Welcome to the twenty twenty Liberty Media Investor Day. Before we begin, note that in case of a technical difficulty, we recommend that you first refresh your computer browser. If this does not resolve the issue being experienced, our technical support team is standing by to help. You can reach them at any time by calling (773) 645-4877. Again, that number is (773) 645-4877.
Now please sit back and relax as our program is about to begin.
Brian, what's up with the no video?
Brian, please don't Zoom shame me.
Courtney,
you're on mute. Actually, it's kind of okay.
Can we do this on Zoom? People all think I'm no longer CU 40 if we're using Webex.
I am not getting my CU 40 tattoo changed.
Webex is so lame. I have to create a real life poster for my background.
It fell apart.
Hey, guys. Do you see my really cool background? It's the Internal Revenue Service Center.
Actually, I kind of like it.
Why are we using Webex?
This is the year of Test and Track, and we've only tested Webex.
Liberty may not know much about testing, but we have been tracking longer than Fauci. Today, we have an exclusive from the Liberty Collection. It's the Tracker Tracker with NavNav.
Oh Greg, I'm not familiar with this product.
It's a must have for anyone who follows Liberty. Can't figure out a tax basis? Worried the other fund managers have an edge? Embarrassed to acknowledge you forgot which asset is attributed to which tracker. Tired of making calls out to the surly IR crew in Inglewood?
In the privacy of your own home or office, this product tells you everything you need to know about LMCA, LBRD, LaVinta, L Trepa and QVCA.
Sounds pretty helpful. What's NavNav?
NavNav helps you navigate net asset value seamlessly in real time under any scenario. Calculate the LBRD discount to CHTR in seconds and it runs numbers on your own conspiracy theories for countless hours of fun.
He thinks we want more tickers, he must have borrowed Elon's Ambien. I have no room left on my signature block.
Liberty says it's trying to be more eco friendly to be included in new Dartmouth green ETFs. So I made this sign from recycled, sustainable, fair trade, gluten free cardboard. Tracking sucks kill a lot of paper. Good morning. Welcome to the Liberty Investor Meeting.
I'm here at the Time Center. Where are you?
Since we're virtual, I'm going to lose the jacket. We've split the agenda over two days. Today, we'll cover Liberty Media and Liberty TripAdvisor, and we'll end with Q and A with Greg and John. Q and A questions had to be submitted by last Friday, so we're all set. As you can see from our cold open, we're taking a trip down memory lane and revisiting our previous skits.
Stay tuned as we've got highlights throughout the meeting. A few logistical items. Please tag us on Twitter using Liberty Investor Day. As a friendly reminder, all slides will be posted after we do the necessary filings. We appreciate your patience.
They will be posted no later than next Wednesday, so they'll be there just in time for Thanksgiving. Before you text me asking me for the WiFi password, that's not my problem this year, so you're on your own. One of the good things about going virtual this year is that I don't have to read the FLS. Please enjoy this music while you thoroughly read the FLS currently on your screen, which will also be included in your slide deck.
A registration statement relating to the securities of Liberty Media Acquisition Corporation has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This presentation shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the security laws of any such state or jurisdiction. When available, copies of the prospectus related to the offering may be obtained for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov or from Citigroup, Care of Broadridge Financial Services, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, telephone (800) 831-9146 or Morgan Stanley and Co, LLC, Attention Prospectus Department, 180 Varek Street, Second Floor, New York, New York 10014. Now let's get on with the show.
2020, a year of reflection. I know we can't get together to film a new comedy skit, but it sure is fun to think about the days of building our fledgling acting careers.
And neither Sirius nor Live Nation would put us on, even though we own them.
Howard said we're a dancing act made for radio.
Renee, Ben, you're just in time.
I'm sorry, for what?
We've been setting the dance requirements for all the Liberty new hires.
I can back at Reyna.
Sorry, can't make it. I got to price another exchangeable.
You're not getting away that easily. Why don't we show you?
We will race again. We will race again. We will race again.
Welcome to Liberty Media's Investor Day. As my old boss, Bill Gates, said, this is like a world war, except in this case, we're all on the same side. Looking back at the second world war, the effect of the pandemic may be symbolized by Rosie the Riveter. Between nineteen forty and nineteen forty five, there was a 37% increase in the female workforce in The US. Men went to war and women went into the workforce.
Necessity bred acceptance. This year at times, while it's also felt like Groundhog's Day, life has also felt like listening to a podcast at one and a half times speed. Just as Rosie showed what was possible, COVID has also broken down the barriers of what we thought was possible. It's accelerated multi year trends, speeding up adoption from years to months, and forced digitization across industries. Labor intensive sectors have been shut down, and there's been rapid adoption of technologies in response to these lockdowns.
Some of the best performing stocks have had the highest yield of intangible capital per employee. We believe this is part of a larger trend, higher asset utilization. Across the Liberty portfolio, we're seeing similar accelerants and asset light transitions. At f one, we completed a transition to remote broadcasting in two months rather than the planned two years with a roughly 35% reduction in traveling, headcount, and overall cargo. Our esports took off with the delay in the start of the season.
Participation was up a 118%, and we had more than 33,000,000 viewers. We were the number one video on YouTube, even above the Queen's speech. At Braves, we have been digitizing in park transaction functionality with contactless payments and mobile ordering. At Live Nation, we've launched smart suite of tools that helps fans safely return to live events. This has accelerated the adoption of new technologies everywhere.
For example, the Kansas City Chiefs, they opened the NFL season with a 100% digital ticketing. Live Nation has tested streaming concerts, and they've become the norm. 95% of our fans indicate they plan to return to live events. That's the highest point of confidence since the start of the pandemic. Charter has accelerated the rate of self installs from 32% in the 2018 to eighty three percent this quarter.
At Sirius, broadcasting ops have gone remote. Howard is happily broadcasting from his basement in the Hamptons. QVC has also had innovation on the broadcast front. We've seen more creativity with streaming only content like our recently launched Curtis Stone Travels series. We've introduced hosts from home content, which has increased flexibility for vendors in the future with more manageable broadcast schedules.
Our customers love the authenticity. Queue hosts were the original influences now more than ever. But as Charlie Munger has said, consequences have consequences and the consequences of the consequences have consequences and so on. We have attempted today to identify some potential second and third order effects of industry accelerations that we hope are neither overly obvious nor too risky in asserting. We do understand it's risky to draw conclusions in the middle of a pandemic, especially with the rapid change of developments in cases, vaccines, the political landscape, and variability by geography.
Nonetheless, we will try. Here are some of the accelerated trends to discuss today. Digital boomers. Born out of necessity, there has been a widespread acceptance of online platforms with expanded audiences. Digital acceleration has been less impactful on my seventeen year old twins and other digital natives, but whose parents haven't started to buy groceries online for the first time.
The five year expected ecommerce growth rate curve accelerated in five months. Consumers purchased clothing, household products, groceries online for the first time during COVID, fueled in part by boomers. Boomers account for more than 50% of total US household wealth. 47% of boomers have increased digital spending during COVID. You too can still get some blue light glasses available on QVC.
For example, in online grocery, penetration doubled in 2020 to just under 10%. Last year, Activate estimated we'd have a 134,000,000 online grocery shoppers in 2024. In reality, in 2020, we already have a 140,000,000. We're blowing the top off many of these digital trends. So what's next?
We think there's a broadening opportunity for Zoom and other streamers. They are likely to become aggregating platforms with vertical apps that allow businesses of all sizes to create targeted services. Zoom will have a use case regardless of your age or technical ability. They will be a future resource for things like DIY home projects, fixing your sink, or scheduling a home appraisal. Last month, Zoom announced a new Zoom apps bundle, which will roll out this year.
It'll initially be focused on workplace and educational productivity with apps like Asana and Kahoot. But this is Rosie the Reveiter Revisited. Society didn't think we would be able to do it in this way, but when we had to, we did, and we will continue going forward. QVC Cribs. The DIY nesting phenomenon was hot well before COVID fanned the flames.
Marie Kondo may have been the original, but how fortunate that Netflix had this lineup ready to launch when COVID hit. With stay at home orders, we're all nesting and upgrading our cribs. Our bedrooms are our offices. Our living rooms are our gyms. Our backyards are our vacations.
Yes. This is an obvious narrative that we are all likely living. But let's look at how this is playing out at Curate. QXH footwear is down 14%. It appears some people haven't worn shoes in months.
Color cosmetics are down 38%. Front gate pool products are up 129%. QVC fitness and wellness is up 81%, and Zulily puzzle sales are up 157%. DIY is in because you can't let anyone else in your home. QXH at home pedicure sets are up 22%, and nationwide yeast sales are up 201%.
At QXH, bread makers are flying off the shelves. While premium beer sales are lagging due to bar and restaurant closures, we're compensating in other ways. Studies estimate the average person drinks per day are up 27% in COVID, and we know wine sales at QVC are up a 133%. The on-site is the new off-site. Born out of necessity, we have virtualized the office.
Life used to revolve around work. Now work revolves around life. This has given rise to a subset of white collar and technical workers we call the lululemon collar worker. Unencumbered with a steady income, they can work from anywhere if you have a good broadband connection. Interestingly, only 7% of British workers wanna return to the office full time once restrictions are lifted.
These trends will permanently shift business travel today. Tune in later to the Liberty trip presentation to hear more. And just check out Marriott's work anywhere offering. This may cause pressure on wages as companies can seek lower cost talent in distant locations, and there surely will be a divergence in the trend across subsets of The US workforce. The lululemon collar workers have almost fully recovered employment rates to pre COVID levels unlike other groups.
So what's next? We've already seen acute impacts to commercial real estate. We spoke with one leader in the financial services industry. He said current social distance protocols would require three and a half hours to get the whole staff through the elevators into their respective offices. Surely, this will abate with vaccines.
But over the long term, we do expect a significant decline in commercial real estate demand. While it may sound aggressive, one leading venture capitalist estimated will only need 20% of the current commercial real estate capacity in the future. Microsoft has already stated a new policy which says if you're not going to be in the office three days per week, you don't get a desk. Office space will surely be imagined as a creative meeting space, and this will drive higher asset utilization of the physical workspace and may cause even the reincarnation of WeWork. If these trends persist, what happens, for example, to the Midtown lunch spot, the dry cleaner, or the halal guy on 50 Third?
Perhaps this will be the final nail in the coffin for the shoe shiner and the magazine stand. With the remote workforce, there will no doubt be impacts on innovation and on workplace culture, creative thinking, and deal generation. Early indicators imply productivity is holding up, but we have questions about this for the long term. For millennials, the value of flexibility outweighs face to face connections. The deals of today originated from the face to face connections of two years ago.
But what about the deals that are two years from now? With the elasticity of time in quarantine, yes, you're saving time on commuting, but we're also working all the time zones. I have a son who's an investment banking analyst. He claims his workday has expanded two and a half hours. He used to only get work when the managing director came in at nine.
Now they start sending emails at 06:30AM. Born out of necessity, the pendulum has swung all the way to the virtual workforce. We think the right balance will settle somewhere in between with increased flexibility part of the new reality. With increased flexibility, we believe there will be a potential positive reversal of the current she session. We started the year with this headline in January.
Now we hear these quotes. Women have taken on a larger share of child care, remote learning, and elder care. Four times as many women as men have dropped out of the labor force nationwide. Here's a powerful message from the CEO of Mastercard. But we are optimists.
And in the long run, we believe women can be beneficiaries from increased flexibility in the workplace. We do recognize the concept of flexibility may look different for different kinds of workers, whether in the corporate world or in service industries. But with fewer career interruptions, we believe that in the years to come, we will see more women in leadership positions. Dedensification. With more time at home, everyone is rethinking where they want to live and real estate volumes are running sky high.
The typical US home sold in sixteen days in September 2020 versus twenty eight days the same time last year. Over the last fifty years, economic activity has clustered in larger US cities as employment shifted from manufacturing to services. But the cost of living, state taxes, and in some cases, wildfires have already made cities like New York and San Francisco difficult to scale. Pandora wisely expanded from Oakland to Atlanta in 02/2018. Their presence has grown from zero to 200 people with a significant focus on product development.
We've all heard about urban flight during COVID. Most of this is not the case. It's really concentrated in New York and San Francisco and not evident in other US cities. US residential inventories are nationwide down about 5% in the third quarter. By comparison, New York residential inventories are up about 16%.
Between March and June, 16,000 New Yorkers switched to Connecticut addresses. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that there are 16,000 apartments sitting unrented in Manhattan, double the typical vacancy rate. As a result of COVID, we expect tech in Silicon Valley and financial services in New York will virtualize. Slack is not the only company hiring for 100% remote positions offered in two dozen states. In recent years, the urban population has gotten increasingly younger.
In part, the appeal has been trendy bars and restaurants. But the New York state controller has estimated there were third to half of all of Manhattan's 24,000 restaurants could close in the next six months. So consider the network effects. If there are less restaurants, bars, and nightlife, will that reduce the appeal of cities for the younger demographic and further the flight from cities? D densification will also result in other inefficiencies, particularly around the environment.
