Last year's Investor Day, we made a few predictions for life post-COVID. Now I think we phrased the question inaccurately. We now know there isn't a finite endpoint. Today, we'll talk about life with enduring COVID. The pandemic is now endemic. A number of trends we discussed are here to stay. Telemedicine, teleducation, and nesting. Today we'll go deeper into two themes from last year, the workplace and the markets. There's posturing about the new norm. How much is pent-up emotional spend or pull forward? Right now it's not YOLO, but YULO, you only unlock once. The pendulum is swinging far upon reopening, but it's unlikely to stay here. The world is changing in fundamental ways, but there are overshoots. At Liberty, we are trying to navigate what is old school and what is hype train, and what will stick as cool but credible.
We thought it was interesting to look at several vectors that impact the workplace and the markets. First, accelerated digital adoption. Second, social isolation. Third, stimulus spending. Fourth, demographic shifts. Granted, navigating demographic shifts is nothing new, but Millennial and Gen Z views will have outsized impact. Fifth and finally, inundation with dopamine or pleasure responses. To quote Dr. Anna Lembke's new book, Dopamine Nation, "We've transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, Instagramming, YouTubing, Tweeting. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation." Let's look at these vectors' impact on the workplace.
As Steve Sinofsky, a former Microsoft colleague, said, "The incumbent in this disruption is not the headquarters or office, but the full list of structures and approaches of the company." We'll look at the vectors to help understand the context behind the evolving shifts. First, accelerated digital adoption. We went into 2020 with a digital toolbox in place, but nobody really used it. In COVID, we were forced to open the toolbox, enabling the massive shift to remote work. According to a recent McKinsey survey, companies accelerated digitization of internal operations by 3-4 years. Initially, many jobs went remote as a temporary condition, but now a huge category of remote jobs became permanent. The share of online job searches for remote positions is up 460% in the last 2 years.
There are more job listings for remote roles that pay at least $100,000 than there are six-figure roles in any city in North America. As Michael Dell said, "Work is something you do, it's not a place." Let's talk about two, three, and four. Social isolation, stimulus funding, and demographic shifts contributed to a record number of Americans exiting the workforce, the Great Resignation. Resignations were up 12% from 2019, and almost 3% of the U.S. workforce quit their jobs in August alone. Temporary departures due to COVID-related fears or family care needs are a subset. The Colorado governor estimates fears of either the disease or the vaccine are around 25% of the quits. This cohort will reduce, but is unlikely to be eliminated. Other factors surely contributed to the Great Resignation. Remote work can lead to loneliness and discontent.
The federal government injected an unprecedented $4 trillion into our $21 trillion U.S. economy. This gave latitude to reevaluate priorities, with employees searching for meaning and increased flexibility. The great reassessment. Work has been deprioritized as a hallmark of identity. Among boomers, more than 3 million Americans retired early, partly driven by rising home prices and stock market gains. A younger workforce perhaps has a different mindset toward their jobs. 63% of millennial workers say they plan to look for a new position at some point over the next year, more than double baby boomers. We understand that the workplace has forever changed. How do we determine what is old school and what is hype train, and how do we create an optimal environment? If we look at Gen Z, I'm sure many of you saw this headline.
Many from this younger cohort, fed up with traditional work, took to more flexible outlets and accelerated the gig and creator economy. According to a recent Twitch leak, the top 81 streamers on the platform each earned over $1 million from 2019 to date, and the top five earned over $5 million. Surely this isn't attainable for everyone, and it seems like hype trading. Right now, employees hold the cards. We've become a country of people without jobs and jobs without people. There are 7.4 million unemployed, and yet we have more job openings than any time in our country's history. Wages grew 1.5% in the third quarter, the highest quarterly growth in 20 years. While inflation ate a good chunk of this, higher pay is demanded to fill record vacancies.
We saw one report of Massachusetts snowplow drivers earning up to $310 an hour. For many workers, while the job safety net might have been mom and dad or the government, it may now be the 10 million job openings with massive amounts of choice. Now, employees want choice, especially after a global pandemic where our ability to choose has been so limited. While employees hold the cards, it's employers who need to consider where to place their chips. How much choice in workplace flexibility actually leads to peak satisfaction, business performance, and retention? When researchers put 24 jams on a single table, customers were more inclined to sample. When they put out six jams, customers purchased with increased frequency. This is the paradox of choice. More isn't always better.
Employees want workplace flexibility to endure, but with too much choice as to where and how we work, happiness may dwindle. In part, this is due to the escalation of expectations. When abundant choices imply that near perfection is possible, high expectations are unlikely to be met. More choice is not likely to solve all of employees' grievances. Well-managed flexibility will look different for each company and among teams. Managers will have a more considered and intentional approach to the workplace, where the digital toolbox will be increasingly important. Do you mandate which days to be in office? Do you manage collective time in office more efficiently by blocking hours for open door policies? Do you adopt a one Zoom, all Zoom policy? We also need to rethink measures of productivity, inherently qualitative metrics that can't be assessed through counting meetings or emails sent.
We're likely to need a deeper set of incentives to bring people back or offer creative remote work opportunities. Some perks of the past incentivize the workforce to never have to leave the office, like massage therapists or dry cleaners. Consider talent and skill development courses offered to employees instead. The U.S. spends only 0.1% of GDP on assisting and retraining its unemployed workers. Hierarchical structures are harder to manage in a distributed workforce. All the tiles are the same size on Zoom. Many teams will benefit from flatter structures. Just ask the authority, Dilbert. We will need to prioritize culture creation. For many years, the office, just like marriage, was a ready-made social life. Back to our vectors, the isolation in the U.S. continued to increase even as the public health crisis has abated.
The desire for social cohesion will surely be one factor driving the return to the office. As we said last year, the on-site is the new off-site, and the office space will need to be reimagined as a creative meeting space. Lastly, employers must prepare for a more transient workforce. The pandemic accelerated the migration towards prioritizing a series of jobs over a single career. With more transient workers comes the elimination of tribal knowledge. We will need improved tools around process documentation, efficient onboarding and off-boarding. It can't take six months to ramp up a new hire, assuming they're gonna switch jobs within 2 years. We're bullish on companies that automate processes and collaboration tools and digitize culture creation. Clearly, there are risks in a hybrid environment, a limp workforce culture which is especially important for aligning workers to the joy and mission of the company.
Junior employees over-relying on remote and failing to develop soft skills and relationship building, and inequity rising from unequal exposure. Ctrip did a study of 16,000 employees in a call center. They found remote workers were 13% more productive, but associated with 50% reduced rates of promotion. Finally, burnout. Two-thirds of survey respondents said feelings of burnout worsened throughout the pandemic. Setting boundaries between work and home life through office space is important for us as well as for your investments. Get the right teams together at the right time in the right places, and both qualitative and quantitative work product will improve. Five days in the office is old school, but full flex is the hype train most will not get to. Managed flexibility can succeed with smart, active leadership. No one knows where this will shake out.
As Derek Thompson said, "Remote work is better in some ways and for some people, worse in other ways and for other people, and worse now than it will be later, since after all, we've tinkered with white-collar office practices for like 100 years." Now we'll use a similar lens to discuss the commotion in the markets over the last 20 months. Last year, we talked about Charles Schwab meets Candy Crush, and that was before Roaring Kitty or the GameStop and AMC short squeezes of 2021. This year, as Elon Musk has tweeted, "I thought 1999 was peak insanity, but 2021 is 1000% more insane." Wall Street timelines have compressed dramatically. 20 years ago, 3-5 years was an acceptable time horizon. Now it's three months. Or maybe all of you were just waiting for Investor Day announcements.
We've moved along the hype line away from old school on a fast-moving hype train. As Barron's recently said, "It's weird finance." The same vectors from the workplace are driving the hype train in markets. Digital acceleration. While Robinhood and Acorns have been disrupted, traditional shops have also adapted and accelerated digital strategies. TikTok finfluencers are primary sources of stock picks. 25-year-old Austin Hankwitz charges anywhere from $4,500- $8,000 per stock pick post on his page. Social isolation, especially in the height of the pandemic, led people to seek like-minded community through online platforms like Reddit, TikTok, or even Robinhood, fueling the retail market boom. WallStreetBets has grown to a community of more than 11 million and more than doubled subs since the start of 2020.
In January 2021, posts tied to hashtag stock market had garnered over 800 million views on TikTok, more than triple the figure from June of 2020. Stimulus funding has contributed to the rise of meme stocks, interest in crypto investing, and excitement about NFTs. CNBC recently ran a headline that almost half of 18- to 34-year-olds who received government stimulus money invested some of it in stocks, funds, or crypto. More than $2 billion was spent on NFTs during the first three months of 2021, a 2,100% increase from the fourth quarter of 2020. As Warren Buffett said, "Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money." Demographic shifts are driving increased focus on ESG. Gen Z and millennial consumers should grow to 70% of the population by 2028, and they will inherit $60 trillion of wealth by 2050 just in the U.S.
Finally, the inundation of dopamine with heightened stimulation over the past 20 months. Consumers increased their time with media and tech 45 minutes per day, and now kids play more Fortnite in the U.S. than football and baseball combined. We increased our food and drink consumption over the past 20 months, and we've normalized indulgence through purchases, with 20 billion parcels shipped in the U.S. in 2020 versus 15 billion in 2019. This inundation of dopamine desensitizes our brain's risk-reward calibration and heightens a gambling mindset. Amplified by the lack of sports, fans needed to deploy betting dollars elsewhere and financial markets became an outlet. Accordingly, we're seeing all types of assets, including equities, real estate, and fantasy assets priced at levels that disregard traditional risk frameworks. Throw in some FOMO and Tesla's market cap is greater than the top 10 OEMs combined.
Coinbase's market cap is half of Goldman Sachs, despite having 3% of the revenue, and SpaceX has nearly the same EV as Lockheed Martin. We've seen all these themes play out in the market, and we're attempting to sort through the noise. What's old school? Mutual funds. It's been 7 years since U.S. equity mutual funds finished a year with positive asset flows. Demand for lower fees is leading to fund closures, and it's estimated up to 20% of mutual funds could be eliminated by 2025. With tech and growth seemingly invincible or today's Nifty Fifty, we're seeing Value and GARP lag. We're still confident in our opportunities here, so we'll move this over. What's hype train? Meme stocks, NFTs and fantasy assets, crypto, metaverse, SPAC mania.
Two weeks ago, a story ran about the Squid crypto that in 15 minutes went from $600 to almost $3,000 and back down to less than $0.01. No one can identify its creators, its website is offline, and its social channels are shut down. Surely, hype doesn't mean there isn't money to be made. As with any wave of hype, 95% is probably momentum and 5% will stick. Cool but credible. Tech and media companies are smartly building out crypto knowledge and NFT strategy to be competitive for top talent. Visa bought a CryptoPunks. Stripe is building a crypto team. Every MLB umpire has FTX on their jersey, and sports and digital art were early in NFT adoption, but now countless consumer and tech brands have joined. Even politicians see crypto funding.
Front Row is a marketplace founded by four political strategists that creates digital versions of campaign swag to cater to young voters. The mayors of Miami and New York City are vying to be crypto-friendly cities and offering to get partly paid in Bitcoin. The IR website will soon have a market to bet on My CryptoPunks. Consumer adoption will grow across these industries, especially as the space between physical and virtual worlds continue to blur. We are involved with agency in this space across our companies. EDC Las Vegas 2021 was the first music festival to be held in the Roblox metaverse. Live Nation announced digital collectible NFTs as live ticket stubs. F1 signed a global partnership with Crypto.com and continues to explore the space. We've avoided principal risk. Taking a long-term view, we hope avoids getting caught up in a speculative bubble.
The regulatory ramifications for a lot of hype assets is still in question, and the industry is already moving faster than regulators can keep up. Bitcoin is arguably the old man's crypto. On SPACs, with dopamine-infused markets, we want outcomes shorter, faster, quicker. Part of the appeal of a SPAC is that IPOs aren't fast enough. There has already been a huge drop-off in SPACs. As you know, look at the secondary trading dynamics, especially since May. We do feel good about the positioning of LMAC, the SPAC, differentiated with real support behind it and committed capital through our FPA, plus Liberty's track record, and we'd like to believe the strength of our management team. Finally, ESG is an enduring trend powered by millennial voice and heightened awareness of stakeholder capitalism.
