Very pleased to have, Gunnar Wiedenfels, CFO of Warner Bros. Discovery. Gunnar, how are you?
Morning. Good. How are you?
Doing great. Doing great. If there are questions that you wanna ask in the audience, just please be sure to hit the button just below the white arrow, just so we make sure that the question gets webcast for the broader audience. Did you have a good holiday?
Very good.
Nice.
Much needed a couple of days.
Of course.
quiet. ready to go for this year.
All right. All right. Well, we're approaching, I think, one year following deal close. I suspect the strategic rationale for why you did the deal is still very much intact, but we're even getting questions on that front from investors, right? People are so pessimistic about streaming, you know. There's just big questions that are out there. I'm just gonna ask you to just sort of describe the strategic rationale at the time of the deal. Has anything changed in terms of the strategic, you know, logic for the transaction? Then things that you've learned over the last year that you think are most salient that maybe you didn't know a priori.
Yeah, we've learned a lot. Let me take a step back and set the table a little bit if you don't mind. This conference here is really timely for us this year because the beginning of 2023 really marks the beginning of a new chapter for us. We're closing chapter one. We're opening chapter two. Your understanding right, there was a lot of discussion last year around what was going on with Warner Bros. Discovery, what was going on in the industry. Our team has worked really, really hard throughout the entire year, literally 24/7, in many parts of the company. We had to come in strong and make very swift decisions. David put a top leadership team in place.
In a way, we were able to take advantage of the fact that a new team was starting as a new combined management team for a new combined company. We took advantage of that. We took the courageous decisions that had to be made. What's interesting to me is that a lot of that was seen through the lens of synergy, integration, you know, the debt, et cetera. The reality is it had very little to do with that. The industry change that has been going on over the past 18, 24 months has been pretty dramatic.
The new team that David put in place with CEOs for each of the business units, they just did what had to be done, which is take a fresh look at what's working, what's not working, what parameters have changed, how are we gonna look at content investments, where are we gonna spend, how are we gonna collaborate across this integrated portfolio. They quickly made the right decisions to set the company up. 2022 was a year of restructuring. 2023 is gonna be a year of relaunching and building on the great foundation that was laid last year.
To get to the point of the strategic thesis, I think it's not only intact, I think the long-term earnings potential of this combined company may actually be greater than what we thought we were gonna find when we initially started debating this deal and put together our initial models. The way David had laid out the three strategic pillars, the unrivaled ability to generate world-class content on the one hand, an unparalleled distribution footprint with access to all monetization windows and cash registers around the world on the other, and then combining those two with a professional one company management approach.
That's intact, and we're actually seeing a lot of great proof points that are starting to come through on the content side. We talked a lot last year about the enormous success that HBO has had with 37 Emmys and Warner Bros. Television as well with another 10 or 11 awards on top. We were going into 2023 with a much greater slate. We're gonna be ramping up production across large parts of the company. You'll see twice as many theatrical releases. We've got some exciting games coming up. On the content side, we're in great shape. On the distribution side, we've always been very clear that we're viewing Warner Bros. Discovery as one portfolio, a balanced portfolio of media assets of media outlets, if you wish.
Never sort of going all in on D2C, never going all in on linear or theatrical. It's about the combination of all of these platforms. We've seen very positive signals. The theatrical world has obviously recovered, not, you know, to the pre-pandemic levels, but a very solid year relative to the performance in 2020 and also 2021. On the linear side, our affiliate teams have worked 24/7 throughout the fourth quarter. We renewed deals worth more than 30% of our U.S. affiliate revenue in the fourth quarter across the affiliate landscape, bringing the entire value of this portfolio to the table.
Got these deals co-terminus, and it's just a great proof point for the value that our linear portfolio is bringing to affiliates and to our consumers, our viewers. That gives me a ton of confidence. We get a lot of questions about what's going on in the linear world.
Sure.
There's a lot of longevity in that in that business. I think the deals that we've been able to strike are a wonderful testament to the value of that business. Also on the D2C distribution side, the teams are really working hard at getting that combined product launched in the spring, and they're on track. That's gonna be very exciting to finally bring together Discovery+ and HBO Max. We've also made significant progress within the existing technology footprint. We've seen continued subscriber momentum through the fourth quarter. That is despite a certain amount of pullback on the branding and marketing side, obviously in anticipation of the new product launch. That's very pleasing.
We've launched the Amazon deal in the fourth quarter. Across the board, we've seen better engagement, better churn than we had originally modeled. Net, net, we put out this long-term vision for the D2C business as one additional element of an integrated media portfolio with a US breakeven in 2024 and $1 billion of global profits in 2025. If anything, I mean, we're, we're doing a little better than what we had modeled out when we, when we, when we put that together. Great progress on that front as well.