The suburbs are responsible for about 50% of all US residential carbon emissions. In the burbs, car rides replace public transport, which produce four times as much greenhouse gases per passenger mile. Subway and commuter rail ridership in New York is down at least 60% and closer to home here in Colorado, the RTD ridership is down 70%. Other COVID related inefficiencies will also impact the environment. We've seen a resurgence in single use everything.
Plastic demand is up 40%. Global parcel volumes are expected to grow 19% this year, leading to inefficiencies with more packaging and last mile delivery. Even during the lockdown, we saw relatively low savings in energy consumption. For example, commercial buildings energy consumption was only down 15% even in April at the height of the lockdown. Outdoor heaters and constantly running ventilation systems have only added to our energy usage.
Overall, it's estimated that energy efficiency in 2020 will be down 12 15%. Charles Schwab meets Candy Crush. Pre COVID, there was already a rise in fractional trading platforms like Acorn and Stash. With sports on the sidelines and stimulus checks being cashed, sports fans went in search of a new way to bet, whether on FanDuel or Robinhood. We've seen stunning market activity in 2020 on Robinhood.
Over 50% of new brokerage accounts in the first half of the year were opened on Robinhood, And Robinhood daily average revenue trades were four times E*TRADE. And Robinhood users trade 88 times as many option contracts as the average Schwab customer. As one macro strategist cheekily said, the smart money is the Robinhood accounts, and the dumb money are billionaire hedge funds. There is an onslaught of market research attempting to quantify the market implications of Robinhood, but it's difficult. Our friend Scott Galloway has said, if you wanna know what Tesla stock will do tomorrow, just look at how many Robinhood accounts were open today.
Surely, factors have contributed to the wild market movements of 2020. Softbank, which might be viewed as a large aggregated Robinhood account, bought $50,000,000,000 of tech options in stocks like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple. On the other hand, corporate buybacks have been reduced by more than half in 2020. We've seen irrational market behavior in our own stocks. Look at the premiums on the b's versus the a's in Curate and Liberty Trip.
The godfather of this movement is Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports. Check out this video.
And once my brain adapted and was able to figure it out, quickly I realized stocks only go up. So we just keep betting on stocks to go up, and they keep going up.
Our thesis, can't stop, won't stop until there's a market correction. Doctor McDistance, there's been a movement towards telehealth for decades, but there's always been an underlying assumption that anything other than in person was unsatisfactory. COVID forced a change. Last year, eleven percent of consumers used telehealth. Seventy six percent of consumers indicated they're likely to use telehealth going forward.
Medicare patients grew telemedicine visits from 11,000 a month last year to 1,300,000 a week in mid April. McKinsey estimates that the telemedicine market could be worth as much as $250,000,000,000 a year, and digital health companies raised $5,400,000,000 in the 2020. The hardest transition may be physical diagnostics. The biggest growth is likely to be mental health remotely. So what's next?
People will get over their obsession with HIPAA and the privacy of medical data. Doctors will go DTC, and hospitals are at risk of being disintermediated. Fifteen to twenty percent of all their patients come from emergency room visits, which are down substantially this year. Rising unemployment plus our health care crisis will surely raise questions about continually tying employment and health care coverage. This may also be another example of an industry migrating towards higher asset utilization with expanded medical access, shorter waits, and more efficient use of facilities and doctors' times.
Campus light. Pre COVID, higher education was already in trouble. Overall enrollment growth is slowing, as you can see in this chart, and the tuition revenue of small private schools declined three times as much as their larger peers. The cost of attending college is up an average of 10%, and debt has risen three times that rate with repayment rates plummeting. COVID has accelerated the adoption of online learning.
This is another example of higher asset utilization where digitization will drive better productivity from education facilities and faculty. Pre pandemic online education was starting to grow with 35% of undergraduate students taking at least one course online. Now nearly 100% of college students are learning remotely, at least in part. Online degrees are being destigmatized. And here we may have Rosie again.
Longer term, surviving schools will look to better monetize their assets with larger student populations and likely a hybrid model. Princeton can rely on its endowment distributions for 50% of operating revenue. Without it, they would lose over a billion dollars. In contrast, Liberty University, which doesn't have the endowment, has only 1% of its operating revenue from its endowment distributions, but has a 100,000 students, most of them online. As a result, they have a robust income statement and high asset utilization of both their physical campus and their talent pool.
There are limitations to online only education, and there's still a benefit to the in person component. The classroom version of the on-site is the new off-site, perhaps will involve more class time being collaborative and more lectures being pre watched online. With economic and demographic realities and COVID accelerated technology advancements, surely a major shift is coming in higher education. Let's talk about the economy. We've seen unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies.
The Fed has been growing its balance sheet for years, but COVID has taken it to another level. Monetary stimulus and Fed backstopping have created a sense of infinite liquidity. Corporate debt issuance through the third quarter was 35% higher than all of 02/2019. Companies were given liquidity lifelines, but not necessarily solvency lifelines. We are creating record deficits with US deficit to GDP ratio likely to exceed 16% this year.
That's higher than all of our socialist European peers. State budgets will be hurt even more. They're not allowed to run deficits and can't print money. We do expect a supply shock from shifting to two supply chains, a China one and a non China one, at a cost of likely a trillion dollars. And this will break thirty five years of muscle memory associated with one integrated global supply chain.
Services are traditionally two thirds of our economy. With 70% of them shut down, consumers have not been able to spend there. There's also been a $1,000,000,000,000 increase in personal income due to the fiscal stimulus. This has gone into two areas, savings, which are up, and product spending. Product spending is up 25% this year.
That product demand has fueled the economy and stock market this year. Historically, the service sector has driven inflation with prices growing about 3% a year compared to product prices which grow about 1% a year. This year, we're already seeing price appreciation in new categories of products like housing and food. Beef and veal is up 20% and used cars, which are up 15%. Without services, it's unclear what future inflation will be.
Perhaps much of this demand is a pull forward of future product demand. We'd probably be short the 2022 futures market for camping supplies, RVs, and used bikes. To finish, this has been a period of dynamism amidst great challenges. COVID has demonstrated it's good to be big, it's good to be digital, and it's best to be both. There have been outsized winners like Amazon and Netflix and Zillow and closer to home companies like Charter and Curate.
And dueling trends abound. We've seen digital acceleration driving distribution and globalization of talent and intangibles and yet greater localization of the physical and other supply chains. We are more digitally connected than ever while we are forced into physical separation. We've had increased personal income with government assistance, but fewer purchase occasions. There's been a progression towards an asset light business model across many industries, yet there are also massive inefficiencies with dedensifications and new supply chains.
We have so much newfound time, yet we all feel we have no time at all. Many of the changes we have mentioned above might be transitory, but we think a number of these effects are here to stay. At Liberty, we will look for the opportunity amidst this disruption. Thank you. As we have said, 2020 has felt like Groundhog Day.
When the pandemic began, we created a red team focused on shoring up our balance sheets and ensuring liquidity. For example, most recently, last week, we priced an $800,000,000 LYB exchangeable, B920 with the shoe, that will help fuel incremental capacity for share repurchases at LSXM. We also restructured our margin loan on live, which will free up incremental live equity that can be used as collateral for future LSXM repurchases. When the pandemic began, we also formed a green team to go after opportunities. Notably, we completed the reattribution between FWON and LSXM.
As we communicated at the time of the deal, we believe reattribution was in the best interest of both sets of trackers. But at the time, there was some grumbling from a few LSXM shareholders. Well, let's look back. Since then, the LSXM shareholders who bought the LYV stock at $36.72 per share have profited dramatically. As of the time of this filming, the LYV stock's up about 70%.
The LSXM shareholders get half the upside on that up to $47.74 a share and a 100% thereafter. So a pretty good deal. Since the time we did the deal, all of our stocks have outperformed the market. I wanna reach out and thank two of our great leaders. We'd like to think that Liberty's strength is empowering companies with talented management and letting those teams operate autonomously and successfully.
But nowhere have we had stronger leadership than Chase Carey and Jim Meyer. We were blessed to have them and thank them very much. The good news is we also have a strong bench. Jennifer Witz, who's been with Sirius for nearly two decades, will become CEO there. And Stefano Domenicali, who has unparalleled respect, reputation, and credibility will take over at f one.
We do remain focused on getting to 80% of SiriusXM. It's appealing because of the tax consolidation. All the dividends that flow up from Sirius to LSXM will be tax free versus about the 8% leakage we have today. We would love this to be an ATV, an active trader business, but it is not a priority. It would require us to go through too many hoops and unnatural acts, So it's unlikely we will do it, and we do have other ATBs, the Braves, and F1 will soon become one.
We have used our firepower for buybacks at LSXM. We have lots of asset coverage and future liquidity to do more. I'd also note that we expect Siri will continue to buy back stock to get us to the 80% level, and we'll also continue to pay out an increasing amount of dividends. Importantly, this year, we signed a new Concord agreement and credit to Chase Carey and his team. This should promote a more level playing field and ensure the long term financial stability of both the league and the teams.
Importantly for us, it provides greater upside for FWON as we have greater financial success for the league. There are other regulatory changes included which simplify our governance and will promote greater competition, including more standardized parts. There's still more to come, there's future work to be done on things like reducing the cost of the engine, but we're on the right path. F1 also announced updated efforts on sustainability. There's a lot of impressive progress that's been made in the past year.
We were awarded the FIA's three star environmental accreditation, the maximum award the FIA can give. 90% of the global vehicles are powered by the internal combustion engine, and the vast majority will continue to be powered by internal combustion engines for a period to come. So it's important that we help drive advances in that engine. The largest opportunity for emission reductions is through hybrid technology and sustainable fuels. Electric is great PR, but electrification isn't the only future.
To power an f one car at current speeds over a Grand Prix race, you would need the amount of energy in a six and a half ton battery. We have a history of long, strong returns, and that equity story remains good. As a part of continuing that story, I want to introduce LMAC, the SPAC. Given legal restrictions, I can't say much more than what's on the slide, but I do encourage you to please look at the registration statement that we filed today. Some of the opportunities for us for the SPAC and other vehicles we have may be in beaten down industries.
The market may be, in our judgment, underestimating how long it will take for some of these segments to rebound, and we will continue to look here for interesting investments. Lastly, I wanna point out some of the great work that our companies did around COVID and community engagement. Thank you. And now you'll hear from Brian Wendley.
There's no virtual. It's just your office.
Oh, sorry. Here.
Is Star Wars now? Yes.
Oh, look at the doggy. Look. Looks like a tennis ball.
Thank you,
Patricia. Good? You got everything you need?
Good to go.
Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone, from Inglewood, Colorado. The liquidity picture is strong at Liberty SiriusXM. Dollars 12,000,000,000 of total debt with $7,900,000,000 being held directly at the Sirius level, under moderate leverage of 3.1x and an undrawn 1,750,000,000 revolver. This leaves $4,000,000,000 of debt at the parent level, which is pro form a for the live exchangeables that we just issued. Pro form a impact of an incremental $800,000,000 in debt and cash, which excludes any potential upsize from the greenshoe.
This is an attractive instrument with an exchange price of $90 and a coupon of 50 basis points. We plan to use the proceeds to repay the legacy live exchangeables and settle the call spread in 2021. Any incremental cash will be used for general corporate purposes, including stock buybacks. Our corporate debt is comprised of $1,700,000,000 of drawn margin loans and exchangeables covered by our Series shares and $1,200,000,000 of exchangeables covered by our Live stake and the 1.375% LMC convertibles, which we'll discuss more in a moment. This debt is supported by ample liquidity, as you can see on the right hand side of the slide.
After backing out the Syrian Live shares underlying the various margin loans and exchangeables and the value of the live call spread, there's 14,600,000,000 of asset value. This includes the pro form a impact of freeing up 45,000,000 shares by amending our margin loan in conjunction with the newly issued live exchange pool. For purposes of this slide, we are valuing the call spread at intrinsic value, assuming Live Nation is trading above $47.74 at settlement. Lastly, there's also pro form a cash of $900,000,000 and margin loan capacity of $800,000,000 Next, we just wanted to provide a little bit more clarity around the $1.375 cash convertible notes. We issued these notes in 2013.
At issuance, we bought a call spread to increase our net conversion price to up 75%. In 2016, the notes became convertible into a basket of shares when we did our tracker recapitalization. As you can see, the majority of the basket value is still in the Series shares, but there is a portion that is related to the Batter and Fwon shares. As part of the reattribution in April, we moved a portion of the Batter interest over and created an F1 intergroup interest to cover the exposure of those two securities. As a result, we are now hedged on our exposure to price appreciation on the securities in the underlying basket.
Looking at LSXM's NAV. Pro form a for the reattribution, the NAV of LSXM is still pretty simple. Two public securities, and Sirius and Live Nation make up 95% of the asset value. Add in the intergroup interests, the pro form a cash and a small iHeart investment to finish off the asset side. Value inclusive of the impact of the bond hedge and the warrant, and you include the intrinsic obligation under the call spread to an NAV of $19,800,000,000 or $8.3 a share.
That represents a 34% discount. Even if you zero out all non Siri equities, including the intergroup interest and burden calculation, with a full amount of corporate debt, we would still trade at a mid teens discount. Moving over to the Formula One Group. We have a strong liquidity position here as well, dollars 1,400,000,000.0 of cash at the parent level, dollars $639,000,000 of liquidity at the OpCo level, which includes $500,000,000 of undrawn revolver capacity. The Batter Intergroup interest and the AT and T shares round out the left side of the slide.