Nearly 60% of millennial women say their purchase decisions are driven by brand values and stances on issues that are important to them. There's increased scrutiny and controversy around what constitutes ESG, which might dampen the hype and could forestall AUM growth after a record year of nearly $230 billion ESG inflows. There's appropriate skepticism of ESG efforts that appear as greenwashing. For Liberty, we recognize our role as capital allocators with reach across a large portfolio where we have a tangible impact. We completed a materiality assessment this year and rolled out a portfolio-wide ESG strategy, which I'll discuss in more detail shortly. We've also conducted a company-wide mission, vision, values assessment, and behind me, you can see the values that we at Liberty uphold. There are other enduring trends to add, like indexing. It's a trend long underway and very familiar to this audience.
It's estimated that 40%-50% of total dollars in the market are being indexed, and it's not unreasonable to think that indexing inflows could grow to 70%-75% of the market. Index has the appearance of permanent capital, but due to its concentration, could lead to crowding and greater volatility. Growth in tech and software names. The trend has been bolstered by COVID digital acceleration and might continue to be strengthened by ESG, since tech names are the largest exposure in most ESG funds. For Liberty, we attempt to keep a pulse on what's driving the hype train, but focus our energy on what's credible. We like to think we're less affected by market FOMO. We are fortunate to see lots of deal flow across core TMT and new speculative white spaces, and we are patient capital.
In meme-driven, social media-fueled celebrity utterance markets, a steadier hand is more critical now than ever. Fortunately, our businesses generate meaningful cash flow, which gives Liberty flexibility to create shareholder value even in periods of uncertainty and dislocation. Now, let's get into more about our companies. Thanks. That was a lot of videos. We'll try and do something live to tell you what's going on. Good to have you all back. That is the Backstreet Boys in the front there, if you hadn't heard the music. As I said, it's been 2 years since we were here, and we're gonna start with a review since our last Investor Day, which was virtual, and this one's hybrid. Beginning with LSXM, the big news this month is we finally got over 80%, and we therefore will receive all our distributions from Sirius tax-free.
We have continued to repurchase our LSXM shares, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. Sirius had a great year, attaining its full year sub-guidance by the third quarter. At Formula 1, the team managed a record 22-race calendar, and we have to credit them to learning how to navigate the complexities of COVID. We introduced Sprint events this year with the approval of the F1, us, the FIA and the teams. We had in a recent fan survey, participation was up 13% from our last one in 2017, and the average fan age is down by 4 years at a time when all other sports have rising average ages. At the Braves, you may have heard, as we've hyped it, that we won the World Series, and we've had many player accolades.
There are probably more to come, but so far, we've won four of the nine National League Silver Slugger Awards, Freddie, Ozzie, Austin Riley, and Max Fried. At Liberty Broadband, as of yesterday's filing, we've actually received $3.6 billion year to date from Charter, and we've spent more than that buying back our own stock at Liberty Broadband. That's been at an attractive look-through price on purchases year to date, reported of $547. At Liberty TripAdvisor, the travel trends continue to improve, particularly in leisure, and Trip is well-positioned. We also cleaned up the capital structure at LTRIP earlier this year, and you'll hear more on that from Brian shortly. At LMAC, we raised $575 million earlier this year.
That's the largest such corporate SPAC ever done, according to the banks who were involved, so you have to decide whether you want to trust them or not. It continues to trade well, in contrast to many other SPACs, as we talked about earlier. Yesterday, we were trading a little over $11, among the top trading SPACs that have not yet announced an acquisition. We have significant capital at our disposal across the SPAC proceeds, the Formula 1 FPA, forward purchase agreement, and the potential actually to add more cash. Obviously, we can't talk about what we're looking at, so that's all you're gonna get on LMAC for today. Sorry. Everyone is out there talking about supply and the supply challenges. We're here to talk about demand, and we have a lot of it.
Supply pressures are gonna be temporary, but our demand is strong and indicates, in our minds, the health of our portfolio. First, looking at our live event businesses. COVID definitely tampered with and put a damper on the ability to have fans. That's the supply side. Once we've reopened, demand has been there. At F1, we've had record fan count. The U.S. GP in Austin was the largest Grand Prix ever in history, with over 40,000 fans and 140,000 on Sunday alone. We've seen strong viewership trends in many of our growth markets, especially the U.S. At the Braves, we've hosted 10 million fans since 2017, and have 25 years over 2 million annual attendance. During the World Series, we had record-setting merch sales. We sold $4.6 million over three days.
That's what we normally sell in a peak summer month. At Live Nation, 83% of our fans held on to their tickets for postponed events, and the 2022 pipeline is about double-digit growth over the 2019 pipeline. Let's talk about healthy demand across some of our other assets. At Sirius XM, there have been issues around the SAAR. Mostly they're abating, and they've mostly been driven by supply issues or caused by supply issues, but the demand for cars is sky-high, and you can see that in the rising prices. At Charter, we've seen data demand grow 30% from pre-pandemic levels, and data usage is continuing to grow even as work from home has abated. At Tripadvisor, air travel is now close to pre-pandemic levels, and domestic leisure travel has recovered. Turning for a minute e to F1 and the U.S. growth strategy.
When we purchased F1 almost 5 years ago, growing the U.S. was a critical goal and something we thought had real opportunity, and we're very pleased that's coming to pass. I'd mentioned the attendance at Austin. There, the promoter offered some compelling fan experiences, including carnival rides, concerts, Burning Man sculptures, and regional food. Accordingly, Austin Airport had its busiest day in history on the Sunday of the GP. Average viewership in the U.S. at the time for the U.S. GP there in Austin on ESPN was up 42% over 2019. Season three of Drive to Survive has been number one in 27 countries. Importantly, when we look at our viewership and compare it to other sports, we're up about 30% while many have had declines.
The takeaway, these factors are set to cause us real monetization improvements ahead, particularly with the new Miami race in 2022. Hopefully, you've all bought your tickets. The FWONA balance sheet also has substantial assets and cash. F1 has a high free cash flow conversion and current liquidity of about $2.4 billion. Many of you ask, what are we gonna do with that cash? Well, first we're gonna invest in the business, but it's modest, requiring the low capital intensity of that business. The cash needs are modest. We'll do share repurchases. You've already seen we've repurchased about 1 million FWONA shares, reflecting both our confidence in the business and taking advantage of the spread against FWONK. We've seen some potential other assets. We have a small investment, for example, in Clear that's up about 30% year-to-date.
You'll see proactive debt management. We redeemed the AT&T exchangeables, and we continue to look at other ways to optimize the balance sheet. Turning to Sirius XM, we finally crossed the 80% number. We structured it in a way to make it an ATB and give us increased flexibility. Once F1 becomes an ATB in January, we'll have three ATBs at Liberty Media. Accordingly, all dividends are gonna flow up tax-free, as we mentioned before, and you may have seen that SIRI upped its dividend recently by 50%. The NAV discount tightened this year. We will continue to attack it over the coming year, and we'll do it even now more tax efficiently. Year-to-date, we've seen a $4.1 billion increase in the market cap, and isolating only on the NAV compression, we've seen a gain of $900 million.
Wait, there's more. First looking at Sirius itself, stellar operating performance year-to-date. Record high 32 million self-pay subs, record low self-pay churn in the third quarter, and Pandora's ad segment continues to show very strong results in the third quarter, ad CPMs were up about 29% versus the prior year. Looking at LSXM itself, we continue to repurchase stock, as I said. 8.5 million and an average price of $45.13 a share, quite attractive. Effective look-through price of $3.53 on SIRI, which compares favorably to yesterday's closing price at SIRI of $6.62. I'd note we also sold our iHeart shares at an attractive 40% gain. Looking for a moment at the components of our share price appreciation, first, I'd note the current price looks attractive relative to our average buyback price of $45.13.
There's been $2.61 worth of NAV compression and a substantial portion of gain from the increase in LYV over the last year, which validates the reattribution that we also did last year. As I mentioned, we'll take advantage of discounts where we find them, and we're doing the same at LBRD. We repurchased 20 million shares for an average price of $164.52 a share. Pretty attractive. Look-through price of Charter of $547 versus the $691 it closed at yesterday. That's a 21% look-through discount. The NAV per share year to date is up 7% because of the accretion of our buyback versus Charter being up about 5% as shown on the slide.
We expect that Liberty Broadband's buybacks will match or exceed all the cash flow that we receive through our share sales into Charter's buyback. I'd like to spend a minute reiterating Charter's competitive position. There's been a lot of writing recently about pressure from fiber and other factors impacting cable. We're still quite bullish on the space and especially bullish on Charter. Strong growth metrics since COVID and attractively priced product offerings give us confidence. The network evolution that we have with the ability to deploy DOCSIS upgrades, high-split, and fiber deployment on new installations gives us an enduring path to grow. The free cash flow was up 117% last year, which supports our active capital return activities at Charter, and free cash flow per share therefore was up almost 160%.
Importantly, at Charter, mobile adds another leg to the stool for growth. The very successful mobile strategy is being deployed. It's still small compared to the video bundle, but cable has captured 30% of all the wireless adds, net adds over the last 3 years, and penetration will grow, and the economics for the benefit of Charter will continue to get better and better. The bottom right shows we have the best wireless pricing out there at all numbers of lines. The Braves. People didn't put a high percentage chance that we would win. We spent more time under .500 than any champion in baseball history, 101 days under .500. The Braves had the second highest attendance of any MLB team, second to the Dodgers, who had 17% higher attendance despite the fact that their ballpark is 35% larger.
Finally, looking at Tripadvisor among the portfolio companies. We're confident in Tripadvisor's business. The flexible nature of their cost control allows for a balance between cost controls and investments. According to industry sources, leisure travel is expected to fully recover by next year, with international travel being the lagging element. The Q3 hotel auction, and you'll hear more about this obviously from Steve in a minute, reached 76% of the 2019 levels, and as we expect it will grow over the coming quarters. We have promising growth opportunities. Beginning with Tripadvisor Plus, the business model has been pivoted recently to vacation funds. The immediate benefit of increased supply without paywall and the hotels maintaining rate parity allow cashback either to your bank account or to use on future trips.
Both our experiences in dining segments have very attractive assets, and we will continue to look at ways to highlight their value, including through partnerships and the like. Lastly, I'm gonna touch a bit on our portfolio approach to ESG. It's an important effort, one we focused on over the past 20 months, and we try to show a larger impact through a coordinated effort across our portfolio, and we're both being responsive to your investor needs and our ability to take a leadership position. The priorities are very different across the portfolio. For example, at Qurate it's really about supply chain management, and at Formula 1 it's largely about climate. At Liberty, we've tried to provide value by hosting summits, sharing best practices and providing oversight and guidance where we can.
We have completed a materiality assessment across the company and it's identified our four ESG pillars. Part of that is we're announcing a Liberty Climate Initiative. We intend to be carbon neutral on scope one and two emissions by 2030 at Liberty, and we're ensuring our portfolio companies publicly report on their carbon footprints, and we are encouraging them towards lower carbon strategies. We'll try and provide support to the portfolio companies in a lot of ways. One of the ways is by offering co-investment opportunities in our green energy investments. We've done a bunch and allows them to leverage our experience and our track record and get increased scale with us. We like to end with this slide. We have a history of strong returns.
We're always happy with this visual, and I'm happy that we beat the long-term trend this year and increased the overall returns over the period. Thanks very much.
[Presentation]
The things we do for IR. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be back after a 2-year hiatus. I might not be a Bill Ackman sock puppeteer, but hopefully, the explanation from the sock puppet answered your questions. If not, of course, there's always slides in the appendix. We've come a long way since March 2020. I won't rehash all the details because we talked about a lot of this last year, but we fortified our balance sheets, secured covenant relief, and ensured we had adequate liquidity across the portfolio. Our companies were nimble and took the necessary actions needed. As we moved into 2021, our companies continued to adapt and started the process of a strong recovery. We've de-levered and the balance sheets are strong across the complex.
As you heard from Greg, Formula 1 was incredibly nimble operating their business over the past year and a half. Despite some disruptions and reshuffling of the calendar in 2021, they will get off a record 22 races and the P&L will be much more reflective of a normal year, particularly in the back half of this year. You can see that in our strong results during the first nine months. Following the initial disruption at the end of Q1 2020, we fortified the Formula One Group balance sheet and amended the F1 covenant to a liquidity covenant and have maintained significant cushion at the opco level since that point.
