

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

We are receiving money for commercialization of our spectrum right now. You know, we're part of a four-company consortia called EdgeBeam Wireless. We have a very good CEO of that business that is based in Boston, we're receiving money now for commercial uses of our spectrum, high-speed data transmission. It's not life-changing. Wouldn't buy everybody in this room lunch at this point, but it's, you know, money's begin to flow. There are any number of proofs of concept out there, whether it's, you know, lower cost 5G network replacements or location-based, whether it's precision agriculture or fleet management using our GPS to autocorrect a terrestrial GPS system, connected car entertainment and navigation. There are any number of those kinds of applications.

I think as the, as the FCC moves toward, first eliminating the simulcast requirement, which we're there on that, I think eliminating ultimately the 1.0 carriage requirement, which would then cause the set manufacturers to have to design to 3.0. I think right now Sony is the only set manufacturer that puts 3.0 tuners in every one of their sets. It could help bring the consumer market along. Quite honestly, the monetization opportunity is in B2B and not necessarily B2C. I think we could provide, as a industry, a backup GPS system for the United States, and we're the largest industrial and maybe even the only industrialized country in the world that does not have a backup GPS system.

Now, most other countries have two satellites in the air, one primary, one backup, that could both be taken out by the same dirty bomb. if we were providing a terrestrial-based system, it's we think superior, and we've done a lot of work on, GPS is all about timing. We have our own atomic clock, and we're in sync with NIST, which is in Colorado, with one of our full power stations, that's a translator to our Denver stations that we're using to, and we've shown that our performance is far exceeds the standards for GPS. This is a viable alternative, a national benefit. The President and the Department of Transportation, I think even DoD, have all weighed in saying a backup GPS system is a national benefit for the country.

It's now just campaigning to get our technology and our system approved and that, you know, not only would we be paid for it like the current GPS system is paid for, but we would provide a national benefit, a public interest benefit by using our spectrum assets, which I think is, you know, obviously in the country's best interest.

Benjamin Soff
Director, Equity Research, Deutsche Bank

Well, that seems like a pretty good place to wrap it. Thanks, guys.

Lee Ann Gliha
EVP and CFO, Nexstar Media Group

Thank you.

Perry Sook
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Nexstar Media Group

Thank you for having us. Appreciate it.

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