After adding in the expected intrinsic value of the live call spread and backing out the AT and T shares that underlie the exchangeables, you get to our total liquidity picture of $2,600,000,000 This leaves us in a good position, both at the OpCo level with the revolver and at the parent level with available cash balances to either pursue an attractive investments, opportunities or support the F1 ecosystem, which doesn't appear necessary at this time based on the success of the 2020 season. As the next slide states, we have a manageable debt profile at the F1 Group, dollars 2,900,000,000.0 of debt at the F1 level. As a reminder, we were at 5.1x leverage at year end before feeling the effects of COVID. We have since modified covenants replacing net leverage with a $200,000,000 minimum liquidity covenant through March 2022, which is easily covered currently with the cash balance and the revolver. At the parent level, we have $800,000,000 of debt, the bulk of which relates to our 1% convertible notes, which are stated here at fair value.
The remainder of the debt is either covered by our AT and T shares or other corporate level assets. Switching to the Braves. We have total debt at the Braves Group with a little over $700,000,000 This is offset by cash of $240,000,000 of which $77,000,000 sits at the parent level and could be used to help support the Braves if needed. During Q3, we amended our covenants on the stadium debt as well as the MLB facility and the revolver at the team level. Lastly, let's spend a moment thinking about the Braves valuation.
Per ESPN reports, Steve Cohen paid $2,400,000,000 for the Mets, implying a 6.7x revenue multiple. We aren't saying Steve paid too much, but we appreciate what it should mean for our stock. If you were to look at it on a dollars per win basis, he paid about $93,000,000 per regular season win in 2020, implying a valuation north of about $3,000,000,000 for the Braves by our math. The Braves are currently trading at 2.8x our twenty nineteen team revenues or $1,200,000,000 after backing out analyst consensus value for the battery. This compares to $1,800,000,000 for the most recent Forbes estimate.
If you were to apply this Met's revenue multiple to the Braves, the Braves would have an enterprise value of $2,600,000,000 Congrats to Freddie on the NL MVP. As he is demonstrating on the right hand side of the slide, this would take the stock from its price of $21.39 on $11.6 up over 100% to $43 and change. Note these prices are inclusive of the battery. Nearly trading at comparable sales comps is truly an opportunity to hit it out of the park, and we expect continued good things to come for the team and for the equity. Thank you for your continued interest in Liberty Media Corporation.
What's going on? What's on?
What's your waiting for?
I should wait.
What's going on, Dion?
Deborah Metzman is moments away now. I can see her.
Hi. What's
up? Thank you for all that you guys are doing for us. How are you bringing your a game
this time in the morning?
Well, I love that you think it's my a game.
Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah. You think you can handle me? Let's check. Is that?
Oh my god.
There's Marquis in the building. Yeah. No. We can't hear you, brother.
Doja Cat. He gets too far in your liver?
Yes. What?
Tia, you adopted a son, didn't you?
I actually adopted two sons.
They were aging out of the foster care system, and, yeah, and I love them.
And the thing about Hamilton is
that different things hit differently depending on where we are in the national discourse.
And it's something that a lot of communities have been talking about forever. It's not a new conversation.
Everybody have a
drink in their hand?
Cheers to the Virtual Music Row
Happy Hour. But first, our last order of business, transition planning. We haven't spotted her yet. Why?
I see something. That looks like the downtown markings of a SiriusXM executive, busy at work. Oh, she spotted us. Crikey. Stand very still.
Oh, she went back to her work. Let's see if we can get a closer look. Quiet. We don't wanna spook her. Nothing faces her.
She's hard at work in a stand up desk. The perfect successor. We've never been this close before. Shh. Oh, crikey.
We best back out now. We've broken the concentration, but a successful visit nonetheless.
I'm thrilled to actually be here in our SiriusXM studios in Rockefeller Center today. And maybe after we wrap this up, I'll go back down to Jim Meyer's office and start taking some measurements. In all seriousness, I am very excited to be taking on the CEO role of SiriusXM in January. Jim Meyer and I have worked together for seventeen years and I've learned a tremendous amount from him. We share many of the same values including hard work, high integrity and following through on our commitments.
I'm incredibly grateful to have had him as a leader over the last several years and I know I speak for all of you and the employees at SiriusXM when I say we will miss him dearly. We are in an incredibly powerful position. We are the leader in audio entertainment in North America with 150,000,000 listeners across our platforms and brands. Key to this and core to us maintaining this leadership position is our content. We are the best in audio across every format and all genres.
We will always invest in content to support our value proposition across our platforms in a disciplined way. You can see many of the new additions we've had this year on this slide including our expanded relationship with Kevin Hart, our recently launched partnership with LeBron James and Uninterrupted on Pandora, which will soon come to SiriusXM as well and our soon to be launched Marvel podcasts. I want to take a minute and talk about Howard Stern. So Jim talked a lot about this on the earnings call a few weeks ago. I have nothing new to add today, but we remain encouraged and confident that we will have something to say soon on this topic.
I think we can all agree that Howard Stern is at the top of his game. He is incredibly talented and creative and he has done some of the best interviews I have ever heard and seen in the last several months while working remotely. We would be thrilled to continue to have him on our platforms going forward. I want to talk a little bit about podcasts. SiriusXM has always led in the talk audio space.
We've been doing talk audio for twenty years. So we are well positioned to participate in the podcasting space. We will be launching podcasts on SiriusXM very soon. You'll see us provide a very curated set of podcasts for our SiriusXM paid subscribers, including our much anticipated launch of Marvel. For Pandora, we'll provide a much broader set of podcasts, including those from third parties to complement our music service.
And with the addition of Stitcher, we have a podcast focused content offering as well. Let's turn now to SiriusXM specifically. We have a winning consumer value proposition combined with a resilient business model. The combination of our unique premium audio content offering across music, talk, sports, news, comedy and entertainment, along with our compelling ease of use in the car drives our strong conversion and retention rates. Key to growth for us in the future are four initiatives: protecting and growing our position in the car, building our 360L capabilities, driving SiriusXM engagement outside of the car and growing our digital only subscriptions.
We'll talk more about those in the coming slides. I want to go back to our business model. We have an extremely powerful business model and business models matter. At no time have we seen that more than over the past year, which has been extremely challenging for many companies. However, we are uniquely positioned to continue to drive our strong results because of our resilient subscription model.
We have high ARPU and high variable margins that support our profitability. Let's talk about our position in the car. I feel really good about this. We have executed a number of long term agreements with virtually all of our OEM partners. You can see the most recent ones here, BMW, GM and Kia.
Many of these agreements even go out as far as 2028. These agreements are key to improving our penetration rates over time. We still expect to get to 80% penetration by the end of this year and we have line of sight to even a couple of points higher than that as we go into next year. Of course, changes in market share and model mix could affect this or we could see fluctuations, but the overall trajectory is the same. We will see increasing penetration rates among our new car sales.
I'm also very pleased that we've been
able to
secure improved distribution of 360L across our OEM partners. We will reach 25% of our SiriusXM equipped vehicles next year and that will grow to 80% in the four years beyond that. 360L is how we future proof our business. The combination of satellite and IP delivery in the car gives us expansive bandwidth and the capability to offer more personalized services to our subscribers in the car. Our improved penetration rates on the new car side roll through to used cars and improve our overall long tail opportunity and drive increases in our enabled fleet, we expect that over time to reach two twenty million vehicles on the road.
Now that we have secured and advanced our position in the car, what's key is for us to expand our engagement among our satellite subscribers outside of the car. The vast majority of our subscription packages now include streaming. We know that if our trialers stream during the trial, our conversion rates are materially higher. The same follows for our subscribers. If they stream, retention is higher.
This has been a slow and steady March. It is a marathon and not a sprint, but we continue to see improvements every month. In addition to getting our satellite subscribers to engage with us outside of the car, we're looking to grow our digital only subscriptions. I believe there is untapped opportunity here. This is key to our growth going forward and we see this as a new funnel for our business.
So let's turn to Pandora. We are improving our content both with select SiriusXM content, increasing numbers of podcasts and we're improving our feature set. We've seen great engagement with Modes, a feature that we introduced last year and it continues to build in terms of engagement, especially when we combine it with unique brands like LeBron James and UNINTERRUPTED. On Pandora, maintaining listenership remains a challenge in a very competitive market. However, the bright spot I see is our ability to monetize through advertising.
We are still the largest free audio platform in The United States. But what's even more interesting is the fact that we can use our expert ad sales team and our ad technology to improve our advertising business outside of Pandora and off platform. So let's turn to the advertising business. The massive U. S.
Audio advertising business has clearly struggled this year with COVID, but we still have a business of $15,000,000,000 in revenue and terrestrial radio still maintains the dominant share at 70%. However, the share of listening for terrestrial radio has been in decline and therefore the growth in the future will come from digital and satellite. We are clearly well positioned to capitalize on this growth. Not only do we have the strongest free audio platform in The United States, but we also have added Stitcher and Simplecast to our ad technology stack to be able to provide effective monetization for podcast creators. We now offer a one stop shop for content creators and advertisers.
At $1,300,000,000 this is clearly an important and growing revenue stream for SiriusXM. I want to talk about two additional revenue opportunities. We are exploring launching an ad supported SiriusXM satellite tier in the vehicle. You've heard us talk about never losing a listener. The best way and most successful way I think we can achieve growth here is by integrating the product in the car.
We are looking at a number of different options in terms of the number of channels and the types of channels because what we don't want to do is cannibalize the robust business model we have in subscription in the car. However, with the combination of satellite and IP, we can offer targeted and interactive advertising capabilities and this can be a successful way for us to win back our non converters and churners in a much more integrated way. The second revenue opportunity is spectrum. Jim showed this slide last year and I am pleased to report progress. We have launched our initial wideband deployment this year, first with an aftermarket radio in the middle of the year and now we have our first OEM launching in the next month with the production of our wideband chipset.
This chip allows access to both pieces of our spectrum and as soon as the middle of this decade, we will be able to consider options to free up the low band for other opportunities. There will continue to be additional ideas as we research what we might use this spectrum for going forward. This year has been incredibly challenging as you all know and I am very proud of our team in terms of how we have delivered against these challenges. Our self pay net subscriber additions for SiriusXM, we expect to be approximately 800,000 this year. That is 90% of the number we initially expected at the beginning of this year.
Of course, we have seen the tailwind of rising auto sales driving and rebuilding our auto funnel, but we've also had extremely strong performance in churn across all of our Reason codes. So our SiriusXM subscriptions will be close to what we expected earlier this year. Despite a major fall off in advertising revenue in the second quarter, our third quarter advertising revenue was down just 6%. So our total revenue for 2020, we expect to be down only 1% at approximately $7,850,000,000 Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be approximately $2,475,000,000 which is up 2% versus 2019. And our free cash flow generation remains strong at 1,600,000,000.0 Our free cash flow generation has been what's enabled us to deliver significant capital returns for our shareholders.
In the third quarter, we ramped up our repurchases and recently we announced our fourth consecutive increase in our dividend. Since 2012, we have returned more than $15,000,000,000 of capital with repurchases and dividends to our shareholders. Given all of this, we have also been able to execute a number of strategic transactions over the past year. We have deployed our capital to support our business with the acquisition of both Stitcher and Simplecast to enhance our podcasting capabilities. And earlier this year, we made a strategic investment in SoundCloud to have a better window into the global streaming music company and its attractive younger demographic.
In closing, let me tell you what our priorities are for 2021 and beyond. We will bolster our leadership position in audio in North America with premium content and effective distribution. We will continue to drive penetration of SiriusXM and 360L in the car to fuel the long tail growth in new and used cars and build our enabled vehicles. We will accelerate SiriusXM's digital only subscriptions and the engagement of our satellite subscribers outside the car. We will strengthen our position as the largest and premier digital audio ad platform in North America and we will leverage our unmatched business model to deliver significant EBITDA and free cash flow to our shareholders.
These are my commitments to you. Thank you.
The world is missing live more than ever. Electric feeling of the music, the roll of the crowd when the home team scores, the memories we make enjoying these moments together. Artists can't wait to get back on the road.
Music to me is, it's the air that I breathe.
I feel like my art is the ability
keeping their tickets for rescheduled festivals. The show will go on. EDC twenty twenty one sold out in under twenty four hours. New Zealand just hosted a sold out arena tour with 20,000 fans. Ticketmaster has helped the NFL welcome back almost 500,000 fans.
We are innovative. We are resilient. We are Live Nation.
Good morning, and welcome to the Live Nation show. While the flywheel is paused, today, we want to take you through why the fundamentals of our business are still strong, why we see great opportunity coming out of this and how we have the balance sheet to finance our growth. We're looking today at some of the greatest pent up demand that the live business has ever seen. The fact that 83% of fans are holding on to their tickets in anticipation of next year's show is amazing. On the supply side, artists are waiting for the green light.
We have lots of venues underutilized available and ready for a 2022 surge. And we're now seeing a path to a business back in the 2021 with recent vaccine news and other science upgrades. And at Live Nation Ticketmaster, we're doing our part to get ready both at the access control level and at the venue protocols. We believe coming out of this, we will have an upgraded flywheel. We're seeing technology advances and opportunities that will excel growth programs for us.