The return of racing in July 2020 meant that leverage has steadily come down from a peak of 23x to 5.6x at the end of the quarter, very near our target range of 5x-5.5x. We would expect to be within that range in 2022. As we've shown in the past, Formula 1 converts a high percentage of OIBDA to free cash. Here we show the 5-year average of free cash conversion, excluding 2020 due to the lower OIBDA and some one-time working capital impacts resulting from the reduced and compressed schedule. As you can see at the operating company level, F1 converts roughly 2/3 of OIBDA to levered free cash with very minimal working capital impacts, low capital expenditures, and a low effective tax rate.
The most significant impact at the opco level is interest expense, which we've actually normalized here. Cash interest expense has actually decreased approximately $120 million over this time period. Without the normalization, the average would have been closer to 39%, but we felt it was more appropriate to show you the current capital structure. We do have working capital swings from year to year, but this is largely due to the timing of when certain promoter fees are received near the end of the year. Cash taxes have remained in the low single digits over this time period, and we would expect that to continue for the foreseeable future. The corporate impact on the free cash conversion is in the mid- to high-single digits.
Generally running around 7%, it fluctuates year to year based on our transactional activity, but pretty consistent. Cash interest expense at the corporate level is fairly minimal. Looking at the Braves quarter end, we are sitting on $217 million of cash and restricted cash at the Braves Group. Healthy improvement over the 2020 disrupted season. Some of that cash sits at the corporate level and covers approximately $5 million of corporate allocated costs. There's also $83 million of restricted cash which relates to certain revenues associated with the stadium, which are pledged for debt service, stadium maintenance, and lease payments. Excess amounts in these accounts are released annually and can be used for general corporate purposes such as purchasing things like World Series rings, as an example.
There's detail of the Braves debt in the appendix, but looking at the maturity profile, we are in good shape. Our next maturities outside recurring amortization on the stadium debt are in 2023. $134 million of this represents construction loans on Phase II of the development that we intend to replace in the near- to medium-term, as both the retail and office components of that development are virtually fully leased. Maturities in 2024 and 2025 include our entertainment loan and the Comcast office building, which is fully leased under a long-term lease. That leaves the MLB debt in 2026 and primarily stadium-related debt after that, which is primarily due in 2041. As I said at the beginning, a pretty healthy balance sheet that didn't require a reliever during the heavily shortened and impacted season in 2020.
I feel like we show this slide every year, and I feel like it keeps getting better. $18.6 billion of unencumbered securities at LSXM, compared to $14.6 billion last year. This slide is pro forma for selling the remainder of our iHeart stake in early Q4, but not the planned redemption of the 2.25% Live Nation exchangeables, which we would expect to settle out in early 2022. Overall liquidity fairly consistent, down $100 million to $1.6 billion from last year. Major movements there would be the settlement of the call spread with the F1 Group, LSXM stock repurchases offset by Sirius dividends, iHeart proceeds, and increased capacity on the Sirius margin loan.
The $1.6 billion of cash and margin loan capacity is further supported by $280 million of expected dividends from Sirius XM, reflecting their recent 50% dividend increase. That leaves us with a 16% current loan-to-value on the corporate level debt at LSXM. Turning to GCI. GCI has seen continued improvement in its leverage portfolio. Moving from peak leverage of 6.2x to 3 x at the end of Q3. This is reflective of steps to manage our debt profile as well as strong operating results of the business. The company has seen continued growth in OIBDA from $267 million in 2018 to $363 million at the end of the quarter on a trailing 12-month basis.
Payments on our rural healthcare programs, which have been slow to non-existent over the last couple of years, began flowing since last Investor Day with $248 million received. Those positive working capital movements, combined with strong results, have allowed us to pay down $278 million on our credit facility during the first nine months of the year, with an additional $30 million paid after quarter end. We also refinanced our debt at GCI after quarter end and took out the Term Loan B with a new $250 million Term Loan A and a $150 million incremental draw on the revolver. The revolver's maturity date was extended to 2026, and the Term Loan A has a 2027 maturity date.
These actions will lead to $8 million in annual interest savings, and the positive momentum at GCI has also led to favorable credit rating upgrades for Moody's and S&P. We are comfortable with GCI's leverage at this time, and we'd expect GCI to be a provider of cash to Liberty Broadband in the future. Looking at Trip. Earlier in the year, we restructured the preferred shares at Liberty TripAdvisor by repurchasing 42% of the shares held by Certares for $373 million. This was done with a $281 million cash payment and the delivery of $92 million worth of Tripadvisor shares, representing 1.7 million shares. The cash was generated from a portion of the proceeds received from concurrently issued exchangeable bonds on our Trip interest.
This exchangeable has a $330 million face amount, 50 basis point coupon, initial exchange price of $69.78, and a put/call date of around March 25. As part of this transaction, Certares permanently waived its put right, which reduces overhang risk and provides stability to the Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings capital structure for the foreseeable future. We also raised $35 million for future working capital needs, including interest expense at the corporate level, and we unencumbered 1.7 million Tripadvisor shares. Greg O'Hara remains on both the Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings and Tripadvisor boards, and we are pleased with the continuing partnership. Finally, in a nod to our tax team, it wouldn't be an Investor Day presentation about talking about taxes, so I'm excited to do that. I wanted to quickly walk through the tax implications on our Charter share sales.
I guess we're skipping the balance sheet overview of Liberty Broadband since we have nearly $28 billion of unencumbered securities and a loan to value of 7%, with future liquidity coming from continued share sales. $3.6 billion, as Greg said, so far this year. Anyway, we'll just focus on taxes. Our sale proceeds are treated as dividend income for tax purposes and eligible for a 65% dividend received deduction. The net effect of this results in a forecasted tax rate of roughly 5%-7% in the current year, which we expect in 2022 and 2023 will increase closer to 7%-9%. The increase is largely due to the fact that we were able to utilize tax loss carry-forwards in 2021, which we don't expect to repeat going forward.
We are remitting cash payments quarterly, so the payment of the liability is fairly closely matching up to the timing of receipts from the share sales. As always, IR has put a plethora of information in the appendix to help with your questions throughout the year. Thank you for your time and your continued interest in Liberty Media.
[Presentation]
Hello, everyone. It's a real pleasure to speak to you from my day job.
From the media center, the heart of rock and roll, where everyone is connected through our people, through our technology to follow Formula 1. 2021 has been an incredible, yet challenging year. Formula 1 is an organization that is able to adapt and maintain our focus on the needs of the sport. All of this is possible because of this historic foundation of our business, which have been significantly enhanced by the work done by Chase and the team since 2017. I want to pay tribute to Chase's leadership over that period. The sport's ability, not just to navigate a successful path, but also to flourish during the pandemic, is a testimony to his contribution. Many businesses have used the pandemic as a moment to pause, alter plans, or change direction.
At Formula 1, my view is that it has been presented an opportunity to grow, to thrive, and to provide our customer and fans with something they have been craving for so long, inspiration and entertainment. We remain centered on our fans, both retaining our core fans and keeping them engaged while continuing to reach new ones in compelling ways. A balance that requires skills and consideration. We are privileged as a sport to be truly international, racing in many continents and countries around the world with a global fan base over half a billion. We reach every corner of the globe through our events, TV broadcast, and other media content. These days, if you show anyone in the world a picture of an F1 car, they will instantly know what it is. If you show them a picture of Lewis Hamilton, he's recognized.
If you say the words Formula 1, people think of speed, legends, and top-tier racing. Having such a powerful platform is both a blessing and also responsibility. We are an industry and a sport with tens of thousands of direct and indirect employees through our teams, partners, and supply chain across Europe and the globe. The industry, jobs, and growth of the business depend on a vision and a strategy to continue building the sport. We must protect what we have, grow it, reach more fans, and ensure the platform is always evolving. The pandemic is painful, but we are coming back strong. Our growth curve has been delayed, but it has not been altered. If anything, we believe we have even more opportunity than was the case in early 2020.
The best days for Formula 1 are still ahead of us, and we were delighted to announce our record-breaking 23-race calendar for 2022 a few weeks ago. We have a clear plan to achieve this growth, and we remain concentrated on the key priorities and opportunity we see in front of us that I laid out earlier in the year, which are, number one, putting the drivers at the center of F1 as they are the soul and the ambassador of the sport. The collective talent we have today on the grid is as high as it has ever been in Formula 1 history, and we should celebrate that. Second, delivering an incredible product that strengthen competition and action on the track, including a record-breaking 23-race schedule next year, another new race location being added to the calendar in the future.
Number three, enhancing the long-term prospect of the sport and ensuring an attractive business model for all participants and attracting new participants. Number four, remaining committed through our action to our WeRaceAsOne platform, focused on sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and community. In accordance with these priorities, we make decisions for Formula 1 with a holistic mindset, not solely focused on individual revenue stream. For example, in contemplating a new race, it is not just about the promotion fee. We consider the market. Is it a territory where we have many existing fans, or does it present a growth opportunity? How do these fans consume content in this location? Do our sponsors value exposure in this market, and are we unrepresented by sponsors from this region?
All of these variables factor in our assessment of the total value proposition as we sit in the enviable position of having far more demand towards races than an available supply all weekends to the field. The primary revenue stream of F1 are all interconnected, and our holistic business strategy looks to grow F1 revenue in totality. Coming back to 2021, we have an incredible battle on the track for the championship. The closest rivalry in years between Lewis and Max. One is going for an historic eighth world title and the other for his first. We have seen drama, battles, and incidents throughout the field, and welcome new and returning faces and teams to the podium. We have seen Esteban Ocon clinching Alpine first win, Sebastian Vettel second for Aston Martin in Baku, and Daniel Ricciardo and McLaren getting back on the winners' step in Monza.
The fans are back at our races, and their energy and enthusiasm for Formula 1 has never been stronger. From the full crowds numbering over 350,000 at Silverstone, to the Orange Army in Zandvoort, to the U.S. Grand Prix, which hosted 120,000 fans per day, the love and the passion for our sport is on full display. Fans around the world are also tuning in virtually, and we are continuing to reach new audiences. Despite having four fewer races in 2020 than 2019, Formula 1 maintain a strong audience position with our average audience per Grand Prix at 87.4 million, and our cumulative TV audiences at 1.5 billion in 2020.
TV audiences in 2021 are also tuning in, and we have seen strong growth this season compared to 2020 and 2019 in many key markets, notably France, the Netherlands, Greece, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. In 2020, Formula 1 made significant gains across digital, making us the second fastest-growing major sport league on the planet across the four major social platforms. With regard to media rights, it has been a very strong year. We signed 23 agreements, including new deals with Sky Germany and Bandeirantes in Brazil, and have successfully put in place successive deals with the vast majority of markets previously covered by the Fox Sports channel under the Disney agreement in Asia through 2022. With a small number of deals for remaining markets to be completed this year.
We continue to work closely with our broadcast partners who are always evolving the breadth and depth of coverage of the sport and reaching new audiences around the world. F1 TV remains a great way for fans to catch all the action of race weekend. We have seen huge growth in subscriber numbers in 2021, and peak concurrent views for race days across the season have consistently been almost 3x higher than 2020 season. We are focused on both the content we deliver and the way we deliver it. We have incredible broadcast partners who are expert in what they do. They provide fantastic coverage and analysis for our fans around the world, and are a crucial element in satisfying our fans. We are also fully aware that consumer habits have changed and will continue to change.
More and more people are using social media, watching short clips of sport, and wanting to see more content around their sporting heroes. We are delivering this and seeing the rewards in a growing fan base. Formula 1 has continued that strong growth during 2021. Our esports events are also going from strength to strength. In the last 18 months, F1 esports events have achieved over 40 million viewers across TV and digital. This popularity led to a record number of people attending to be a part of this year's pro exhibition, with almost half a million taking part in qualification, an increase over 100% for 2020. Season 3 of Drive to Survive debuted on March 19 and continues to build mass global popularity for the sport.
On an almost daily basis, we continue to hear anecdotes about how the show has brought in new, non-typical fans, and we are hugely excited about the next season. Interest in hosting a F1 race has never been higher. As I mentioned, we are in a very strong position with more demand than supply of weekends in our calendar. In designing the race calendar, we concentrate on quality, not just on quantity. We want to ensure the calendar is right for the business overall, delivering a mix of historic and new venues with the facility for exciting racing. Investment in the circuit and overall weekends activity to enhance both the fan experience and financial agreements that deliver long-term value for Formula 1.