We're seeing new programs emerge. And we've got an evolved leadership team that's ready to innovate in the Live Nation two point zero. And now Jackie will take you through some of these programs.
Thank you, Michael. As the flywheel starts up again, our global expansion opportunity will accelerate. Thanks to our superior business model, both at Live Nation and Ticketmaster, we have the ability to grow market share over time, including in underserved markets where we can meaningfully increase our presence. This will lead us closer to our $125,000,000 fan goal, driving an incremental two seventy five million dollars of AOI opportunity. We've also used this time to rethink our Ticketmaster business, aligning everyone under one global team.
Over the next few years, this team will be tasked with developing and implementing a global technology roadmap with the goal of getting Ticketmaster to one global marketplace, representing an additional $75,000,000 of AOI opportunity. During this time, ticketing trends have also accelerated with certain events having 100% digital ticketing adoption rates. This will accelerate our ability to improve our marketing, optimize our pricing and improve our on-site spend through contactless concessions, representing a $225,000,000 AOI opportunity. We've also rethought our entire e commerce flow from the waiting room to the checkout page. We've gone through all our digital properties, optimizing and increasing our ad units, representing $125,000,000 AOI opportunity.
With that, I'll hand it over to Joe to talk about some new items we've been working on.
Thanks, Jackie. One of the areas we've seen great fan demand this year is with streaming concerts, over 100,000,000 fans watching Live Nation streams this year. Going forward, we think this can be a great incremental revenue stream for artists who are already putting on their concert to add the stream. And Live Nation is uniquely positioned with over 23,000 concerts across our venues and festivals, where the artist can simply add the digital stream to the concert they're already doing on a very efficient manner. That, combined with our Ticketmaster platform, where we can sell both the virtual ticket and the real ticket together on the same platform, leveraging Ticketmaster's fan traffic, gives us a tremendous opportunity to create a new revenue stream for artists, which Live Nation can also benefit from.
Another area that we've seen a lot of growth this year is in direct to fan e commerce. We've long been in this business working with artists on fan clubs and ticket programs for them to reach their fans directly. And this year, the merchandise business that we operate for our artists is up 85% year to date. These programs together can create a platform along with other pieces that will give artists a number of ways they can connect with fans and again create additional incremental revenue streams that both they and we can benefit from. And as we've stopped over the past several months, we haven't stopped asking ourselves how we can work better, how can we be more effective, how can we be more efficient, What technology can we use?
How do we centralize to take advantage of special skills? How do we develop new data tools? How do we make decisions that are faster? And as we found a number of areas that we can do that, we've also seen that we can do it cheaper. And we think that we can take $200,000,000 out of our cost structure while operating more effectively.
And these cost savings along with the liquidity that we have today now has us at a point where we can see a path forward. We believe we've got the capital necessary to not just come out of this, but to accelerate as we come out of it. And as we look at the great range of liquidity options that remain beyond what we've already have, we think that we can truly take advantage of any opportunity that we see as we emerge from this pandemic. So as Michael spoke, the supply and demand dynamics are great. As Jackie laid out, our core business opportunities are as large as ever.
We have new opportunities in streaming and direct to fan e commerce. And we've got a great cost position, liquidity and flexibility so that by 2022, we're returning to the double digit growth that we've delivered over the past fifteen years.
Thank you for listening to our business presentation today. But before we go, I want to make sure we acknowledge all those affected by the live shutdown. And I'm very proud of Live Nation. We have launched Crew Nation, raised over 15,000,000 so far to help all of those in need who are the heart and soul of the live show. And here's a video.
COVID has impacted all of us. Since July, I've been in 15 countries, had over 50 COVID tests and even found a new CEO. I'm gonna miss all of you. I won't miss these Investor Day hijinks.
A new season and a new decade for Formula One. And finally, it's here. Flights are out, and we're underway for Formula One in 2020. It's all about maximum attack. Valtteri Bottas wins.
Yes. Look at that move. Oh my lord. It's another victory for Lewis Hamilton. That's that's will to wield up, Max Verstappen
When we took over Formula One in 2017, we inherited a skeletal organization that lacked structure and vision. It had no social media, marketing activity, brand building operation, and it rarely engaged with the fans. Therefore, we immediately launched a detailed plan to grow this incredible global sport in the way it deserved. That plan was built in improving the competition and action on the track, upgrading events to true spectacles, aggressively developing digital media capabilities while upgrading our traditional broadcast for fans, exploiting growth opportunities both geographically and by expanding our brand and improving the business model for Formula One and its teams to strengthen existing partners and attract the right new partners. 2017 and 2018 were foundation building years largely spent putting an organization in place to execute these plans and improving relationship with partners to enable us to deliver our goals, which was a significant challenge as we largely started from scratch and inherited a culture of divide and exploit, not partner and grow.
In 2019, we began to deliver on the very first step in the long term growth of the sport, with revenues growing 11%, pre team share EBITDA up 14% and adjusted EBITDA up 21%. More importantly, we were delivering growth in fan excitement through increased attendance, viewership, digital engagement and support for our initiatives. We entered 2020 with a budget reflecting continued growth in revenue and profits. We had a high degree of confidence in our budget given the contractual nature of our major revenue streams. We felt equally positive about our ability to keep this growth going into 2021 and 2022 as we built on existing initiatives and plan for new ones to add further strength.
Obviously, 2020 did not play out as planned for us or the world, and our priorities and goals were turned on their head. Faced with the virus, our ultimate goal became positioning the sport so that the impact interrupted our growth curve, not changed it. Essentially, when the world emerges from the virus, we want Formula One to largely be where we expected to be before the virus. In order to achieve that goal, we identified three key priorities for 2020 after the virus hit in March. First, to keep our fans engaged with the sport championship season and other initiatives that maintain the momentum we built coming into 2020 and to do so safely.
Second, while mitigating the financial impact from the virus this year, prioritize strong long term relationships with our commercial partners. And third, enhance the long term growth of the sport by completing agreements and regulatory changes to strengthen the competition and action on the track, the governance of the sport and the business model for the teams in Formula One. There are still three races to go this season, but we believe we are well on our way to achieving our goals. Our success is a testament to our employees, our teams and our partners who rose to the challenge, with Formula One being the first international sport to resume its season, something we're proud of and shows the resilience of our sport. Delivering a race schedule in a safe and secure way required teamwork, planning and discipline.
Most do not realize the complexity of our sport, which requires about 2,500 personnel and a schedule to race in 13 countries in twenty twenty with people and organizations arriving from a wide range of locations. We launched a 17 race schedule in early July, meeting our previously announced goal of a 15 to 18 race calendar. Building the schedule was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle as 13 of our originally planned 22 race locations canceled and only three of our races occurred on their originally planned dates. We used this as an opportunity to create special interest for fans by adding races in locations where we had not raced in years, if at all. The fans have reacted to the revised season and new venues very well.
While many sports have struggled with viewership declines this year, our viewership is up modestly over last year. To achieve these results in a season where the Mercedes dominance and Ferrari struggles, while so many other sports have seen steep declines, is a solid achievement. Our digital growth has been even more dramatic. Formula One is the fastest growing sport league in terms of followers across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, with a 17% growth rate between March and September. Formula One also saw the highest year on year growth rate for social engagement, with growth of 70%, which is more than three times higher than its closest competitor, La Liga, which saw an increase of 22%.
This season also saw some great moments from both well established champions, highlighted by Lewis Hamilton becoming the all time leader in wins with his ninety second victory surpassing Michael Schumacher, and from some of our great rising stars, including our youngest ever podium in Monza with an amazing victory for Pierre Gasly, with Carlos Sainz and Lance Stroll taking second and third spot. It looks like 2021 will be an even bigger year for driver storylines, with four time champion Sebastian Vettel moving to Assy Martin, two time champion Fernando Alonso returning to Formula one with Renault, Daniel Riccardo moving to McLaren, Carlos Sainz joining Charles Leclerc at Ferrari and the potential for one or two emerging drivers from Formula two to join our incredible roster of young stars that includes Will Kirk, Max Verstappen, George Russell and Lando Norris. We could not have a more exciting group of stars on the track. Netflix has been capturing the drama as they filmed Season three of Drive to Survive. The racing in 2020 has not only been confined to the real racing circuits.
Our virtual Grand Prix series achieved a record breaking 30,000,000 views across TV and digital platforms during the lockdown period as fans tuned in for live sporting action, including eight virtual Grand Prixs, Pro exhibition races and challenge events with current drivers, F1 legends and sports and music stars all battling it out against each other. Our F1 Esports series presented by Aramco got underway in October, and we've seen tremendous growth with Esports as over 237,000 participants attempted to qualify this year. We will have eight live broadcasts double last year, which will be streamed online via F1's official channels on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch and HUYA as well as broadcast by international TV partners. With regards to our 2020 results, we recognized early on that this was going to be an unprecedented and uniquely challenging year financially. The most significant impact was on our promotion revenue as only four of our 17 races will have had fans and those were capped at less than half capacity.
Only one event will have a limited Paddock Club, although we have had success with our virtual Paddock Club this season. In spite of these challenges, we've not only maintained, but strengthened the relationship with our promoters. We've completed renewals for next year on improved terms. Last week, we announced a 23 race calendar for 2021. We were particularly excited to add Saudi Arabia to our calendar next year.
Our Saudi partners plan a race that will truly be a spectacle in the grand descents, and we're excited to play a role in helping our partners provide new exciting experiences to the people of Saudi Arabia. Sports has always had a unique role in bringing different cultures together and crossing borders, being a force for good. We are planning for twenty twenty events with fans that provide an experience close to normal and expect our agreements to be honored. We will also be looking to bringing the Club back to our events. We have great plans for the Paddock Club, which were deferred this year and expect it to be a significant contributor to our long term growth.
We have proven that we can safely travel and operate our races, and our promoters increasingly recognize the need to move forward and manage the virus. In fact, many hosts actually want to use our event as a platform to show the world they are moving forward. Looking beyond 2021, we continue to feel great about the excitement from locations around the world in hosting Formula One. Many locations we raced at this year expressed great interest in new races, and other countries have stronger than ever interest. We expect to move to a 24 race calendar in the next few years, and we'll probably rotate a few races so we'll be able to accommodate a few new partners, but they will be limited as long term partnerships continue to be our priority.
Sponsorship revenues in 2020 were not impacted as severely as promoter revenues, but it was significant as some canceled locations had material local sponsors, the fewer races reduced title sponsors and inventory, and the lack of hospitality precluded hosting benefits. We've reached revised agreements with most of our sponsor partners and are in constructive discussions with all. We approached these agreements with a spirit of partnership. In almost all cases, we could have taken a much firmer approach if we simply enforced our contracts as written. However, we believe it is best to approach these discussions with a sense of fairness to maintain our momentum.
We also wanted to protect the long term value of our agreements by primarily absorbing adjustments in 2020, not subsequent years. We believe this decision has served us well. We're finalizing our last renewal for next year, and support from partners has been strong. We're also actively engaged in bringing in new sponsors. We have stated before that the sponsor area has been one that has lagged behind our expectations.
Some of those challenges are macro ones in a world dominated by Facebook and Google, and some of the challenges are not initially appreciating the situation we inherited. We made some organizational changes early in 2020. And while the virus has created some unique challenges in the short term, we feel good about our momentum. Aramco was a great addition to our global partner portfolio earlier this year,
and we're actively engaged
in a number of opportunities in areas like communications, technology and finance. Sponsorship continues to be an area of opportunity, we look forward to delivering on our promise. Television revenues have not been impacted to the same extent as promoters or sponsorships, but it has still been material. Much like sponsorships, we prioritize long term relationships over contract terms, and again, we believe it served us well. In spite of the virus, we completed a new agreement with Sky Germany and renewals with MovieStar, AMC Networks, Match TV, Bell Media, Service TV and ORF.
We continue to expand our digital platform through new initiatives like a partnership with YouTube to livestream our race in Germany to a number of markets. Our OTT platform, F1 TV, continues to improve both technically and content wise. We continue to work with our broadcast partners to either gain more flexibility or partner with them to grow this platform for our most avid fans. Overall, we could not be more excited about our opportunities for growth in the traditional television and digital world. Our engagement in social media continues to explode.
Engagement in new franchises like eSports and Drive to Survive illustrate the global interest in Formula One. Our discussions with the large digital players continue to get traction. At the same time, our traditional partners are second to none in importance, and we recognize the challenge is how to navigate this changing media landscape while building partnerships on both fronts. Our third priority this year was to implement key initiatives for the long term growth in health and support. A cost cap on team expenditures to improve competition and the business model for both existing and potential new teams.
New technical and sporting regulations for 2022 that will improve action on the track for fans a five year agreement with teams to better balance prize fund distribution and provide improved stability and an enhanced sense of partnership a streamlined governance structure to better grow and improve the sport advanced initiatives on both diversity and sustainability and strengthen our balance sheet to provide both stability and an ability to be opportunistic during this period of continuing uncertainty. We clearly have more to do, and in some key areas, we're just beginning. Our sustainability plan will be at the top of that list. A year ago, we announced our sustainability goals for 2025 and 02/1930. These goals touched every part of our business, and we've made real progress in the last twelve months with actions reducing travel, freight, office operations and other initiatives to reduce our carbon footprint or achieve other sustainability goals.