We made a number of exciting race announcements, including introducing Miami for 2022, welcoming Qatar to both the 2021 calendar, as well as agreeing a 10-year deal for further races from 2023, and we have our first race in Saudi in just a few weeks' times. While China isn't on the 2022 calendar currently due to ongoing COVID-19 related issue, we will restore it to the calendar as soon as conditions allow, and look forward to growing our long-term partnership in these years ahead. Despite the challenging economic environment, the sponsorship partners area have been very strong, with several new partnerships, good renewals, and a healthy pipeline being built despite the ongoing pandemic. Within the last six months, we welcome Crypto.com as a new global partner for our Sprint events.
BWT joined us as an official partner and Saudi Telecom as a title partner. Earlier this year, we welcomed new partnership with Workday , Ferrari Trento, Zoom, and Herjavec. The pipeline remains very promising, with a number of conversations near finalization, specifically across the global partners category of tech, enterprise and consumer, and the financial services. In the licensing space, we have also completed a multi-year extension with Fanatics across apparel and e-com. Fanatics, Codemasters, which is now Electronic Arts, and Topps all continue to outperform royalties expectations. Once again, this shows the huge value our partners and potential partners see in our global platform and engage audiences around the world. With the merging of our internal digital licensing and sponsorship teams, we are able to offer a much more compelling business case, enabling more performance-based and tailored partnerships.
CRM and the first-party data at scale will become the final value of the offering in due course. We also continue to look at developing more commercial assets that didn't exist before, such as the Sprint, Rookies, and the F2 and F3 events to offer additional partnership and revenue opportunities. These are all positive developments for the sport. However, the action on track must be exciting and engaging to make this growth possible. The good news is that execution of increasing competition on the track is already underway with more to come. We introduced a new format for 2021 with our Sprint. The Sprint was agreed by all teams and reflects the improved spirit of collaboration we have built in the sport over recent years.
This format balances three days of action with qualifying on Friday, the Sprint on Saturday, and the race following on Sunday, providing more action and content for our fans, broadcasters, media, and partners. Viewers are tuning in. The Sprint has seen exciting action on the track and has shaken up the starting grid for Sunday with some dramatic outcomes. We have completed our three events this season in Silverstone, Monza, and Brazil, and the impact has been positive for all stakeholders and conversation with the teams for six events in 2022 are progressing very well. We now have a budget cap in place, limiting the amount teams can spend on their cars each year. This is designed to make the sport more financially sustainable, and is also closing the gap between the big spending teams and those with lower budgets.
The days of some teams spending $300 million- $500 million per year has gone. Spend on the car in 2021 has been limited to $145 million, and is scheduled to fall to $140 million next year, and $135 million in 2023. In 2022, we will see a new era for Formula 1 with new regulation introduced. The 2022 rules have been designed with the intention to improve competition and reduce the gap from front to back across the grid, allow close battles, and encourage more overtaking. The attention has been on the design of the new cars, driven by the aerodynamics. With the current rules, the aerodynamics disruption felt as a car gets closer to another is dramatic.
Once you are within three car lengths of the car in front, you only have 75% of the downforce you would want. At one car length, the downforce drop materially lower than, and only 55% is retained. With the new car we have developed, modeling shows that at three car lengths, a car will retain 95% of the downforce, and at one car length, it will reduce to only 85%. That is a huge difference, and we expect it will have a noticeable impact on the track. This is all fantastic news for the future of Formula 1.
This action, agreed with the strong support of the FIA and our competitive teams, show the determination of the sport to improve and create compelling, more exciting racing on the track, which feed the flywheel of growth on the commercial side, and we believe create a strong foundation for the next era of Formula 1. Today, major brands like Formula 1 needs to stand for more, needs to act as good citizen and provide solution and opportunity for our society. Our ESG action have been designed to make a real difference, under our WeRaceAsOne platform that is making positive contribution to sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and community. It's a really important platform for us. As a global sport, we have a positive role to play in making a difference, and we are already delivering results.
In 2019, we set out our detailed plan to be net zero carbon as a sport by 2030. We have already made progress toward reducing our carbon footprint, reducing waste, removing single-use plastic from our operation, and improving our logistics and travel efficiency through processes and volume optimization. We are going to have a 100% sustainable fueled engine in F1 cars in the coming years that will be carbon neutral, and the fuels we create will be drop-in, meaning they can be used globally by the automotive sector, a game changer for global automotive emissions. New OEMs are already speaking to us about this plan and technology. It comes alongside an approach to reduce the complexity and cost for our next engine.
We shouldn't forget that the current engine are the most powerful and efficient in the world, and are already powered by 10% sustainable fuels. Our discussion with existing and potential OEMs have been very positive for the sport. Alongside our sustainability efforts, we are taking action to increase diversity. We want to be as diverse as our fan base, and this is why we are taking action to ensure talented people from underrepresented groups have the best opportunity to get into and build a fantastic career in this amazing sport. A few months ago, we were delighted to announce that scholars, apprentices, and interns will get the chance to fulfill their dreams in Formula 1. This year, we have created position for them to work in the sport, pursue their education, and get first-hand experience.
We are creating the right condition to improve both our sport on the racetrack and the values that our global brand stands for. It is a very exciting time for Formula 1 with fans engaging, an exciting championship, and a set of strong values that will shape the future of our organization and the sport globally. Especially over these past couple of years, Formula 1 has shown that innovation, purpose, and determination are the key ingredients to turn every challenge into an opportunity and make a real difference. Thank you very much.
[Presentation]
Good morning, everyone. This fall marked the 20th anniversary of the very first XM subscriber we signed up. Since then, we have built SiriusXM into the leading audio entertainment company in North America. We have 150 million listeners, of which 40 million of them are paying premium SiriusXM and Pandora subscribers. Our share of ear is 20% in the car for SiriusXM alone, and that's despite the fact that we're only in half the cars on the road. In the past 12 months, we've generated an industry-leading $1.7 billion in digital advertising revenue. Edison has recently said that Americans are spending an astounding 4 hours a day with audio, and that's up 8% year- over- year. We are at the forefront of capturing the shift from AM/FM and the growth in new categories, including podcasts.
There we go. 2021 has been yet another year of extremely strong execution across the board. We've secured multi-platform content deals with Megyn Kelly, Drake, Tom Brady, and Kevin Hart, and many more. We've launched creative partnerships with great brands like TikTok across SiriusXM and Pandora. We've fortified our in-vehicle distribution with extended OEM agreements and new 360L launches, and we've increased our digital engagement outside of the car. We've built upon our leadership position in podcasting after the acquisitions we did last year of Stitcher and Simplecast by signing a number of very significant deals in the space and acquiring 99% Invisible. We've brought all of this podcasting reach together with our SiriusXM and Pandora advertising teams under the banner of SXM Media.
With these winning strategies and our strong execution, we are extremely well-positioned to deliver on our guidance, which we've increased twice this year. We're constantly expanding the breadth of our content at SiriusXM, and you know, we have music, news, talk, comedy, sports, and entertainment. This is actually a great image from a campaign where we launched earlier this fall our biggest multimedia national ad campaign ever, which generates all this excitement around the content, highlights the breadth and diversity of what we have, but also emphasizes all the places you can listen to SiriusXM outside of the car. Hopefully, you're gonna see it if you're watching any NFL games. We continue to find ways to bring very unique value to our subscribers and listeners, and this past summer, we were at the forefront of relaunching live experiences with our small stage series.
We've hosted a number of events across the country, music events, comedy events, with some pretty amazing artists. Not only is this a really unique experience for small groups of our subscribers to see their favorite artists, but we generate phenomenal content too that we broadcast on air. Pandora continues to be highly valued by tens of millions of listeners across the U.S. This year we extended our partnership with T-Mobile, and we launched a very unique customized version of Pandora with ad-free weekends and specialized content. We've also done numerous hosted, sponsored live events, whether they're virtual or in person, with advertisers and fans. We've collaborated with over 100 artists on takeover modes, which allows artists to create customized stations talking about the influences for their music and the stories behind their latest albums.
We also announced yesterday a great marketing collaboration with DJ Khaled, who is a huge fan of Pandora, so you'll be hearing a lot from him. Creators have long come to SiriusXM because of our history of working closely with talent to design unique audio experiences for them to reach their fans. This has become even more evident today now that we have Pandora and Stitcher in the portfolio. This is some great examples here. Megyn Kelly, who launched a live show on SiriusXM earlier this fall, and we distribute her podcast much more broadly across a number of platforms. Crime Junkie and the Last Podcast on the Left, we just announced recently ad sales deals with both of those properties, and they came to SiriusXM because of our strong ad sales and tech capabilities, but also because they wanted our support in broad distribution.
They'll also be looking at different ways to customize content for SiriusXM as well. U2 launched a channel on SiriusXM last year and just launched three customized modes on Pandora to discuss the influences behind their first three albums. Over the course of the last year, I've been talking a lot about our three major areas of growth, and I wanna reinforce them today. Our long-term growth will of course come from our very strong and leading position in the car. However, increasingly, in the years to come, we will be growing much more outside of the car with digital engagement and based on our strong ad platform. Both of these will drive further differentiation in our listener base and in our revenue streams. First, we continue to reinforce our leading position in the car.
You can see from the slide our penetration rate in new cars year to date is up 5% versus last year. We're approaching 82%. On the used car side, we're still just at 50%, so there's plenty of room to grow there in the years to come. All major OEMs are committed to 360L programs, and we know that when users have experienced the features for 360L, they convert and retain at higher rates. Our job is to take all this great data we're getting from the car now and design the insights to be able to personalize the marketing, whether it's in the car or out of the car, on recommendations for content and features. 360L obviously makes the experience in-car much easier to use and is, I think, the next generation in entertainment system in the car.
We continue to deliver more value to OEMs by reducing their costs and also reducing development cycles. We're developing our next generation wideband module. We are delivering software updates over the air, and we're looking at a single AAOS in-vehicle app to be able to launch new features into market much more quickly. We're really evolving here, though, to an audio platform. Our 360L capabilities allow us to introduce other services in the car, whether that's our services, Pandora and Stitcher, or others in the years to come. We can do all this with multiple monetization models, right? We have subscription and advertising as well. Our second major growth area is driving digital engagement with listeners primarily out of the car.
Over the past 2 years, we've been primarily focused on getting our satellite subscribers to stream because we know that higher engagement outside of the car means better retention. We've done this very successfully, and it still continues to grow today. The percentage of subscribers that highlight that SiriusXM is their number one source for audio outside of the car has doubled over the past 3 years. We know that when subscribers stream, their total listening time doubles. All that time outside of the car is 100% incremental to the time in the car. We also know that we're increasingly getting exposure to other members of the household. Even our apps are not just a companion to satellite. They're actually a way for us to drive digital subscriptions outside of the enabled fleet, opening up an entirely new market opportunity for us.
We've launched, over the past couple of years, 200 exclusive music channels. We've added sports rights here. We've designed new packages with aggressive pricing. We've launched IAP, so take the friction out of the buying process. We launched our SiriusXM Home campaign, which speaks to all of the ways you can listen outside of the car, because we really need to improve the awareness about the fact that SiriusXM is not just in the car, and we're making a lot of headway here. This is improving our ability to reach younger and more diverse listeners. Our third area of growth is, of course, our ad platform. Since buying Pandora 2 years ago, we've firmly established ourselves as the leader in digital audio advertising in North America.
We brought the teams together, SiriusXM, Pandora, and Stitcher, under the umbrella of SXM Media to make sure that advertisers saw the scale and reach of what we can deliver to them. We've been very disciplined in the podcast market, but we found great opportunities to bring talent to our platforms and exclusively manage the ad sales, whether it's Crime Junkie, the top-rated podcast, Last Podcast on the Left, For Colored Nerds, Storytime with Seth Rogen, 99% Invisible, which we bought earlier this year, The Bellas, or Rory & MAL. Creators want to come to SiriusXM. Remember, many of these podcasts are broadcast beyond our platforms to other third-party platforms, and we monetize there as well. We're also protecting our valuable first-party data, and that means we don't need to rely as much on third-party identifiers.
2021 will be yet another year of, you know, phenomenal delivery across our metrics. We've increased our guidance twice. Our revenue and EBITDA will be up 7% and our free cash flow will be up 8%. This is what positions us so well to continue to generate and deliver capital returns. Nearly $17 billion of capital returned to shareholders over the past 9 years. We maintain the flexibility. We just increased the dividend, as Greg mentioned, 50%, last month, but we still maintain the flexibility to do what we need to invest in our business, whether it's organically or through M&A, to be able to deliver the best listener experiences. This year we did several different smaller investments in one acquisition. We bought 99% Invisible, a podcast company. We also invested in Audio Up and Flymachine.