However, at the top of our priorities for both sustainability and our sport is building a road map for the combustion engine that addresses the environmental goals of our automotive partners and society. Formula One has long served as a platform for introducing next generation advancements in the automotive world. We believe we have the opportunity to do that with a next generation engine that combines hybrid technology with advanced fuels. It is increasingly clear that electric will be part of the solution, but that a carbon neutral combustion engine is as important, if not more so, to the world's environmental goals. We need to build an engine road map with our partners that addresses both our cost and environmental goals.
We are not alone in recognizing the leadership opportunity Formula One has in this case. Leaders from both existing partners and potential partners speak to the importance of this initiative. We also continue to build on other initiatives which are important to us, our fans and society. We recognize that it is increasingly important in today's world that you have to do good if you want to do well. We are proud of our We Races One initiative launched in July to stand against racism, address inequality and diversity in Formula One and ensure we have a positive impact on communities and the environment.
We're moving forward with plans for scholarships, internships and other initiatives to address these problems alongside our sustainability goals. In conclusion, we've successfully weathered the challenges of the virus in 2020. We are planning for a world that begins to move forward in 2021 and have been clear with all our partners as it relates to those expectations. We have an even more exciting 2022 right behind it with new cars and regulations to energize competition and action on the track with a healthier business model to broaden the appeal of the sport. That being said, we recognize that we do not have a crystal ball as it relates to the virus.
So we will be prepared for the unknown. But what we are certain of is that when the world moves past the virus, the Formula One will be prepared to pick up where we were before the virus interruption. We believe the world will value unique events live and on screens as much as ever. The countries will want a platform to connect with a world that is sick of being cooped up. And the unique combination of incredible sport, Meredith's state of the art technology, will uniquely position us for success.
My tenure as CEO over this incredible sport has been an adventure. On January 1, Stefano Domenicali will become the new CEO of Formula One, and I look forward to supporting him. The business couldn't be in better hands as Stefano knows how to run a large and successful international business, and he also knows Formula One better than most. I wish him and everyone in the sport the best for the exciting years ahead.
Hi. My name is Stefano, Stefano Domenicali. And I'm really proud that from January 2021, I will be part of this family and taking responsibility for Formula One project. Well, this will be an incredible journey. Stay tuned, but do not expect from me any kind of guidance at all.
Yeah. Hey, Liz. Business is it's gonna rebound, man. We've got a we've got a great team for years to come. Yeah.
Battery is already bouncing back. We're we're in good shape. We're in good shape for the future. I'm excited.
Yeah. Thanks. Absolutely. No.
No. I I'm not gonna ask Freddie Freeman to write
a Peloton.
No. Yeah.
I'll tell I'll tell Ronald Acuna you're a better athlete than him. I Hi, my name is Derek Schiller. I'm President and CEO of the Atlanta Braves. Welcome. So I want to first start by taking you back a little bit in time where we actually laid out a vision for this in an Investor Day a few years ago.
We talked a little bit about the strategy going into a new ballpark as well as building the Battery Atlanta. And that strategy was really set on investing in that new ballpark, building up the business model through increased fan amenities and enhancing those revenue streams. And then we also built a whole complex of a mixed use development associated with the new ballpark. And that created an opportunity for us to have a three sixty five day a year environment in addition to a brand new ballpark. The result of that is nothing short of fantastic.
And those results have already proven out. Today, if you're coming to the Battery Atlanta, you would see a vibrant mixed use development. We've built really what is a community, and that community operates three sixty five days a year around the ballpark. The ballpark itself is obviously designed for Braves game day use. We've got a lot of great things that are happening as part of the ballpark.
This would probably be a good time to remind you that we also went through a rebranding of the ballpark. Ballpark changed its name from SunTrust Park to Truist Park when the merger of SunTrust and BB and T happened. So that is now fully in place and all of the signage and all of the other associated assets of the naming rights partner have all been changed to Truist Park. Up until this point in time, all of the key performance indicators of this new business model have really worked out exceptionally well. You can see on the screen there a lot of the KPIs that we've drawn out.
And the fans have reacted. They've come to the ballpark in lots of different ways. Certainly, ticket sales have increased and associated revenue streams have increased substantially since we moved into the ballpark in 2017. And then also because of the success of the team and reinvesting into the on field product, fans have also followed us in ways that include television, where we have almost a doubling, really more than a doubling of our television ratings since 2017. So we're earning this year, I think we averaged right around a 3.6 household rating, which is really fantastic and led each of the nights that we were on TV.
So that was great. So then we obviously take you to March 13. We call out this date on the screen because that is the date that basically our entire operation stopped. We halted our spring training and we ultimately started thinking about what could we do to obviously pivot from this. The world changed at that point in time.
I think it was one hundred and thirty three days from that March 13 until we started the operation of our abbreviated 60 game schedule. But in the meantime, we focused a lot on what we could do to reduce expenses and manage the business in a different way in this COVID environment. So in addition to dramatically adjusting our expenses and really controlling those, we also worked a lot on our health and safety protocols so that we would be at the ready when the season did resume. We created a health preparedness task force, which actually still meets to this day and we are ready for the eventual return of fans. In fact, we did have some fans return for viewing parties during our post season run.
So with that, the battery also has been going on and has been continuing to operate actually during the entire COVID time period. So since that March 13 date, we've had the battery that has stayed in operation. There are some places that stopped in some degree or form. But we actually had a Phase two that was still continuing to be under construction. In fact, it's still under construction right now.
And the primary parts of that Phase two is an elevator test tower and an office complex that's associated with a company by the name of ThyssenKrupp. So ThyssenKrupp will operate and occupy about 50% of the commercial space and the remaining space will be leased out. In fact, we've got some major tenant announcements that will be coming here soon for the remainder or a big portion of the remainder of that space. So really excited about that. And that really completes the lion's share of the Battery Atlanta build out.
It's going to be an unbelievable complex that actually joins right with what our Phase one. On the field, we did complete that 60 game season. It was an abbreviated regular season for Major League Baseball. Normal season is 162 games, so having 60 games was very unusual. But we were able to win the National League East.
And that obviously is a big feather in the cap and certainly went on to a very unique postseason. The postseason was something that worked out pretty well for us, I would say. The picture that you're seeing there is really us winning the division series in Houston. And then we went on ultimately to play in Arlington, Texas for the league championship series. We were one win away from going on the World Series.
So obviously, little bit disappointed in that, but overall had a remarkable year. And that's led by a lot of great individual performances. Now up on the screen is some of those individual accolades and achievements of our players. Had a great run with a lot of the different achievements there. And we're still awaiting what we think will be the eventuality of Freddie Freeman winning the NL MVP.
We're very hopeful and believe that he's deserving of that great achievement. This is also a good time to remind you that Brave Country is a very sizable piece of The United States. It represents one of the largest geographic marketing territories in all of professional sports, about 14,000,000 homes in that area. And that ultimately represents an opportunity for us, not only today, with a lot of great things that are happening in that territory, but ultimately, it's we believe a great opportunity for the direct to consumer offerings and other things that will be happening there. On the lower right hand, there's a picture of The United States, a map of that.
And you can see each team is defined in the various territories where they sell the bulk of their tickets. We actually have the most number of counties that we sell tickets to compared to anybody else in Major League Baseball. I think it's over four fifty counties that we sell to. So pretty cool things happening on the business side with our fan base. Speaking of which, we've continued to have great engagement with our fan base even while we're in the midst of this pandemic and have seen some terrific results in the form of social media engagement as well as other offerings that we have there.
We believe, again, we're well positioned for that. And we also think that this is really a result of some of the work that we've done over many years, not only with Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which really started about ten plus years ago and helped usher in great digital innovations in Major League Baseball and the online platforms, but also for us. We were one of the first teams to adopt mobile ticketing. And ultimately, the results of that mean that we've got a lot of fans that are already used to consuming and engaging with us in all of our digital content offerings. There's some great results of social media content that's happening.
We ultimately think we're going to have a good chance of monetizing these and doing really well with all of our social media content. Let's look forward a little bit. Let's look to 2021. Obviously, in the midst of a pandemic of twenty twenty and some of the challenges, we obviously want to look forward to 2021. We feel like we're in really good position for 2021.
And in fact, if you look at some of the other indicators for our business, one of which, really important to us, is ticket sales. How are we doing in ticket sales? Well, in the midst of a pandemic, we sold over 1,000 new season tickets, which is really remarkable. We think that's actually that's a pretty big achievement. And I wouldn't normally call that out and we wouldn't normally put that on this particular Investor Day presentation.
But I think it's substantial enough and shows you that even while the pandemic is going on with the excitement of the team and all they're looking forward to, we're actually doing a really good job of selling tickets. We also are engaging with our corporate sponsors in a meaningful way. We've been able to retain a bulk of their revenue for the twenty twenty season. And looking forward, we think going into next year, we're well positioned with corporate partners and believe we should be able to return to pre COVID levels for our sponsorship revenues and associated. So feel really good about 2021 as we sit forward.
So overall, 2021 has a lot of great things going forward. Far left of the screen there, you can see that one of those is that we're going to be hosting the twenty twenty one All Star Game. So we've got a lot of work on that ahead. We've been already actually actively working with Major League Baseball on that and feel really good about what that event represents for us. Also the team itself.
Team itself is in really good shape, as is the battery. The battery is actually doing quite well. In fact, it's got some restaurants that are today reaching levels that were higher than when COVID came. So some of the results that we're seeing in the battery from a sales level are really indicative of how Atlanta and Georgia are responding to this. People are still coming out and they're still doing so in ways that we think we can do so safely.
So it's happening and I feel really good about that and appreciate the support of our local and state governments. As far as financial results, look, I think everybody will tell you that's in the live event business that we were substantially impacted. Obviously COVID is not good for businesses that rely heavily upon people congregating in large gatherings like at a ballpark and coming together. So that hurt us. But if you focus on next year and once we emerge all out of this, we think we're going to be able to return to those high revenue achievements that we were having before COVID came.
And we think we're well poised to do so. We also know that COVID actually positioned us to advance some technologies and some other things that will work well for us, not only as we immediately emerge from this but will also help us long term. Things like contactless solutions as you come to the ballpark, being able to pay with digital wallet and those types of offerings. A lot of things that we think are going to be innovations that will succeed and ultimately help us achieve higher yield and higher opportunities for fan engagement and fan experience. So overall, what I'll tell you is the team is looking great.
We have a great team on the field. We've signed some of the young talent to long term contracts over the past year or plus. We've got some returning great players, Freddie Freeman right there in the middle. And obviously, we're going to complement that continue to complement that with some key acquisitions. Alex Anthopoulos and his whole team have done a remarkable job.
And we're well poised to have success on the field for a long, long time to come. Off the field, the battery is a success. It's a great rendering here of the Thyssenkrupp complex and that Phase two that I mentioned earlier. And the occupancy rates of not only that, but also the rest of the battery have been going up. And we've actually got some new offerings and some new openings here in the battery that have been going on for the past year.
Excited to have those fully up and going. So really, really good stuff. One of the final things that I'll mention is the Mets, not just because they're in the NL East and they're a foe of ours on the field, but off the field, they just went through a transaction. And that transaction resulted in, I think, a record multiple of revenues. And we certainly are watching that closely.
I hope you are too. We actually have a lot in common with the total revenues of the Mets. And so you can make your own determination about what the value of the Atlanta Braves is as a result of some of those recent transactions, especially including the Mets. I want to thank everybody for participating today in this unique way. And I will tell you that we are poised to return and have a great year next year, not only on the field, but off the field well.
So we're in terrific position with all of our business and think that we're in long term success here. Thank you.
We owe our CEOs a huge thank you for putting up with our shenanigans.
Not all of our CEOs were as enthusiastic.
Noah Falca.
What's up with this new theme of retiring to chairman?
Well, there's nothing wrong with being Chairman. It's a pretty good deal.
I wonder if forcing them to act had anything to do with their transitions.
It's Courtney again. Please tune into the FLS displayed on your screen and included in our slide deck.
This got me thinking, Greg. Have we been unfair to Jason Bazinet all these years? Have we dogged him mercilessly?
And Jason Bazinet, self appointed tracker creator and ticker name, recently suggesting in his research a new ticker, Linta. Really? Wow. We've never heard that one before.
And a second one called Liberty Access. Liberty Access? Really? Thank you, about a QVC HSN merger. And you're still speculating after all the years on QVC buying HSN.
Really, really? Well, actually, really.
I see here you allocated 17% over the Q3 hours to the Formula One group. Now I would think post Tickerpalooza, your allocation should be well under 15%. Even if it takes double effort, you can't count Jason Bazinet time twice.
Is it time to seek forgiveness? There are some traditions that must go on, and he earns it every year.
We hope you enjoyed our Liberty trivia and the best of my man, Foe Mafe. Who is not over their staycation? Trip has been looking at travel's progress in stages. To date, The US and Europe's progress through these phases has been fluid. However, we can all hope that recent vaccine developments creates the potential to fast forward to stages four and five.