Audio Up, we're doing co-production on scripted podcasts and managing the ad sales for those podcasts. With Flymachine, they have a very unique immersive social platform focused on live events, and we look forward to working with them on that as well. We are really well-positioned to continue to drive growth in our core business, but there's also a number of call options for the future as well. These span new ways of monetizing, whether it's our enabled fleet of inactive vehicles, or our spectrum assets, especially as we consider how we might free up the low band in the second half of this decade. We're also exploring new packages and niche audio services that capture incremental demand, including having a robust, free ad-supported platform in the car. In summary, our content has never been better.
We're even more attractive today than we were years ago now that we have Pandora and Stitcher as part of our portfolio. We've reinforced our position in the vehicle and we're improving upon it with connectivity. We're growing our digital engagement outside of the car and driving more new subscriptions in this manner. We've generated record high ad revenue, and we're positioned to capture more of this with multi-platform buys with advertisers. This track record of solid execution with these strengths sets us up for ongoing growth in the future. I can't end, of course, without emphasizing, unlike Liberty Plus , our unbeatable business model and our margin profile will continue to deliver significant cash lows in the future and capital returns for our shareholders. Thank you. Thank you.
[Presentation]
Derek Schiller, President and CEO of the Atlanta Braves, coming to you from Truist Park and the Battery Atlanta, home of the world champion Atlanta Braves. This is where the confetti is supposed to blow on me. The Braves have had consistently strong teams, winning the National League East Division four consecutive seasons, and our 2021 World Series championship marks the first championship in 26 years. Since opening Truist Park in 2017, we've seen our revenues grow, driven by innovative use of data and analytics to drive our core baseball revenues and the incredible growth of our mixed-use development, the Battery Atlanta. Entering the 2021 season, there was a lot of uncertainty about how fans would return to baseball. We were very optimistic, and our attendance numbers still exceeded our high expectations.
We began the season with 33% capacity for our first home stand, expanded to 50% for our second April home stand, and went to 100% capacity in May. Only the Dodgers, with a ballpark that holds 10,000 more fans than ours, had a higher attendance in 2021. The Battery Atlanta also saw record numbers of people enjoying the property and businesses. We attribute much of this success to our relationships and collaboration. We maintained a high touch relationship with both our season ticket holders and our corporate partners. Because our direct communication and interaction during the 2020 season, we were able to see success in those areas in 2021. This was supplemented with strong data-driven outreach program to engage all our fans.
2021 saw us hit a Braves record in average ticket price and average gate receipts for the regular season. Average paid attendance and premium ticket revenue were below our run rate due to the month of April being at limited capacity. We are fortunate to have a strong brand presence in a city with a concentration of corporate headquarters. In 2020, we were able to retain 54% of our corporate sponsorship dollars with only 37% of the games played. We work closely with our corporate partners to identify opportunities to make good, and in some cases, extended our contracts by a year. 94% of our contracted revenue is locked up in a five-year or longer deal. We are very bullish about expanding our already strong revenue stream.
In addition to opportunities a World Series championship presents, we also see opportunities in gaming, technology, and new assets like player uniform patches. Our existing contract with Sinclair runs through 2027, and we were recently able to lock in 2023 through 2027 at a higher per game rate. Bally Sports South and Southeast are two of the strongest regional sports networks in the nation. We continue to believe that direct to consumer is critical to our future, and we are actively engaged with Major League Baseball in developing what the future of streaming looks like. This map of The Battery Atlanta represents our current footprint for Phase I and Phase II, circled. Most of our Phase I tenants are fully operational. The restaurants are experiencing labor shortages similar to the rest of the nation, but they are all open for business and thriving.
Phase II is fully online with a three-ballpark center you can see in the lower circle as our crown jewel. TKE and Papa John's are the anchor tenants, and we are confident we will be able to lease the remainder of the building shortly. We have had a lot of interest, and many spaces have a current LOI in place. We have over 1.3 million leasable square footage of space in Phase I and II. Retail and dining shows some post-COVID impact as tenants with signed leases are slow to open due to supply chain issues. While we do not currently have plans for a Phase III, we are open to new opportunities for development or partnership. For the nine months ended September 30th, 2021, total revenue is $466 million, significantly higher than COVID 2020.
If you were to compare revenues to 2019, baseball revenues have increased 4% and development revenues have increased 22%. 2021 expenses are significantly higher than 2020, reflecting a partial season of baseball and cost containment actions in 2020. Compared to 2019, expenses have increased by 2.5% during the same period. Baseball adjusted OIBDA is $69 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2021, a 15% increase over 2019. Development adjusted OIBDA is $23 million, a 35% increase over 2019. 2021 operating income is $30 million, 150% higher than 2019. I'm going to provide some brief color on a few additional areas we believe to be growth opportunities for the Braves. Sports betting is rapidly proliferating in the United States.
In the first half of 2021, 28 states have legal and live sports betting, with the market surpassing $20 billion in total wagers for the first half of the year. It is forecasted that total wagers will reach nearly $200 billion by 2025. Sports betting continues to slowly make it through the Georgia legislature. We believe the law will ultimately pass, however the timing is still in question. We are part of a consortium with other professional sports teams in Atlanta and working with a special interest group to ensure that sports betting is implemented properly in Georgia. We believe that the financial upside from sports betting is in fan engagement and sponsorship opportunities.
Everyone is familiar with the Moneyball concept and the use of sabermetrics in baseball, but you may be less familiar with how extensively it is used in the business of baseball at the Braves and how our usage has evolved. We have been building our data warehouse for years now, integrating our customer purchasing history and social media information with MLB's data to create a richer and more robust data set. What started as a simple way to target our customers for ticket sales has evolved to a sophisticated way to create a unique digital representation of a customer. When working across ecosystems, primary and secondary ticketing, MLB.TV, retail, et c., this is a difficult challenge, and it is an important part of our segmentation strategies. We believe that as the industry moves to direct-to-consumer broadcast model, we will be well-positioned to succeed in this area.
To wrap up, I'd like to share some facts about the World Series. We played 16 games, eight of them at home, and we had thousands of people come out to the Battery to watch our away games. It was a fantastic month of October, punctuated by the Atlanta Braves winning the World Series, the first time in 26 years, and a few days later, we had a parade that was attended by an estimated 2 million fans all across Braves country, coming together to celebrate this historic victory. We appreciate all of your support of the Braves, and look forward to doing it again next year.
[Presentation]
Hello, everyone. Let me dive right in. Tripadvisor is a global travel guidance company. Our mission to help travelers all around the world plan and have that perfect trip, unleash the full potential of that trip. We are the world's largest travel platform. This is supply and demand, and it's a marketplace that comes together incredibly well. We're approaching close to 1 billion reviews, 1 billion bits of information that will help you plan that very next trip. It's a two-sided marketplace because we have hotels, things to do, restaurants on one side, people looking for the eyeballs, your eyeballs, the 400+ million travelers and diners that come to our site every month to come plan that amazing trip. Of course, we play in a $5 trillion travel marketplace.
A couple of years ago, we commissioned a study that said we influenced about 10% of that travel, $500 billion. Incredible number of vacation nights. It's really a staggering point of scale for the business. COVID hit us hard. None of us got to travel. We look at the recovery now and say, "Amen, it's here. It's exciting. We're back on the road." U.S. going really strong, Europe catching up, and the rest of the world, well, not so much. We see that it's very heavily domestic-oriented, which doesn't play to our strengths yet because international trips, those big adventures that people go on, need the most research and get planned on Tripadvisor the most. As the international borders open up, as people start going further and staying longer, Tripadvisor comes back.
I want to take a moment and review that we have different aspects of our business. We have hotels, and this is the hotel auction. We call it a meta auction, helping you find the right price on every different place you can stay on the planet, as well as our B2B solutions. We're offering hoteliers a way through advertising to reach a new set of audience, get higher in the listing, more media placements, more ability for that hotelier to sell that incremental room night. Next up is display and platform. This is standard media. It's also sponsorships. We released a couple of Alexa skills, helping DMO organizations build their credibility with our travelers. This is also where we put our new subscription business.
More on that later. Experiences both on the Viator point of sale as well as on Tripadvisor are a massive, wonderful category. When you think about what you do on a vacation, you think about what you did, not as much where you went, certainly not where you stayed, not about the airplane that got you there. It's all about the magical memories that were created when you were on those vacations. That's what you bring home. That's our entire experiences category. One of those types of experiences, you could say, is dining. In Europe, we have leading reservation system along with discounts to help people come back, make more and more reservations through our app. We'll talk about that as well. Now, I've talked here quite a few times about our hotel business. It is our largest business.
I'm choose to spend a bit more time on our experiences in dining. We break this out in an exciting segment, because we have exciting growth trajectories to be talking to you about. Let's start with experiences and with a video.
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This is what makes you remember your last vacation. This is what makes you want to go out again, to experience the world, to have those magical memories, family, friends. I'm sure many of those sequences, many of those pictures rang some bells or caused a little bit of wanderlust. You wanna get out and do it again. Viator is Tripadvisor-owned, our pure-play OTA for experiences. It's a great category. When you think about how the online travel industry has grown, started with airlines, then hotels, alternative accommodations, rentals, and now experiences. We've been a leader in the space here. It's a big space, and it is coming online in a big way. Our Viator business looks like a supply aggregator. We're contracting with tours and activity providers all over the world.
We own a bit of software called Bokun, which is something that tour operators use to bring their inventory online. We work with hundreds of Bokun competitors out there to help have the most comprehensive supply footprint for everything you wanna do, anywhere you wanna go. That's kind of the supply side. We have Viator as a point of sale, big point of sale, multilingual, and it's perfect for finding and buying that experience. You have Tripadvisor with about 100 million people on our site each month looking for something to do. It's a huge funnel of demand, but it's not just Tripadvisor as a distribution partner for Viator, but also your leading online travel agencies.
Literally, Booking and Expedia, those types, and literally thousands of additional partners that license the Viator supply and sell attractions, tours, and activities in their own way. The business recovered nicely in the summertime. Our revenue was at 75% of same period last in 2019. Our Viator point of sale individually had already achieved 2019 levels. Amazing. In October, we saw that our combined, all of the channels, the ones that were slower to recover, the fast ones, all combined reached our 2019 levels. This is a faster recovery than our hotel business. This is kinda amazing to us and shining a beautiful spotlight on how well this experience part of our business is growing. Moving on to dining. TheFork has 80,000 restaurants covering Europe and Australia and several other parts of the world.
29 million users. A ton of activity. You make your online reservation, it's super convenient, and you get a discount. This is, as we've seen it grow across the globe, a wonderful way to add to that travel experience and use it as a local. We've expanded a little bit into, call it, the fintech space here with TheFork PAY, the ability to pay at the table. Super convenient. It's gonna take over the world. Gift cards, where instead of giving a cash gift card, instead of giving perhaps an Amazon card, it's the thrill of being able to go out to a restaurant, and with 80,000 restaurants, the choice is amazing. Come this holiday season and many more, we predict a very nice sales of gift cards.
Already, even though this is a European-focused business, we're at 90% of our 2019 levels in Q3. Here's how we view this experience in dining segment. You've got fast-growing opportunity, big TAMs, leader in the category, best supply footprint, locked up or extensively locked up the distribution channels that reach the 100 million that Tripadvisor has. Partnerships across the industry. That led us to think, well, how do we look at this in the scheme of the entire Tripadvisor universe? Because we have a wonderfully profitable and mature hotel business. Here we have some fast-growing businesses in a big TAM, and we were so happy we bought the companies many years ago. Now what comes next?
As we said on our last earnings call, we're looking to crystallize ways that we can better explain this to all of you, better enable us to fund the growth that we see in front of us for experiences, and help appreciate the sum of the parts analysis that should go into valuing a company like Tripadvisor. It's a gem, and we look forward to sharing more details as we figure out exactly what the best way to share that with you would be. Nobody will be surprised that I'm also gonna be talking to you about Tripadvisor Plus. In mid-2021, we launched this program, Travel Subscription. We think there's the opportunity for tens of millions of subscribers.
A fantastic way to up your travel through discounts as the hero feature, and then perks and other benefits. Hotel discounts specifically, as well as perks and benefits in different ways to travel. Real dollars in your pocket. We are helping hoteliers reach a bigger audience, and for Tripadvisor, a recurring revenue stream. In many cases, innovation comes with bumps in the road. Sure enough, we faced one as we had launched the product. It was centered around supply. We had issues with some of our hotel partners not wanting to share discounted inventory in an open system. We have changed the model a bit. We're calling it Vacation Funds, moving it to a cashback style. This is a screenshot of our one of the screenshots of the different Vacation Funds that we are currently in beta test with.