When we were in the decline stage at the peak of the pandemic, we went out and transformed the capital structures at both Liberty Trip and Trip. At Liberty Trip, we retired the inherited margin loan and brought in a key strategic investor. And at Trip, we both strengthened liquidity and cut costs. And as we moved into the plateau stage, Trip leveraged its strength and its credibility to build safety and assurances about where you could travel at what time. This brand building and reputation assuring exercise, I think, was beneficial both to travelers and to trip.
As we move to stage three and travel starts to emerge, we expect there will be shorter trips made on shorter notice. And, this will probably play into the strength of trip as a trusted adviser. RVs and campers have been a hit. We'll check back in 2022 to see what the demand for them is then. As we look ahead, business travel may be permanently reduced.
US residents logged 460,000,000 business trips in 2019, but business travel today is hard and remains depressed. Going forward, this may be a case of Rosie the Riveter. If you can work remotely, if you can be productive with virtual meetings, will you travel as much? Our belief is it's not likely. The days of the rogue warrior may be behind us with 55% of survey respondents saying they plan to reduce their corporate travel in 2021 by at least 50%.
We will see what happens in 2022 and as we go forward. But business travel is the smaller piece of the travel pie. Last year, there was 1,100,000,000,000.0 spent on travel. 800,000,000,000 of it was spent on leisure. We believe there is demand for leisure and that will return.
It may, in the short term, look different. It may be more quick. This year, it's expected that most Thanksgiving travel, for example, will be a day or two. But Trip is set up well to meet the leisure travel needs however it changes and however it moves in the future. Trip has not been standing still during this pandemic.
Steve will give you more details on it shortly, but Trip has used this time to build new revenue opportunities including Trip recommendation, insurance, and a coming subscription service. Thank you.
Hey, thanks everyone for joining. I got to tell you, I'm really liking this working from home thing.
Hey. As soon as I found out that the barn had Wi Fi, I took my work from home to the work from the barn, and I'm pretty much spending all my time here. Hey, Steve. Any chance you might think of adding equestrian medical benefits to our benefits plan?
Yeah. Sure. That's not gonna apply.
All right. We'll let you go. And until next week, folks, have a safe ride. Cheers.
Have good ride. Bye.
I'm going to talk to you today about Helps unleash the full potential of every trip. We are a global travel guidance company. I cofounded TripAdvisor twenty years ago with the goal of helping everyone travel in a way that's magical, leveraging the advice, the insight, the opportunities available from millions of other travelers who have been there and done that trip before. What you see is an incredible marketplace.
We have 400,000,000 unique users each and every month coming to TripAdvisor looking for that insight for their travels. What they find is close to a billion reviews and opinions and photos, amazing insight to help them plan that magical trip. They're looking at information about over 2,000,000 accommodations, 4,000,000 restaurants, hundreds of thousands of different things to do, all with the goal of having a terrific vacation. We have the demand, we have the supply and this feeds into a wonderful feedback loop. Travelers come looking for great insight and they find it on the TripAdvisor site with the content that we have.
They then go looking for suppliers who can meet the needs, places to eat, places to stay, what to do and we send leads to those clients. The traveler then comes back, reports on their vacation, writes more genuine unbiased content, post photos so that yet again, more travelers can find more of what's good out there. We reach travelers at all stages of their travel journey, from the discovery, where should I go, through the research, through the planning, whether you're a light planner or a heavy planner. And then you move on to the comparison, which exactly hotel is right for you on this trip, then through the booking process, and then you're on vacation and you are experiencing this trip of a lifetime. What this amounts to is an incredible influence in the travel industry.
Oxford Economic Study reported that we influenced $05,000,000,000,000 in activity in the travel sector, over 2,000,000,000 vacation nights and over four thirty three million trips taken. This is an incredible amount of scale and of influence. And that's what's really helped make TripAdvisor a household name, a brand name amongst consumers and everyone in the hospitality business all around the globe. Now COVID times have certainly challenged us. What are we doing to navigate this challenging backdrop in 2020?
Traffic, of course, went straight down. April was our low point. But since then, it has been recovering month on month. Summer saw a very steady recovery, some plateauing in October, November. And with medical developments that are on the horizon, we foresee a strong rebound in travel, especially in the areas where TripAdvisor excels, namely leisure travel.
Talk to your friends. We feel that pent up demand to get out and go somewhere. And when travel recovers, when people feel safe to travel, it's coming roaring back. Even in the middle of a pandemic, TripAdvisor has more than held its own in terms of the world's most popular travel site. We remain number one in the category.
So let's talk about for a moment how we are helping our various stakeholders throughout this pandemic and preparing for the next phase. For our consumers, of course, safety is number one. Nobody is going to travel when they don't feel safe. And until a vaccine arrives, we want to make sure that travelers have as much information and are as comfortable as possible when planning that next trip. We launched our TravelSafe initiative.
Over 120,000 hotels and restaurants and attractions have uploaded information, sharing with their potential audience everything they are doing to help their traveler, their potential guests feel safe in their hotel, in their restaurant, on the trip in general. Super successful both from the supplier side, free for suppliers as well as the travelers. After all, we are a guidance company, travel guidance company, and we want to provide the best possible information to travelers all around the globe to make them feel safe, their number one concern. But we aren't just addressing COVID. We are looking into the future.
We are continuing on our clear path to present a One Trip Advisor vision, helping a traveler plan the trips that really matter to them. We covered the whole spectrum. We're helping in the design of the trip. We're helping taking the trip. We're helping in the experiences, the hotels.
The whole thing becomes that trip that you need to have the best advice in. And that's what the One Trip Advisor vision is all about. We're continuing our efforts on multiple devices. So after a while, we will be releasing our new mobile app, a key development in our overall future as the app is not only engaging when you're planning, but a critical necessity when you're actually on the trip. We've also rolled out some new consumer direct to consumer products, and I'll tell you a bit more about that later.
And we have a brand, a new brand that is repositioned to capture the excitement of TripAdvisor, to capture the excitement of travel. We look and say, what's good out there? Because there's so much bad news in the world these days, But travel, travel is a great connector. Traveler is a wonderful emotional connection that humans have all over the globe. And so we rolled out our new brand positioning, there's good out there.
I'll let you see. And last, but certainly not least, we're about to roll out a great new subscription product. You can think of it as a premium club for travelers who are looking to get extra value, special treatment to help make this vacation an amazing stay. Think about other subscription products you know, how loyal that audience becomes. And we're aiming for the same thing with Discounts on tens of thousands of hotels, special treatment, free upgrade if available.
It's the things that everyone can remember about their trip as well as discounts on all of the attractions and tours and activities that we sell on TripAdvisor. As an annual subscription, our audience belongs to this club. Now if you think about it, we have the demand for a product like this already on our site. Those north of 400,000,000 unique users, they are coming to our site to plan that magical trip. And if we get the math right, if we are able to show a traveler a discount, a perk, a benefit that they can get on this trip that more than pays for the subscription itself, we think of that funnel of the hundreds of millions of users taking trips that really matter, enrolling them, getting them to subscribe to a travel club that will help make their vacation better, will save them time, will save them money and will make for a more delightful experience.
We do the math and it doesn't take a high percentage of our current audience to make this a wonderfully successful product. But again, it's all about the traveler. How do we help them take this trip? How do we help them save an amazing amount of money, get some perks, make the trip really special? And of course, with any program like this, we'll be adding more and more to it in terms of perks, benefits and other things.
Moving on to our partners. Some great progress in terms of what we're able to do with partner facing activities. First, with COVID, we absolutely had to recognize that many of our partners were in a world of hurt. So we immediately granted several months of free activity for the folks who were already subscribed on our subscription products. Then we said, well, what comes next?
Well, these folks need help understanding when the best time to reopen, to extend their hours, to take more guests. And so we provided actionable insights to our audience in order to help them recover. And as they recover, so does the whole industry. And then because the team also has grand ambitions to help more and more hoteliers and restaurateurs throughout their life cycle in a post COVID world, we were hard at work and launched two additional products that recently came to market in our Hospitality Solutions unit. So with MenuConnect, we offer the ability to publish restaurants to publish a menu throughout the world, easy one stop, one button click.
Reputation Pro, helping hoteliers improve their reputation on TripAdvisor and other sites. Again, free marketing, great for the hotels, something that they can do even with the limited number of guests they have now, but we're planning for the future. And Spotlight, a business advice product, one that's helping hotels make the right decisions now and into the future, leveraging the sales channel that we already have in building in helping hoteliers all around the globe. And then to our shareholders, when the pandemic hit, like many other companies, we sprang into action. We immediately said, what's this going to do to our business?
How do we plan for what could be a lengthy recovery? And we took immediate action on our fixed cost structure. We pulled out over $200,000,000 costs in calendar twenty twenty alone with a run rate that's higher than that. We immediately shored up our liquidity, renegotiating our bank line and taking additional $500,000,000 in debt. We needed to make sure we had the strong capabilities to withstand a recovery no matter how bumpy it might be.
And we've seen some bumps, but we were actually prepared for this level. So strong liquidity, improved cost structure and we continue to invest in the products that I just talked about and more driving our investment future for these growth opportunities. When we look at it, we say we are on a wonderful track now to be able to grow as a company on a lower cost structure so that we'll be able to regain our profit abilities even before our top line regains to twenty nineteen levels. And what you see here is in our Q3 EBITDA numbers, we show exactly how that fixed cost structure that we took care of or that we lowered and the variable cost structure that is involved in our performance marketing immediately can reflect the current demand environment so that we were able to turn a profit, an EBITDA profit in Q3. So again, when we look at our growth, we look at a multitude of diverse revenue opportunities.
Our hotel category, what built the company, remains strong in our auction, in our B2B products. Our display and advertising capabilities, we have a lot of traffic and we continue to grow our media in our endemic and non endemic. And now we're adding this awesome new subscription opportunity. We launched Reco, our trip designer product, earlier in the year, helping travelers plan an amazing trip with the advice and expert advice from trip designers. And now with the subscription product coming in a couple of months, we'll have an opportunity to help our travelers with more value opportunities throughout the year and of course the renewal.
Experiences remains one of the best opportunities online. It's one of the last ones to come online. We have a leading position both in supply and demand, and doing the right thing when you're on a vacation is absolutely part of having that full considered trip that really matters. Dining, we have our restaurant reservation business in Europe, South America and Australia. And of course, we have a thriving media business on TripAdvisor, which covers the entire world.
Other includes some of our other points of business, including our joint venture with trip.com in China, tapping into that potential quite powerful market. When you look at how this has moved over the years, we see that we've gone from basically a hotel only company. And in 2019, our revenue is much more diversified, and we expect that trend to continue. So to finish, we look at travel rebounding when we have a vaccine. As these medical developments emerge, the pent up demand we think is going to be tremendous.
We're in a wonderful position to capture that. We're already the world's largest travel platform with all of our traffic. We have such brand trust with consumers that people, of course, are still coming to us to figure out where to go, what to do, where to stay. We're launching a major new value proposition in terms of our subscription product, a whole new potential for revenue growth. And the TripAdvisor brand, reinvigorating it with our there's good out there campaigns, primarily on the site, expanding off-site as we can.
With our flexible cost structure, with what we've done internally, we're in a very nice position so that we feel as TripAdvisor and the industry comes through the pandemic, we are in a tremendous position in order to achieve our objectives and help even more travelers all around the globe. Thank you very much.
Do you remember how hard it was to convince Carlton year after year to make a fool of himself?
Who are we kidding? That took no convincing at all.
Well, that certainly opens up some old wounds.
Maybe we can get Brian into a King George costume next.
All right. And welcome to the Q and A portion of our day, what you've all been waiting for. First, I'd like to give a shout out to all those folks that joined us in Peloton yesterday. So not shockingly, our big winner was Greg, but lucky for you guys, he can't actually win any of the prizes. But other top performers were Halsey, Jeff, Michael and Phil.
So congratulations to you. And then we'll get started with some questions. So Greg, we got announced today SPAC, LNAC the SPAC, and I know we can't say much about it. But could you please say a few words?
Well, I think that SPACs have become an interesting toolkit in corporate finance. The flexibility that they enable is something that Liberty wanted to avail itself of, and we hope we'll find interesting opportunities for it in the coming months. And I encourage all of our investors to take a look at the registration statement, which I believe was filed today.
Perfect. Thank you. So thanks to everybody that submitted questions. We're going rotate among the companies so we can get equal airtime for everybody. But we'll start with one for Liberty.
So Liberty Media has an attractive array of assets. Can you talk about the benefits and downsides of having these businesses all in the same corporate entity? What are the trade offs of synergy benefits versus conglomerate discount? What do you see as the timeline and future structure of Liberty Media?
John, you want to take a cut at that?
Yeah. I'll take a shot. Well, first of all, our unique architecture that we have in Liberty, of course, follows a history of of tracking stock structures and and similar unique organizations. We're now hanging this back apparently on top of a tracking stock. So I don't think that's been done before.
But basically, these are transitional structures. Life expectancy of these depends upon the maturity of of the of the various businesses, how they develop, when they're ready to go off on their own in prime time. That usually is accompanied by some regulatory issues, five year trader businesses. There there's various tax and regulatory constraints that establish some of the timing when one would separate an asset. While we're in these structures, the benefit is it's one board of directors.