Instead of the instant discount, it's a cashback after you stay. Again, all of the same benefits, all of the same opportunities, reducing some of the challenges that we had in terms of supply and removing the paywall that was getting in the way. A little bit deeper dive into what the vacation model experience actually looks like. Hotels are offering the lowest publicly available rate. They're comfortable with that. Hotel pays us a commission, be it 10% or up to 30% or 40%, however we negotiate that with the hotel or through aggregators. That funds a reward pool for us. That reward pool, we in turn give back as cashback to the traveler as soon as they arrive at that hotel. Traveler says, "Oh, my goodness, I saved so much money.
Maybe I got a room upgrade, a bottle of wine, and now I'm more loyal to Tripadvisor, coming back because I know I can save money on hundreds of thousands of hotels. What am I gonna do when I'm there? By the way, we're saving you 10% on every single experience we sell on the site as part of your Tripadvisor Plus membership. When you think about loyalty programs, you might think, "Oh, I get some points here. I'm not sure what I can do with them. I might get a cashback on my credit card of 1% or 2%. Maybe I might be able to do something with these points at some point." No, this is different. This is 10% to 15% to 20% cashback to you that goes to your bank account.
You can also charge on whatever credit card you want, earning a couple of points there. That's great. It's all additive. This is literally, in our view, 10 x better than any other loyalty program out there. It's delivering real cash to you, drops into your wallet. When you get there, you can spend it on that trip. You can save it for the next. Customers love it. For hoteliers, again, rate parity issue solved. They get all their inventory out there. They sign up and get access to our incremental demand. Travelers, as I talk about that wonderful cashback, that's why they love it. Tripadvisor has a recurring revenue stream, $99 is the list price. We can take a piece of the commission if we choose to on a second and third and fourth purchase.
We have travelers coming back to us without having to buy them back through typical online means. We get that loyalty angle. The whole ecosystem revolves around a tremendous benefit to that traveler saying, "Well, of course I'm going to start my very next trip on Tripadvisor because I know I'm gonna get savings. I know it has the best selection, and I'm a member, in fact, a paying member." Let me quickly cover a couple of financial highlights from before the pandemic. Super strong company, terrific EBITDA, free cash flow. When the pandemic hit, we had to do a bunch of a pullback. We took out $200 million, vast majority of which will stay out of the company as we rebuild around experiences and around subscription model and keep those auction and media businesses going.
Our commitment to cost management is very real. As we've recovered, as the revenue's gone up, and we've kept our costs down, EBITDA has returned, yay, back into that profitability space. Once again, we continue to grow, leveraging the top-line growth, leveraging the fact that people are gonna be taking those international trips again, leveraging the fact that COVID has taught us bar none that travel is inherent to everything we care about, and that pent-up demand, I would predict, would stay as we value our traveling experience. Travel's coming back. We are super well positioned for that as the leading site, the most trafficked travel site, in the internet. Experiences and dining already hitting 2019 levels. Yay. Looking for additional growth vehicles, growth vectors there, I should say. Travel subscriptions, our new growth vehicle in our hotel media and platform, part of our business.
Again, huge opportunity leveraging the traffic that is already on Tripadvisor, already in our funnel, looking at how to maximize the next part of that experience. Of course, we're returning now to profitability with the leaner cost structure. With that, on a very sort of personal note, I had shared in our recent earnings call that I plan to step down next year, sometime in 2022, and my successor's name. I want to thank Liberty very much for their support over the years. For all of you who are Trip or LTRIP shareholders, thank you very much. It has truly been a privilege to lead such an amazing company. Thank you very much.
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Well, good morning. It's great to be here. As great as the pandemic has been for our business, it's truly a pleasure to be live with you and I can't tell you how good it feels just to be in front of a real audience. You know, let me talk about what Charter is and how it works and what our opportunities are going forward. You know, we're in 41 states. We have three-quarters of a million miles of infrastructure that's taken nearly 50 years to build. It's 1 Gbps high-capacity network everywhere we operate, and it's run systemically and uniformly with common sets of products across the entire infrastructure. We pass 54 million homes and businesses and have 32 million relationships inside of that footprint.
Charter at a glance, you can see that we have 32 million customers, 30 million broadband customers, 16 million video customers, 10 million traditional landline voice customers, and little over 3 million mobile customers. We've been growing nicely. So far over the last 12 months, we grew our revenues by over 8%, and we grew our EBITDA by over 12%, which is really fast growth and the result of the changes, some of the effects of the pandemic, but also consistent with our long run strategy of building value and creating value over time.
How we rank in the industry with other companies, you can see that we're about the same size as Comcast from a broadband relationship perspective and how the two companies relate relative to AT&T, Verizon in terms of the significant broadband product that we all offer. As a multi-channel video provider, we got over the last several years, even though the video business has been quite challenged, our relative position has improved, and we've had less of an effect than the other providers. We've passed AT&T, DIRECTV, and Dish to become the second largest multi-channel video provider. You know, since we put the company together, the broadband business that we have has really been driving the engine of the business to date.
Over the last 5 years, you can see that, because we have a superior product, we have a 200 Mbps broadband speed offering everywhere, which was, in many cases, 10 Mbps when we put the companies together. 200 Mbps everywhere we operate, 1 Gbps available everywhere we operate. 200 Mbps is the minimum speed that we go to market with. We've built an advanced Wi-Fi system that allows our wireless high speed connectivity to be superior throughout the dwelling and office spaces that we operate in. We've invested in a new cloud-based router system that gives us control over privacy and security, and it gives us an ability to manage that in-home network in a way that makes it superior to alternatives.
That capability, that investment, has resulted in a high growth rate from an overall customer growth rate. You can see that, relative to the industry, we've grown twice as fast as the industry at large, and that we've taken our penetration up from 45% of the homes and businesses we passed to 55% during that timeframe. We've also increased the universe of passings by new construction by 10% during the same period. The denominator has gone up by 10% during this five-year window. There are really three opportunities going forward in terms of what we can do to make our business grow. The most immediate opportunity we have is to make mobile products available to every customer we have and have them buy them from us.
You can see that we just launched the business a couple of years ago, and we've already become a player in the mobile space. We're actually growing faster than other providers inside our footprint. We have a pricing system that allows us to offer a superior product for a lot less. If you think about the whole, just do a thought exercise, the broadband business, our average broadband revenue is about $60. You know, retail prices are $79-ish for a standalone product. It's discounted in some cases with other bundles, and it also has promotional pricing. On average, we're taking out about $60. Inside our footprint, the mobile companies are taking out in homes where there are post-paid relationships about 2.2 lines at $60 each.
$132 of mobile revenue per household in households where we're getting $60. We can take that mobile revenue that is in those households, the household telecom spend, and convert that into our revenue, and we can do that by having lower prices and still have a significant increase in the overall portion of revenue that we get for our company and save the customer household spend in a significant way. We can save customers hundreds, thousands of dollars in some cases a year in telecom cost and actually improve our revenue and EBITDA. By doing that, we not only grow our business, you know, on a RPU basis, but we can grow it on a horizontal basis, meaning increased penetration because we have a greater value proposition.
This slide really shows what the revenue opportunity is. The fact is, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, when I came to Charter, my thesis was that it was an under-penetrated asset, that there was plenty of growth in front of it, and that the biggest opportunity we had was to fill in the penetration that we didn't have. You can see we've grown the broadband business to about 55% of the homes that we pass. Look at the mobile penetration that we have as a percentage of the passings we have. Then look at what the industry revenue takeout share that we have. We're a business that, from a revenue perspective, is 26% penetrated from just the telecom. This is not the video piece of the business.
It's not the historic landline telephone line part of the business. The reality is we have a big runway in front of us from an opportunity perspective. The other thing that the other value driver that's making our business more efficient and therefore more competitive is that our service as a product is a key part of our strategy. We've been digitizing the operation in a successful way and improving the quality of all the customer interactions that we have. As a result of that, you know, 25% of all sales we make now are digital sales, meaning they're not handled by a human being, they're coming through a digital platform. 85% of all connects that we do are self-installations. We're direct shipping people CPE, customer premises equipment.
They're self-installing it and automatically provisioning it in a hands-free, seamless, convenient way for consumers. Sixty percent of our customers now engage with us exclusively through digital channels. As a result of that, you know, we're taking out transactions, we're taking out costs, and we're improving the value proposition to the consumer and actually making customer service better. You can see these charts below, total truck rolls go down, and customers go up. The two of those things are creating a widening gap of EBITDA creation by improving service, improving life of customers, which reduce churn, less cost in the overall relationship over time out of a household that's producing revenue. It's producing less service transactions as well. You can see that the pandemic made our pathway to self-installation accelerate.
People didn't want us in their homes. They wanted our services. They needed our services in many cases to manage their digital life, their education, their work, and their entertainment. Yet we had this situation where people didn't want contact. We went to an immediate self-installation process that was quite successful. We were already on the path, but we had to accelerate it. We went faster than we wanted to go from an operational point of view, but it really has worked and is now it's become part of life that we're a self-installation business. The other big opportunity we have is managing the cost of upgrades of the capital infrastructure that we've deployed.
We have a really cost-efficient pathway to continuously improve the quality of services that we deliver and the speeds that we deliver, and to maintain our competitive posture as the fastest product available almost everywhere we operate, and the best product from a latency and value proposition. The way we do that is by continually investing in technologies that get more out of the hybrid fiber-coaxial plant that we have. One thing we did a couple of years ago was go to DOCSIS 3.1, which is a new form of DOCSIS that got us the 1 Gbps capability everywhere. We were able to do that for $9 a home passed of investment.
We have a pathway going forward in both high-split potential capital investments and in DOCSIS 4.0, which is a new format of DOCSIS that allows bi-directional high-capacity DOCSIS at symmetrical speeds. Both of those opportunities are significant and allow us to upgrade at very low costs relative to a replacement cost, new kind of analysis or a competitive overbuild kind of analysis. We can take what's our existing video business and compress it. We can move where we split the signal up and downstream and go to symmetrical gig speeds at very efficient relative, you know, magnitude, you know, significant orders of magnitude in terms of minimal cost relative to what it costs to build another infrastructure.
As a result of that, we think that we can stay future-proofed at very low capital investments and as a result of that, stay competitive. The other great opportunity that we have is to continue to drive our share, which we've been successful in doing, and as a result of that, our network costs on a per customer basis continue to come down as we drive deeper into the market, and we become more competitive as we drive deeper into the market.
What that really produces, all of that I just said, was that you get the jaws of life in our business, which is, you know, a pretty steady capital investment on a growing subscriber base, which really means your capital intensity is coming down and your EBIT is going up, and your free cash flow is expanding at a rapid rate. That's the Charter story. With that, I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much.
You were so good, Tom, they were looking for an encore from you there. Good morning. It's good to be back here in person with an update on Liberty's northernmost ATB. GCI is keeping Alaska connected and closing the digital divide. I'll kick off this morning with a quick refresher of where we are, who we are, and what we do, then take a look at our current environment, let you know how we're doing. Then talk briefly about our network plans and our path to 10 Gbps consumer services, and touch briefly on two major projects that we're bringing along. You'll remember that Alaska is a big state with a really small population. Sharp eyes might recognize.
Sharp eyes might recognize one of Liberty's own in one of those circles, although the fish is so big it's hard to see her behind it. Alaska was emerging from a recession in 2020, and then COVID hit. I expected serious deterioration in the economy, but that's not what happened. Instead, we had a massive infusion of federal funding. Alaska's already received $14 billion under CARES 1 and CARES 2. $5 billion to the state, $5 billion to the tribes, $2 billion to businesses, and $2 billion to consumers, and expects to receive another $9 billion under the Infrastructure Act. That's all on a $50 billion state economy. Federal support, along with high oil prices, are gonna turn Alaska into a growing economy over the next several years. The stimulus impacts have obviously been very, very good for our business. Telecom has simply thrived.
It's been helped by some of the support programs, the Emergency Broadband Benefit program, the FCC's program that supports low-income and COVID-impacted customers, accounted for 25% of our net data adds this year, and another equivalent portion of customers that were pre-existing customers signed up for that program. We expect that $1.5 billion under the Infrastructure Act will be devoted to Alaska for telecom investments. That'll create both opportunities and some challenges. Obviously, there'll be both overbuilding and some crazy projects that get funded with that. It'll exacerbate the supply chain issues, certainly within the state, but as part of a nationwide issue as well. We'll have to manage our way through that. Right now, we're riding the crest of that wave. Our challenge is gonna be to surf it to shore successfully.
Obviously, the business has done extremely well during the pandemic. While 2021 won't match 2020 for results, we'll clearly outperform 2019. Our wireless growth has really been driven by the improvements in our network. Today, GCI is far and away the best and most extensive 5G network in Alaska. Our overall financial performance is driven by the growth in the high-margin data and wireless services, offset a little bit by tapering and low-margin video and voice. We've had very strong growth in commercial, primarily our government health and education business in rural Alaska. Significantly, we've resolved our funding problems with the FCC, and we're getting paid once again for our rural telehealth business. Going forward, our emphasis remains on high-growth wireless and data. Our flagship consumer data offering is now 2 Gbps. It's led to high adoption rates and significant growth.
I'm sure with the lead in I just gave you that you guessed that the building I'm talking about in this slide is the one on the right. We now lead the nation in the rollout of consumer 2 Gbps services. This spring, at a press conference at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, I announced that GCI would launch 2 Gbps services by 2022. It was a big, bold promise. I don't know if people took me seriously at the time because I was standing next to the polar bear mascot of the University of Alaska, but we did it. We launched 2 Gbps in 20 communities across the state. We didn't turn up just sections of a community. We turned up the entire community, which now has us addressing 80% of Alaskans with 2 Gbps services and 40% of our data customers subscribed to that service.
There are a few of those cabins for rent in Alaska for those of you who wish you could get 2 Gbps here in New York and are frustrated with your service levels. Combined with our 5G wireless network, we own the speed messaging in Alaska. 2 Gbps is not the destination, however. It's a rest stop on the way to a 10 Gbps network by 2025. Our path to 10 Gbps is fairly straightforward. We're calling it Hybrid Squared Fiber Coax because it's really hybrid fiber. It's a combination of our legacy HFC network with interspersed fiber to the premises for the truly high, high volume customers. It starts with the elimination of our legacy video platform. Last year, this time, we had 68 QAMs of legacy video running on the network. We're down to 9 now.
We'll be at zero by the first quarter of next year. We'll replace the actives in the plant with actives that are capable of going to 1.8 GHz, but will operate at 1.2 GHz initially, and we'll implement Remote PHY. We'll go to a high-split to open up upstream capacity, and with the advent of DOCSIS 4.0 modems, not the CMTS yet, but just the modems that can access that third OFDM stream, we'll be able to offer a service that's 5 Mbps down and 1 Mbps back. The final steps are to move to a full 1.8 GHz plant and add in the DOCSIS CMTS network, and we'll be able to do full Extended Spectrum DOCSIS by 2025, giving us 10 Gbps down and 1 Gbps back.
For those commercial customers or super users for whom that's still not enough, we'll have the ability to do individualized fiber to the premises within that network. Of course, we plan to monitor and adjust the path as we go, paying attention both to technological change and to changes in consumer demand to be sure there are no surprises at the end of the trail. Next, I have for you a quick overview of our converged network. It's pretty extraordinary, actually, and I'd love to spend 20 minutes going through it with you, but then I'd run way over my 10 minutes and I'd have Courtnee on my case, and I really don't think I can handle that. Let's just jump to the chase and look at where we end up at the end, which is happy customers.
Today, we operate a mixture of legacy networks and a statewide wireless network. We're upgrading all of those simultaneously for more speed and lower latency. In that process, our networks are converging, and in the end, the technical spaghetti of how we get there is a lot less important than the customer experience. It will be all one network, no matter where you are or what you're doing. We'll have seamless connectivity anywhere on any device at blazing speeds. While we build out the network, we've already launched the product. GCI Plus combines our modems, wireless video and voice service into a single product. The price points are extremely compelling against stand-alone services, and customers get both the best wired and wireless networks in Alaska. It's an extremely sticky product. As our network capabilities grow, and as the network converges, the product will expand.
For example, GCI Plus customers automatically got the upgrade to 2 Gbps when we turned it up several weeks ago. GCI is very much about closing the digital divide. In addition to what we've done in the urban areas, rural is a very, very important part of what we do. Our upgrades have not just been for the urban areas. When we launched 2 Gbps, we also turned it up in Nome and Kotzebue, which are two small communities on the northwest coast of Alaska. They now have urban-level service at urban-level pricing. Our wireless service is already statewide, and we're upgrading now to LTE with an easy path to 5G as we build out backhaul. Everyone's interested in closing the digital divide today. At GCI, we've been doing it for the last 40 years.
There are two projects that will help us expand and further close that divide as we drive our network deeper into the state. We already operate the most extensive network in the state composed of fiber, microwave, satellite, and wireless. I mentioned backhaul several times because that's where the real challenge is in Alaska. While today we cover 80% of Alaska with our top-tier products, as we drive backhaul fiber deeper into the state, we'll be able to solve the problems and get that remaining 20% up to urban levels. The first project that we're undertaking is fiber to Dutch Harbor in Alaska, the largest fishing port in the nation, 800 miles down the Aleutian Chain. We're running fiber on the south side of the Aleutians, with stops in five communities along the way and an ultimate destination in Dutch Harbor.
When it's complete, the residents on that whole fiber link will have access to all of our urban-level services. It's a $58 million project with $25 million in support from the USDA ReConnect Pogram. The second major fiber project is fiber to Bethel. This involves a partnership with the Bethel Native Corporation to in an application to NTIA's Tribal Broadband Program to extend fiber from where our network terminates today in Dillingham, Alaska, around and through to Bethel, and once again will bring urban-level services to one of the largest rural communities in the state. Federal support's obviously critical for much of what we expect to do in rural Alaska. We expect lots of federal dollars to flow into the state. There'll be a flurry of activity, but we're well-positioned and looking forward to further closing the digital divide. That's the update on the GCI story.
We're keeping Alaska connected. We appreciate your interest with us and Liberty, and hopefully I will see you again next year in person.
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All right. We may have squeezed that lemon pretty dry.
No, I actually think there still might be one more left.
God, no. God, no. Okay.
Are we just waiting to get?
John on the screen?
John up? Sorry, we can see John, but you can't. I don't know.
There I am.
There you are. Okay. Thank you everyone for coming. We really appreciate the strong turnout today and for you laughing at our comedy. Now we're gonna have Q&A, and we've probably got 30 or 40 minutes. Thank you for pre-submitting your questions. John, I'll start with one for you. We heard a lot today about the markets and Greg's thought piece. What are your thoughts on the market, and how concerned are you about inflation?
Well, I think inflation is a serious concern. As long as the fiscal and monetary stimulus continues globally, really at the pace it's at, we're undoubtedly gonna end up with inflationary results. We're seeing them now. Some of it's transitory, i.e., supply chain interruption based. Mostly, I think this is gonna last at least a couple years. I just had to agree to our fertilizer budget for this coming year, and it's up 300%, largely based upon the increased cost of natural gas. So there are some energy-based inflationary pressures that are going to go through the system. Certainly wages are now moving. Wage expectations are a lot higher.
Even in my own personal businesses, we're debating whether we should go with across the board 4% or 5% or do a 4% budget and then a mid-year increment. Cost pressure is finding its way through the system, and we are still in a very artificial environment. When you look at very high valuations, people are using very low interest rates to discount the future years, particularly in tech companies that still have substantial market pricing power ahead of them. I don't see any other place for money to go right now, but into the equity market. Nobody's gonna invest in long-term bonds. It just seems to me the market will continue to have inflationary pressures.
I don't see any end in sight until policy changes take place at the federal level in both monetary and fiscal policies.
Just to be clear, that's John's personal fertilizer budget. We've been much more restrained on fertilizer at Liberty.
Okay, Tom, one for you. Seems to happen every 3 years or so with cable stocks, where investors collectively get nervous about the competitive position of cable and sell off the stocks. This year, it was driven by slower than forecast Q3 data additions. How are you feeling about Charter's outlook and competitive positioning?
Great. Well, look, I think that cable is a long-term business, and creating customers is a long-term opportunity, and it requires having products and prices and packages that work through time and driving value. You know, we've gone through a really interesting economic situation here with people nesting and having massive broadband growth over the last several years. We are now in the strangest, lowest churn environment I've ever seen in my entire business lifetime, in that you know, people are just not moving, so there's less activity. You know, I think in our planning, you know, our view is that life returns to more normal activity levels and that transaction volume increases and that the kinda growth rates that we've been experiencing return.
I actually, y ou know, the markets do go up and down and there's nervousness about our product on an occasional basis, and there's always a new competitor out there that's got you know a new approach. I think, as I said previously, that our ability to continue to execute through time is demonstrated, and our ability to manage competition through time is demonstrated. I think that the value proposition over the long run is what it was.
Thank you.
It feels like, to Tom's point, I totally agree. There's been a conflagration. Suddenly a slowdown in Q3 in fiber and suddenly every negative potential threat regulation has been crystallized into the stock prices. It does feel like this is a normal cycle cable goes through, and that'll show its strength, and the prices will rise again. The multiples will start to expand again. We'll see.
Okay, one for Stefano. How soon would you expect the large internet players would start to bid more aggressively on sports rights?
Well, there is a lot of interest in our world right now, and that is a great position for us to be in. We are seeing strong figures in our audience growth in the key markets like the U.S.
We have brilliant broadcast partners who provide the depth and the level of coverage that our fans enjoy. We have said before that we will continue to monitor the landscape and we're all open to discussion in this area. I would like to add that there is a similar interest in this market. At this stage, I would say we are in a strong position and expect that to increase. We have already introduced several digital initiatives such as the Sprint in Brazil being available on Twitch, and in 2020 on YouTube, we streamed the Eifel Grand Prix. We have increased the diversity of our broadcast offering to fans.
Perfect. Thanks, Stefano. Okay, John and Greg, because this question never gets old, where do you see the biggest valuation disparity in your holdings from what you believe they are worth and what the public investors are placing on the assets?
John?
Well, I would say the structurally discounted assets that we have, Liberty Sirius and Liberty Broadband, are both moving toward a position in which those structural discounts will shrink on top of what are very strong growth dynamics in wealth creation in the underlying companies, that is Charter and Sirius, both of which are pursuing a leverage free cash flow per share growth strategy. I think those economic models are intact, and they have a little bit of a turbocharger because of the way we structurally hold them and the moves Greg has made in the case of Broadband to shrink the equity proportionately, and in the case of Liberty Sirius to eliminate any tax leakage in any distributions that come to Liberty Sirius from Sirius.
The other one that I would point to, I think, is Qurate. Qurate seems from a pure economic analysis point of view to be undervalued just as a multiple of its ability to generate, levered free cash flow. The strategy of Qurate, which has been a balance between, buyback and, at the end of a season, looking at the cash position of the company and deciding whether or not special dividends are appropriate, I believe has the promise of providing exceptional returns in the future.
I agree.
Really?
Yeah.
All right. Okay.
I agree with John.
Okay.
Usually we do.
Okay, Jennifer, how do you see returns on incremental spending on content and in the podcasting space as competition heats up?
We really have flexibility about how we monetize our content. It really depends on what we might wanna do for an individual platform or what the talent or the creator might want. You know, we could do exclusive content deals for SiriusXM, either to acquire new subscribers in a certain demo or, you know, to enhance the subscription value for our existing subscribers, or we can broadly distribute the content and drive advertising revenue. It is a balance of what the creator might want or the podcast publisher and talent. We have some great examples, like with Megyn Kelly or Kevin Hart or even Tom Brady, where we do have the show on SiriusXM, which is typically longer in interactions with, you know, people calling in. Then we'll distribute that more broadly through a podcast and monetize through advertising.
We sort of get the benefit of both worlds, but we'll continue to experiment there and see what else might happen. I think there are certainly other players out there that are aggressively bidding up content and, you know, we don't really play that game. It's really about finding the right content for our platform and, you know, making sure that we can generate the right return on that investment.
Thank you. Steve, one for you. How aggressive will you be in crystallizing the large embedded value in Viator and TheFork as hinted on your earnings call? What stands in the way of a sale or spin-off given the low valuation currently ascribed to these two assets?