It's under one umbrella. So decisions and transactions synergies are more easily generated. You're dealing off a collective balance sheet and so you get some financial synergies automatically out of that. And automatically, you're in tax consolidation. So you have some benefits there in terms of optimizing outcomes.
In the long history of our businesses, we have very, very seldom been a net issuer of equity. Normally, we are a redeemer of equity in the vast majority of our companies and over the most of the time period. And so the discounts at which some of our units trade actually represents an opportunity to shrink equity at a discount to what we perceive to be mid term values. So it cuts various weddings. It is deferred gratification, no question.
But ultimately, generates better long term ROEs as we're able to play with a full deck of flexibilities and options. So we found it to be an attractive structural transitional structure, and, you know, it will come and go over time. Liberty blossomed with trackers and then and then spun them off historically, and that's likely to recur in the future.
That's I think that's a great answer, John. I have nothing to add.
Okay. Moving along to Formula one, Chase. How will F1 stay relevant with fans and sponsors, especially in a world focused on sustainability and electrification? Has the demographic changed since the Liberty acquisition and the investment in building the sports digital media presence? Chase, are you there?
We can't hear you.
I'm on mute.
There we go.
Okay. Can you hear me now?
Yep. We can hear you great.
Okay. Alright. With regards to staying relevant, you know, fans value Formula one, first and foremost, for excitement and entertainment. It's about great competition and heroes. They don't they don't engage with us because of the environmental message.
However, their interest can be enhanced by the sport supporting important causes like sustainability and diversity. We believe Formula One has a strong plan to address both of these important issues in a very significant, meaningful way, and think it will be a real positive for us. I guess with regards to our digital media investments, this has been an increasingly important and successful area of growth for Formula One. We lead all sports and growth across social media, and initiatives like Drive to Survive and eSports further enhance that growth. Our digital efforts clearly strengthen our growth with nontraditional fans, especially female and young fans.
Over 60% of new Formula One fans during the last two years are 35. And we are second to the NBA in percent of fans under the age 25, and our growth continues as strong as ever.
Great. Thank you, Chase. Greg, continuing in F1. The rumors are going around again that Liberty might want to sell F1. Can you please address these?
Well, I think I've read at least that one former executive who had a pretty seminal role may have been less aware these days, maybe he's too busy changing nappies. But I think both in terms of our interest in selling Formula one, we don't have an interest. And structurally, if we ever intended to sell Formula one, we really are not well set up to do so. As it sits inside the tracking stock, any sale that we did would likely involve taxes, certainly any cash sale at the corporate level, and that would be very unappealing. So both by intent and by structure, we're not really set up to sell Formula One.
You. Jennifer, moving on to SiriusXM. Which company directed initiative do you think will have the biggest impact on Siri over the next two to three years?
Thanks, Courtney. There's there are really two main areas that we've accelerated our digital and streaming efforts in a big way. And you see that with us not only cementing 360L, our next generation satellite plus streaming platform in a car as the plan of record with the OEMs, but also with us making streaming a part of our base package for virtually all of our subscribers. So we're now delivering a lot more content and a more personalized experience to drive engagement outside of the car with our satellite subscribers and our digital only subscribers. And the second area is that we are leveraging our investments in digital audio platform, tech and sales capabilities that will deliver growth in our ad revenue both on and off platform.
Perfect. Thank you. Greg, continuing in the Liberty SiriusXM tracker. It looks like Liberty's holdings in iHeart just converted into voting shares. In light of the evolving situation at iHeart, is there any update on our thoughts regarding the investment?
And also, what are our thoughts on owning more of Live Nation?
So first on iHeart, IR had some issues around foreign ownership that had to get qualified. And when that was done, the FCC allowed us to convert our shares from nonvoting to voting. It really had nothing to do with our actions. It was the actions that iHeart justified to the FCC. Secondly, SiriusXM has a range of very attractive investment opportunities and goals, including buying back its own stock, including paying dividends to us and including growing its presence in podcasting.
So given all of those factors and given that the ad market, the free radio market that iHeart competes in right now is disrupted and unclear what its future is, it's probably not a front and center investment decision for us. I like our position. We'll watch it, but I don't think it's front and center today. And as far as Live Nation, it's a little bit the same thing. Live Nation is well set up today in terms of its capital.
We do stand as a good partner if they need it in the future. I don't believe they will. And as far as us buying more stock in the market, we're actually pretty close to the cap of what we're allowed to buy without permission from their Board. And secondly, as I noted, SiriusXM and LSXM have a lot of other good investment opportunities. So front and center is probably those not thinking about how to grow our live stake.
All right. Moving on to the Braves and a sports question. The Braves broadcast deal still has a ways to go before it's up for renewal. But given some of the challenges that the RSN business has experienced, how do you think distribution for the Braves and regional sports in general evolves heading into that renewal?
Derek, do you want to take a shot at that?
Sure. Thanks. So what I'd first do is probably remind people that we have among the largest geographic television territories in all of sports, some 14 plus million broadband homes. And when you think about it, you actually go back a year or two, people were commenting about the length of our deal being a negative. Perhaps right now in this marketplace, as the marketplace grapples with the changes and stabilizes, the length of our deal all of a sudden now turns into a positive.
I would say long term, there's huge value, continued value in live sports content. And I think ultimately, whether it's direct to consumer or other opportunities for distribution, I think sports and in particular baseball with 162 games in the regular season with that amount of sports represent a terrific opportunity. And I think it's we're very bullish about the long term projections there.
Great.
So maybe just kind of continuing in theme, there's another question around a larger question around sports. So despite sports coming back with Q3 ratings Q3 ratings, at least, in The U. S. Have been dismal. Are sports dead?
Or do you think this is just the temporary effect of stacking sports content altogether, the lack of fans at venues making it feel like the preseason and politics that bled into sports? You've said previously that sports is the glue that holds the bundle together. Does this still hold?
John, I think they're first, they're talking about your quote about sports being the glue. Maybe you wanna take a cut or I mean, we might have opinions from Derek and Chase and myself as well, but why don't you start us off?
Well, sports and sports fans have very strong affinity for, for their teams, for their involvement. Now the the the question really is what percentage of television viewers does that represent? Of course, it varies from team to team and market to market and sport to sport. But historically, that affinity has been so strong that it would lead, consumers to shift from one broadband or or cable supplier to another, and therefore, gave the sports rights owner a lot of leverage because nobody wanted to be without it, and so everybody essentially would carry it. And that continues to be largely the case today.
Typically, carriage disputes in our industry, in the cable industry, usually don't get settled until the eve of the first major NFL game or a major basketball game or or a baseball season. So it's still very powerful programming. I I don't wanna say it's not. However, the cumulative effect of all of the sports in the industry has driven the cost of the big cable bundles, so to speak, to a very high level. And those businesses that tried to do it all, tried to carry all the sports in their basic service like DIRECTV ended up with very high prices for video only.
And to some degree represented a reason why consumers started to abandon the video platform, the big bundle, and go to various streaming and direct, consumer services. So it represents virtually a tax on the on the homeowner or the the television viewer. When that bundle breaks apart is uncertain. It's certainly eroding, and we're now to the point where probably 70% of households no longer receive the big bundle by satellite or cable, but instead put together their television viewing from a potpourri of other sources. That trend will continue.
And and the question really, at what point will some of these sports start to go a la carte to the consumer? And we'll we'll certainly see it evolve that way as big tech decides to play around with with some professional sports, perhaps as a marketing tool or as a differentiator. So I think it's it's a a process that will continue, but sports continues to be a very powerful form of programming worldwide, I can say.
Chase, maybe you want to add something?
Chase, I think we can't hear you. There you go.
All right. Well, maybe while Chase is calculating Derek? Hello? Oh, there we go, Chase. There we go, Chase.
Thank you.
All right.
Okay. Now we've got you, Chase.
Yes. I guess what I'd say is I think what you clearly have is sort of an evolving situation where you have entertainment programming, which is essentially non live programming and live programming, which is sports, news, and events. Know, events like Academy Awards, Grammys, other sorts of events. And I think there's an enormous way, I mean in many ways, you look at the power of news, certainly going to the political cycle like this, and sports is still the most popular programming out there. And so I think what you have is the bundle really becoming the core of the bundle, the value in the bundle, becoming sports news and live a live bundle, essentially sports news and events.
And people being able to get their entertainment content elsewhere. And I think that is sort of the dynamic that is sort of evolving in the business worldwide, probably more advanced in The U. S, but essentially evolving worldwide. So I think power sports will still have an enormously important place, but I think that bundle is going to look different as people get their entertainment, non live programming in one place and live content elsewhere.
I guess I'd finish by saying I agree with both John's comments and Chase's comments. But if you look at the ratings, for example, at F1, early, they were quite good. And towards the end, they were less good, largely because there was a glut. And I think you pointed out the questioner pointed out many of the factors that are going on, and a lot of them are situation specific. Overall, we'll be up at F1, but a lot of other cases where they played into the glut.
And think about what you could be watching October and November at the same time, just a massive explosion of programming against a political scene, both on the court or on the field and in our nation, all of these caused a lot of other choices and took our people who chose to not watch. I think a lot of that will stabilize. You get back to the regular seasons, you get back to the regular schedules. I think a lot of the viewership will return.
Okay. Thank you. So moving on to Liberty TripAdvisor. This one's for you, Greg. The Sotara's preferred security has a put right on the one year anniversary payable in cash or stock.
How are you planning to eliminate the risk of pronounced dilution in the event they decide to exercise the put? Are you trying to take out the security ahead of time to avoid the risk? And if so, are you frustrated with the pace of M and A discussions around TripAdvisor?
I think our partnership with Certaris has been great. It was put in quickly during the sort of the absolute teeth of the pandemic, and we gave Certaris that right put, which then has a six month cleanup. We have six months to remove them as a way to give them optionality in the partnership. I don't believe they're interested in pudding. I don't believe that's a real risk for us.
That partnership between Certari's and Trip and Liberty Trip has only grown. And I believe they at Certari's are as bullish as we are about Trip's prospects and therefore Liberty's Trip's prospects. So I don't see that as our biggest front and center problem. I'm not sure what M and A discussions you mean by trip. I think we're very bullish on the prospects for trip as it as the we exit the pandemic, leisure travel comes back and some of the new opportunities that they put in place such as recommendations and their subscription service rollout, both Certaris and Liberty Trip are quite bullish about Trip's prospects.
All right. Going back around, back up to Formula one. Chase, this one's for you. Do we see the potential for the biggest upside long term? Or is it more blocking and tackling?
How long before races get more competitive and then result in better top line growth? What are the medium term targets for sponsorship?
Okay. I'll take a few questions. On the first one, I guess, look, both blocking and tackling and long term growth are important. Revenue from race promotion and sponsorship is probably driven more by blocking as we enhance our race calendar and fill out our sponsorship portfolio and build more sophisticated capabilities to serve partners. Long term growth will probably be bigger for us in the changing media space and the developing opportunities in critical markets like The United States and China.
I guess as it relates to more compelling racing, we have a number of initiatives taking effect both in 2021 and 2022 that are expected to materially improve competition in action. These changes include cost caps, more balanced revenue distribution, technical and sporting regulatory changes to the car. Some of the changes like those to the car will have a significant, almost immediate impact when introduced. While other changes like cost and revenue ones will create change over time, but we expect these changes in aggregate to have a major impact. As it relates to the sponsorship question, we continue to expect this to be an area of solid growth as we have a number of key industry segments like technology, communications, finance that are underserved, and key inventory and partnership areas to exploit.
We believe Formula One, which uniquely marries world class sport competition to state of the art technology, while engaging a global fan base with events that are true spectacles, is well positioned to provide an attractive, unique opportunity for sponsors.
Great. Thank you, Chase. Back to Jennifer. Jennifer, there's a lot of capital being deployed in podcasting, including by SiriusXM. What's the payoff from these investments?
Five years out, will there be a podcast winner? And what will they have won?
The podcast advertising market is approaching about $900,000,000 today, and it's expected to grow by double digits over the next several years. So it is the fastest growing part of the digital audio ad market. Today, it's under monetized. So improved monetization, along with growth in listenership, should drive it to over time more like a multibillion dollar market. Podcasting for us is an important part of both our content and advertising platform strategies.
From a content standpoint, we've been delivering premium talk audio for nearly twenty years at SiriusXM. And now with our unmatched reach of 150,000,000 listeners in The U. S. And our strong SiriusXM, Pandora and Stitcher audio platforms, we offer even more compelling ways for talent to reach a broad consumer base. And in addition, with our recent Simplecast and Stitcher acquisitions this year, we have assembled a full service platform for podcast creators, publishers and advertisers.
So we are clearly well positioned to serve brands as the digital audio advertising leader in North America. And our announcement this week on our expanded deal with NBC News is a great example of this. We extended our license for the content we broadcast on SiriusXM, and we will also now exclusively provide ad tech and sales representation for NBC News, MSNBC and many CNBC podcasts.
If I could just add, I agree with all Jennifer's comments. Some of you may recall that last year, one of our or my thought piece was about the value of the ear relative to the eye. And I think despite the competition for podcasting and other elements of the audio universe, the risk return, the returns versus cost look far more attractive there than in many segments in video, and we remain very bullish on the whole audio segment.
Okay. Greg, sticking with Liberty SiriusXM. The discount at LSXM, is it preventing us from doing anything? What are the plans to narrow the discount? Recent buybacks have been relatively minor compared to the market cap.
Have we considered a tender?
Well, we certainly have been trying to address the discount. I'm not sure what it prevents us from doing at Liberty serious that we would do. If we were to use a currency, it would most likely be serious as the currency we would use in any kind of a transaction, not the Liberty Sirius currency given the discount. But I'm not sure we're really being prevented today from doing anything that we might wish to do with the Liberty Sirius stock. We have been attacking the buyback and the repurchase as aggressively as we could with the resources we have and the relatively we're getting about 140,000,000 $150,000,000 a year out of Sirius in dividends.
We're using that, and we've used some exchangeables and other borrowings. We've you've called that an exchangeable against Siri. We've had an exchangeable a couple of exchangeables against Live. We've gone and raised as much capital as we could to attack this problem and capture that discount. But we really don't have sufficient capital to say do a massive tender.
We don't have the liquidity without taking undue levels of debt on. So that's what's really what's held us back.
Thank you. Chase, back to you on Formula one. What were the wins for F1 shareholders with the new Concorde Agreement? What will we be focused on improving for the next round of negotiations in 2025? Chase?
I always forget this.
There we can hear you now.
I go. The new current agreement achieves a number of important objectives for us. First, it provides stability, enables us and our partners to be aligned to focus on driving the sport. Second, I guess it provides a healthier business model for all that makes the sport more attractive to existing and potential new partners and investors. Third, it provides a streamlined and a more effective governance structure to enable the sport to be more agile in growing the sport as a competition on the track and as a business off the track.
Fourth, we as the Formula One organization have the opportunity to improve our share of the profits if we can grow the sport at a rate that exceeds the last five or six years. Just as it gets to the next as it looks to the next deal, I think it's too early to speculate. In an ever faster changing world, five years is a long, long time. We'll clearly be thinking about it as we go forward, but the thoughts will also clearly change and evolve as the future unfolds.
Great. Thank you. Jennifer, back to you. How important is your position in the vehicle as a competitive advantage? What happens as Apple and Google seek to become the operating system of the car?
Is this a material threat? Or are there any silver linings for Sirius?
Courtney, we have a clear competitive advantage in the car. We will be in 80% of new cars sold just in the next couple of months. And this is no small part because of the strength of our long standing OEM relationships that we continue to extend, including some of our agreements, which go out to 2028. So we're deeply integrated with the OEMs, and we will work to continue to maintain premium placement in the car even as the OEMs roll out new operating systems as we and the automakers want to offer the best experience for SiriusXM subscribers. And with 360L, we will also benefit from increased connectivity in the vehicle.
It will enable faster rollout of new and more personalized features. And we'll have we have now 132,000,000 enabled vehicles on the road growing to two twenty million over time. So we have a deep understanding of how to create the most compelling consumer audio experience in the car from maximizing the ease of use to minimizing driver distraction.
Great. Greg, continuing at Liberty Sirius. Is the plan for Siri to buy Liberty up to 80% ownership? Then would Sirius swap to a large dividend strategy?
Well, I think the management team and Board at Siri have indicated their desire to buy stock past the 80 level. There's really no impediment to that. We will need to work out some a tax sharing agreement between ourselves and Siri, between Liberty Siri and Siri, but that's already begun. Whether they the Board, and they'll make decision, decides to continue with buybacks at the
rate,
There are some restraints probably they'll start thinking about as they head towards 90%, which might include the ability for Liberty, Siri, to do a short form merger. I think the Siri Board and the independents there will need to think about that. And so whether as they think about that, does that lead to greater dividends or a greater mix of dividends versus buyback? That's possible. But really, the Board will have to make a decision as a whole there about that.
Okay. Back to the Braves. Derek, as we approach discussions for the twenty twenty one baseball season, what are your projections on how COVID comes into play? Specifically, if baseball has another season with limited fan attendance and COVID protocols, how will that impact the Braves?
Well, I'd probably break that down into two buckets. The first is desire and the second is ability. On the desire side is the presentation we talked about. We've had huge demand already. Selling 1,200 season tickets in the midst of a pandemic obviously is one indicator that people want to return to watching baseball live.
We've obviously continued that, and we'll see how that goes the rest of this offseason. And it's probably a good reminder also, we're five months away from the start of the season, so who knows what happens in the span of that five months. A lot has happened every single day during the course of this. But we are on sale actually this week for all 81 games and for all 41,000 seats. And we began that sale this week and are beginning to sell that briskly.
As far as the ability, I'll call it, part of that, I think each jurisdiction is going be a little bit different. We're in the state of Georgia. This is a little bit different look at things, and we've been open. In fact, the battery never closed. So we've had people here throughout, and we have a huge desire in this marketplace to return to events.
I actually think, and I'll speak more on putting my MLB hat on, I think this is a great opportunity for Major League Baseball and baseball as a whole and the Braves being a big part of that to be a unifier of each of our communities that we play in. I think baseball is a fabric of the community and bringing people back together again and some normalcy. Think that's what people are looking for. So we see huge upside as we emerge out of this.
Okay. Thank you. Greg, on Formula one, you've said F-one becomes an ATB in 2022. Are there any impediments to doing a hard spin and creating an asset backed F-one? And is that something that's a priority for you to get done when the time comes?
Yes. The Formula One will become an active trader business on the fifth anniversary of the deal, not the initial investment, but the closing of the back end of the deal where we bought 100%, and that would be in January 2022. That would enable us to do a hard spin if we wanted at that time. We currently have no plan or intent. I think John has indicated that we look at these businesses, we look at our role and think about how we can be helpful and what the benefits are.
We look at if there are discounts, are they transitory, are there something we can take advantage of, are they problematic. And we'll weigh all of those factors and whether the business might be better off independent and what the benefits for our shareholders would be if it were independent at that time, but we have no current plan or intent.
Okay. Back to Jennifer. Jennifer, how would you grade the Pandora acquisition so far?
Well, it's really clear that Pandora operates in a competitive streaming music market, and we continue to work hard to retain its significant listener base. But it remains the largest free digital audio platform in The U. S. And from a monetization standpoint, it's been really strong and exceeded our expectations since the acquisition. And ad revenue has actually bounced back nicely from earlier in the year, both on Pandora and off platform.
Pandora's reach, its ad tech and sales capabilities have enabled us to become the digital audio advertising leader in North America. And in addition, we've been able to leverage Pandora's digital centric approach to greatly advance our digital product development and marketing capabilities across our organization.
If I could add, I agree with all Jennifer's comments. I'd note Sirius' unbelievably strong position in the car, and that's obviously going to improve with 360L, which will give us a direct to consumer element. But historically, we've operated through primarily OEMs and have lacked some of that direct to consumer element. And Pandora massively accelerated our DTC efforts. And that's been very beneficial in understanding who our customers are, where they're going, what their needs are and helping, as Jennifer pointed out, meet their target advertising for them in the best way possible.
Back to you, Chase. In The U. S, would F1 ever consider leapfrogging the historical
of larger audiences via pay TV and link up with a digital player? US,
Let's see. Chase, are you there?
Can you hear me now?
Yes, we can.
Yes, I'm good. Again, said that yes, look, the simple answer is you always consider everything. Generally, REACH is more important in early stage growth markets like The U. S. And China than it is in more mature markets like Western Europe.
However, audience reach is increasingly being redefined as fans engaged with sports like ours across the array of devices and platforms that are available to them today and not just traditional television. We'll certainly continue to value our core television partners. However, we'll evaluate every opportunity on a case by case basis, balancing economics, fan engagement, growth expectations for the market and other factors.
Great. Thank you. Greg, continuing with F1. We have a big cash balance at F1. What do we intend to do with it?
Well, F1 has a very strong balance sheet, and we helped set some of that in place with the reattribution we did earlier this year. I think that was important to stabilize the operating business at F1, where we had uncertainty headed into the pandemic. It's turned out far better this year. Credit to Chase and team and the FIA and the teams themselves for being able to have 17 races this year, as we're projecting. But we didn't know that at the time.
Now as you rightly point out, we have a strong balance sheet. Some of that we've utilized at times to help the teams to bridge certain of their needs. But as you look forward on an offensive basis, I think there will be opportunities around motorsports and around potentially live events, which are attractive. The Fed created a lot of liquidity and allowed a lot of many kinds of businesses in the live space to extend their runways, but they haven't necessarily the demand to handle the debt that they've taken on or the situations and the capital structures and the burns that they have. So as we head into 2022 excuse me, 2021 and then 2022, we'll see where capital needs are and whether they're interesting opportunities for us, first in motorsports and then around live events in general.
Great. Okay. This is one for you, John. How did you develop trust in your lieutenants to fuel the entrepreneurial drive at Liberty while simultaneously enabling massive scale of the business? With 2020 hindsight, what key advice would you share with your younger self and why?
Well, it's all about having good people, smart people. You know, we have been very, very lucky that that our leadership across the various companies, both the Liberty companies and and some of the earlier spin offs, are outstanding executives. And so we we run a very decentralized investment philosophy these days, and we've been very pleased with the energy and and drive. You know, obviously, Greg's been very busy in the capital markets here recently and and now taking on a SPAC approach. You know, our Liberty Global folks just closed on the purchase of a major wireless business in Switzerland a couple days ago.
We're buying we just bought the Puerto Rico businesses of AT and T into our Liberty Latin America company. So so the the spin offs continue to be aggressive growth engines. Obviously, we're thrilled with the performance of Charter over at Liberty Broadband. And if you look at closer to home at at Q rate, QVC, outstanding performance taking place. So it's really about, you know, good management and and not trying to micromanage.
I think that's the advice to the younger John that the idea of investing in levered cash flow businesses, managing the synergies and tax postures and the financing, it all seems to work pretty well, pretty consistently. And we've been able to survive better than survive, prosper in some ways despite this this virus pandemic torpedo spread that hit us in February and March. So there was a lot of scrambling. I have to say Greg had to scramble pretty hard in in March and April when we didn't know where the bottom was. But but in the end, it's about good management.
You know, it's it's also better to swim with the current than against the current. And so we've we've clearly found it easier this year to be in those businesses to have a tailwind. But even the ones that have had a headwind are are doing remarkably well in keeping the business alive and vibrant, whether it's Formula One or something like Live Nation, which has had to face virtual complete shutdown and has had to scramble to control costs and restructure its financings. So it comes down to good management and trying to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.
If I could add, as someone who's been the recipient of that good advice from John, I think the things I would pick up that we've tried to carry forward are, as John noted, be in good businesses where the risk returns look good, get the best executives we can. And you look at the teams that Chase and Jennifer and Derek run and Michael Rapinoe, we have great executives. We have great teams. And then as much as possible, give them freedom to operate where we have aligned incentives. And I think John set that forward for us at the Liberty level, and I hope we try and set it forward at a level down below with those operating companies.
Greg, would you give yourself any your younger self any advice?
It's too long a list to go into. There's only a couple of minutes left, and we don't want to consume the entire day. I hope we've learned something along the way. But I think those are the thoughts that I set forward there are the ones that we tried to I think we got from John, and we try to maintain at liberty.
Okay. And of course, the question we get every year, maybe we'll just stick to the companies we talked about today, right? They always want to know about the biggest valuation versus outlook disconnect. So if we just focus right on Liberty Media and Liberty TripAdvisor, I mean maybe just think about, right, where
pretty glaringly obvious that LSXM has a discount that is massive to Siri. I feel pretty good about the Siri valuation. I feel very, very, very good about the Liberty Siri valuation. It's we are not king canoe. We keep yelling the tide to go back, and it doesn't we are king canoe.
The tide doesn't go back in terms of the discount, and we continue to take advantage of it. And I think, ultimately, that will prove to be very beneficial to the shareholders of Liberty Siri. John, you've got any views on value?
Yes. I listened to the discussion of the Liberty Siri discount, and I what's pretty obvious to me is that, that discount will start to shrink as we approach that structural change. So that that'd be my view on valuation. Obviously,
there's
just a structural discount that will go away with the passage of time. And we could be more aggressive about it, but I don't think there's there's a huge hurry. We're getting there. Obviously, Formula One and the Braves, you know, have been impaired in the short run by the virus. And my guess is that that what Chase has put in place at Formula One will become increasingly powerful as the large tech companies continue to drive toward global platform and start to compete with each other for market share on a global basis.
So in the out years, my guess is a unique asset like Formula One will start to really come into its own in terms of valuation.
All right. So that wraps up Q and A for Day one. We hope you will join us tomorrow for Day two of the Liberty Investor Meeting, which will be Curate, Liberty Broadband and GCI Liberty. Thank you, and thank you to all the CEOs. Great.
Thank you to all our investors. Thank you to our CEOs. And as Courtney said, thank you, Courtney, and hope we see you tomorrow. Okay. That's it for day one.
If you're still interested, and we hope you are, tune in tomorrow for Curate, Liberty Broadband and GCI Liberty. Thank you.