I gather you did pick up on the presentation about these really are gems in our portfolio. When we look at Viator, I'm really serious about, especially Viator, finding a great way to crystallize that value because when you look at the dynamics inside the company, it's recovering quickly, it's on a growth tear, it's a massive category, yet our whole company would appear to be valued more on EBITDA multiple. If there's a way that we can through disclosure, through a partial something, a float a piece, I'm not saying never on an actual sale, but since we view experiences as a core part of the strategic Tripadvisor offering, I just wanna make sure that we have plenty of control over that supply to make sure Tripadvisor also remains core, a core value with great pricing for all of our travelers.
Perfect. Thank you. Tom, coming back to cable. Charter and Comcast are offering ever cheaper wireless service as part of a bundle with fixed and seem to want to continue to drive the price of wireless down. In your view, is it inevitable that most U.S. households will buy their fixed wireless connectivity from one player similar to Europe?
Well, I think the mobile opportunity is very similar to the wireline opportunity that existed 15 years ago. If you look at what happened there, we had high priced wireline phone service in the metro area here. It was about $72 a month. That product now is less than $15 a month. The two biggest wireline phone companies in America are Comcast and Charter. I think the opportunity in mobile is similar. It's got its own complexities, you know. But the opportunity is there to create value for consumers. Consumers actually save money, and we make money. That's a pretty attractive, virtuous model. I think it's available to us. Yeah, I think it leads toward convergence.
John, building on this, what are your thoughts on the cable infrastructure upgrades in the U.S.? It's clear that all Liberty assets outside of the U.S. are upgrading or plan to upgrade their networks to fiber. Why is that not the case here?
I'd start by reminding everybody that Europe has largely converged. That is, the broadband companies, at least ours, are also wireless companies. That's been true in every market we're still operating in. In terms of technology, the existing network structure, the nature of technological upgrade, the pressure from competition, et c., every market's different. In the U.K., we recently announced a fiber overbuild of ourselves, driven initially by B2B opportunities and ultimately because it has a relatively low capital cost element to it. Also, the U.K. is really underbuilt. There's a lot of the U.K. that's never had broadband expansion, and so a lot of that will be built out, for instance, with whatever the latest fiber opportunities are.
A lot of it has to do with the opportunities that present themselves. In the U.S., right now, I think if there is any pressure, technological, it's more for upstream capacity, and that may be more of a political reality than a business reality in the near term. The cable industry's technology in the U.S. contemplated that and does have the capability of vastly expanding the upstream capacity. The other development that we see outside the U.S. is a movement toward collective network building, so that in some places, there's only one fiber backbone network gonna be built, and everybody will share in it or use it. The models vary. In each location, it depends on capital efficiency, the current state of play, cooperation between multiple players.
I don't know if our audience understands, but it's not uncommon. For instance, in the U.K., there are four meaningful cell phone providers but only two networks. Those four competitors share those two networks as a matter of capital efficiency. I think it's different in each location.
If I could just add. I think Tom rightly pointed out the path, and John touched on it, too. The path that cable has in the U.S. to upgrade not only with DOCSIS, but high-split gives them a long path before contemplating thinking fiber is the solution. I think the opportunities on a cost-efficient basis, on a capital-efficient basis to expand the existing plant for upstream and open up capacity, I think Tom articulated well, is a long ride for U.S. Cable.
Okay. Stefano, another one for you. When do you think we find out one way or another if Porsche and/or Audi joins F1, and would they form a new team or be an engine provider?
The discussion on the next power unit is progressing well with the existing and potential OEMs. Everyone sees the huge value of Formula 1 as a platform, but also in our plans to have 100% sustainable fuel drop-in hybrids. That is a major issue that will be a game changer for the automotive market in relation to emissions. A drop-in hybrid fuel can have positive real world input near term for the over 1.6 billion internal combustion engine estimated to be on the road by 2030. As you can imagine, I do not want to prejudice the decision of the potential OEMs or the precise timing, but things are progressing very well at this stage.
If I could just add to Stefano's comment. I think, when someone becomes an engine supplier, it's very common for them to pursue a team. It's illogical to have the branding element that flows from a team that's there. Obviously, no decision's been made, as Stefano pointed out, who's gonna be an engine supplier. It does seem like a logical follow on. If you became an engine supplier, most suppliers therefore wanna go and own a team or two.
Okay. Greg, this one's for you. What are you looking for in the next CEO of Tripadvisor, and what's the timeline for the search? How much flexibility will the new CEO have in resetting priorities and strategy? What can you do to ensure the company doesn't fall behind during the search process?
The search process is already underway. We retained a search firm several months ago. We have an initial list of candidates. We are excited about the prospects being run by the comp committee, on which I'm a member, looking at those prospects, and it'll obviously go to the full board. My expectation is that the new CEO will have flexibility to drive the agenda that he or she chooses, and hopefully drive Trip to new heights and take advantage of the strengths that we have with unfettered freedom.
Okay. Jennifer, tell us a little bit more about the growth strategies outside the car. What are you excited about?
For SiriusXM Digital, there's really two objectives. I talked a little bit about these earlier, but to continue to drive engagement with our satellite subscribers outside of the car, as it's pretty logical. As people engage in other areas and other devices, you know, retention is better. You know, if they are listening to streaming outside of the car during the course of the trial, conversion is better. It's clearly better, you know, for the overall customer experience, and I believe it's been a big contributor to our really low churn over the past year. The other side of it, where I think we're really just at the beginning stages, is SiriusXM Digital subs that aren't tied to the radio in the car.
We've done a lot of, you know, sort of foundation laying this year, with the pricing and packaging, with launching IAP, so a much more frictionless experience, obviously, in the app stores. Now we can do much more effective performance marketing, you know, tied to content-based marketing to push people right into the app. We have a free preview, and that's gonna help again with that, frictionless experience of signing people up. But I think the real objective going forward and what, you know, we're hoping to do next year is to find a distribution partner or a bundle partner that's obviously been really successful on the video side and, you know, will be a big part of our strategy. Also just continuing to launch more content and features that are appropriate for the digital experience.
Thanks. Tom, another one for you. Where does pricing power in the broadband industry go from here, given growing competition from fiber to the home and fixed wireless access?
Pricing is an interesting issue. I think of it as, you know, what is your ability to take revenue from a customer? When you think about the cost per bit, for instance, in broadband, our pricing has been coming down steadily in terms of the capacity we sell and how much throughput we give you as a customer. When you think about mobile, our opportunity there is to take that capacity up even further and reduce pricing. Is that a reduction in pricing? It isn't actually, if you think about it from a relationship perspective. I think if you have a superior set of products, and drive value to customers, that you can increase your revenue, but your costs from a consumer perspective actually go down. What is price?
Ultimately, it's the cost of a consumer having a relationship with you, but from a value proposition on a per bit basis, I think our prices will continue to go down as not just because of competition, but because the products that we will use to drive continued relationships will require more and more capacity. I think, you know, the great thing about our network is that we have the ability to, with very low incremental capital, to increase that capacity dramatically, and therefore improve the overall relationship that we have with the customer in terms of the value we drive and actually lower costs on a capacity basis.
Thanks. Okay, Greg, another one for you, and I think we'll expand it a little bit. What conditions would you need to see to consider a merger of Tripadvisor and Liberty TripAdvisor, similar to what happened with Expedia in 2019? I guess if we were to expand on that, to talk a little bit more about the Liberty Media structure of the tracking stocks and the evolution of that, what you see.
Okay. You know, we would certainly look at a merger of Trip and Liberty Trip. The nature of it is such that to the degree that a Trip stock expands and Liberty Trip stock expands, Liberty Trip should grow faster than Trip. It's a more levered play on Trip, in effect. I think the Liberty Trip shareholders would be better to the degree there's a recovery and Trip expands its stock price, we would benefit and it'd be later. Alternatively, though, you could imagine situations in which somewhere down the road, Trip does something else, it's potentially acquired, and Liberty Trip is a part of that opportunity. Alternatively, that somebody would wanna buy a control position in Trip and would make an attractive offer to Liberty Trip.
You know, while seemingly the natural path is the path that we pursue, for example, with Liberty Expedia and Expedia or with Liberty Media and DIRECTV, there are other paths one can contemplate. As far as the trackers, you know, we've always viewed them as transitory. They're helpful. They give us flexibility. We think they provide transparency and optionality, so they're a positive force in our minds. There are some challenges around them, and you've seen, in some cases, these discounts widen. We try to take advantage of those challenges and turn them into opportunity. Will we always have the tracking stocks? I'll do what my chairman does and shrug. You know, I think they're working well for us now. We're, as I said, taking advantage of that discounted broadband. We're taking advantage of that discounted LSXM.
I think we're getting pretty full value for Formula 1 inside the tracking stock, so I'm not sure it's as immediate. We did go out of our way recently with the LSXM transaction to create optionality if we ever wanted to split them. Look, we monitor it, we pay attention, and we'll look at the opportunities as they arise.
Okay. Stefano, given F1's momentum, do you expect additional teams to emerge even with the sizable upfront payment that needs to be made to join the series?
We currently have 10 exceptional teams on the grid in F1 who are hugely valued by us and the whole sport. The financial stability of the sport and teams is strong because of measures put in place in recent years, such as the budget cap, and we have seen that financial strength and value grow. It is clear that all teams have to pay the fee to the FIA, which is contracted in our Concorde Agreement. Any future potential teams need to be strong and healthy to compete in Formula 1. We would not allow entry to anyone who would come and go and damage the sport, as we want a strong and healthy ecosystem.
If I could add, Courtnee. I think the actions taken over the last couple of years, and Stefano touched on one, the new Concorde Agreement, having a budget cap, a more equitable splitting of some of the prize funds, the goal to have more competitive, on-field, on-track racing, and perhaps most of all, sort of unrecognized, perhaps, is that we created a franchise. Previously, there were 11 teams, and when we joined Formula 1, the 11th team, Manor, was just going into receivership, the English equivalent of bankruptcy, and it got sold for a pound. Now there's a $200 million entry for a new player, and no player is trading for anything like that. You've seen Williams trade at a higher price. You've seen McLaren trade at a higher price.
We've tried to create a lot of value for the teams 'cause it's important to have that ecosystem be healthy. I think there will be the potential for new entrants, as there are clearly people who want to play in this game, and you've seen those rising prices for teams affirm that value.
Okay, Steve, another one for you. Trip is recovering revenues significantly slower than Booking.com or Expedia. Booking.com was back at 93% of FY 2019 revenues in Q3, Expedia at 84%, Tripadvisor only at 71%. Why is Trip recovering more slowly, and what can you do to help it catch up to its peers?
Sure. There are a couple of different explanations there. The first I'd point to is, Booking.com and Expedia have much bigger footprints in alternative accommodations or rentals, been very popular. We're less, we have fewer of those, so it's a less part of our business. If you actually just look at our business, especially our hotel auction compared to, say, a trivago, which is another comp that we use, we're doing pretty well. Second part of the explanation would be, we have a decent part of our business that is more up-funnel. It's more media oriented. It's more B2B for hotels to earn more of the eyeballs of our travelers. As budgets were cut by major hotel chains, that's just on a slower ramp to recovery. You know, overall, we certainly see our traffic coming back.
We see more and more revenue opportunities ahead. I would point to this, comparing to Booking.com and Expedia a bit more as a timing of the recovery. Final point, international travel is something that we're generally pretty strong in. The trips are bigger, require more research. More of our traffic on Tripadvisor has been the slower part of the recovery, and that's probably hurt a bit of our growth.
Okay, for the final question for John and Greg, any 2022 predictions or thoughts about the year that are influencing your investing strategy?
John?
I've tended to think in terms of hard assets that will have pricing power in an inflationary environment. Also taking advantage of what I think are artificially cheap debt just to make sure your balance sheet is long and fixed because I think eventually things will return to historical levels. Human nature insists on compensation for delayed consumption. We are really in an artificial debt environment right now, and I think take advantage of it while it's here.
Yeah, I would agree, and I think John's point about inflation and some of the things I put out in that thought piece about how the markets hype, you know, is leading to a fairly conservative perspective on mine. You try and take advantage of cheap debt, try and husband your resources to be ready for opportunities that are ahead, and I think there will be more. Turmoil seems more likely given the potential for even more stimulus money on top of an already heated environment. I'm fairly cautious. I'm with John.
Okay. You wanna wrap this up?
I want to say thank you to our viewing audience out in the ether and to those who came in IRL. Thank you very much for joining. It's great to have you here. Hopefully, we'll see you again next year without masks even more fluidly. Be well.