Maybe most importantly, I can't emphasize enough the idea of managing this company professionally as one company, that's been the most fascinating part of the journey that we've been on for the past 8, 9 months. The top team that David has put in place, you know, some of the greatest creatives in the industry, running their own business units, but with the greater benefit for Warner Bros. Discovery in mind. There's so much data that historically hasn't really been used in the decision-making. The team is collaborating really well when we discuss windowing, when we discuss allocations.
We're in the, you know, in the second or third inning when it comes to setting up the tools and processes, but the team is collaborating really well. Importantly, from my perspective, we really have command and control over the business now. There were some surprises in the first months of the combination, as you know. You know, we put out the guidance for this year in the summer, and I've been very, very pleased with all of our operating trends over the second half of the year. As such, I feel confident that we'll get to those improvements that we've been talking about, you know, much better cash flow generation, growing the profits, flowing through the value capture from our transformation activities.
I think we're really on track for a lot of asset value creation and free cash flow generation. You know, with that in mind and with the scale that we have, with the creative talent that we have, the global distribution footprint, you know, if anything, as I said at the very beginning, I think the thesis is stronger today than it was 18 months ago.
Super interesting. You know, this, listening to investors is interesting. I'm just gonna sort of tell you a quick narrative, but, you know, when interest rates were very low, of course, everyone just wanted growth, then interest rates went higher and everyone wanted profits. What's been interesting is we started to get questions from investors where they're saying, you know, "People shouldn't do DTC. We should just have a bunch of media companies that become wholesalers," right? They should just feed their content to, you know, others, right? That's what I meant by people sort of challenging the strategic rationale of the deal. What I'm hearing from you is it's, you know, no change in message, no change in strategy. We're just executing and willing to, you know, reiterate all of those long-term targets.
Yeah. Look, but as I said, Jason, the truth is in the middle, right?
Yes.
I mean, we've been very, very clear. I mean, David said, you know, in the, in the very beginning of this journey, something like we're not in it to win the spending wars.
Balance, balance.
It's about how good the content is, not how much. There's no doubt to me. Look, we got a lot of, you know, public noise about some of the content write-offs that we took, which is a reflection of an industry that went overboard and that went on a spending frenzy. There was a lot of thinking of, you know, let's do more, more, more, not necessarily let's do the exact right things, let's do what works. We've said before, we have the ability, the benefit to be Monday morning quarterbacks here.
Right.
You know, Mike and Pam on the film side, and Channing and Casey and Kathleen, they're all going in and taking stock. It's a new day. They're looking at what works, what doesn't work. They made these decisions. We took a little bit of time to make sure that we do it properly.
Yeah.
For some of the titles, we found new homes, elsewhere, et cetera. That's why, you know, this took, you know, six, seven months. I think we've come to great solutions. Most importantly, we're done with that chapter.
Yep.
That was very important to all of us to really use 2022, you know, leave the purchase accounting behind us, leave those initial strategy changes behind us, get it all, get it all out there in terms of our restructuring estimates, then be able to turn the page and move forward. Again, I think the team has laid a great foundation.
It's great.
really excited about, the growth from here.
Okay. With that behind us, there's also the macro environment. Of course, everyone has been on pins and needles since March, I would say, of last year about this broader economic slowdown. I think even you have your firm has made some comments about maybe a less visibility into the, you know, ad market than the past. Can you just talk about your view of the broader sort of ad market? As you sort of talk about those long-term targets that you talked about on the DTC side, or overall leverage, what sort of macro environment are you contemplating?
I mean, let's start by acknowledging that it's a pretty unusual set of geopolitical and macroeconomic parameters.
I'm sure.
Against that backdrop, we had actually been pretty clear since as early as last summer, about, you know, the ad market being a risk factor, and we spoke about it. The good news is that, you know, when we put together our guidance for this year, you know, that was a scenario that was in mind. We, we, you know, actively managed the company from, you know, as early as August, September, with, you know, these environments, in mind. That's back to the command and control point. You know, no big surprises here. That said, in the meantime, you've heard from others as well, that the trends have just not been great.
I think it's fair to say that trends have also not gotten better, if anything, gotten worse through the course of the fourth quarter from a U.S. ad market perspective. While we're seeing some small green shoots for Q1, I wouldn't wanna call the turn here yet. It's a little more mixed, good and bad internationally with we've got some markets that are equally negative, such as U.K., Germany, but we have other markets like Poland, Italy, Latin America, for a wide part of the footprint there that are actually doing fairly well. Again, what matters to me is this is short-term noise.
Yes, you know, it's obviously high margin, you know, flow through of these revenues, but I have no doubt it's gonna come back. Again, if anything, the most recent experience with, you know, our affiliates and the deal renewals shows, you know, that there's enormous value in that ecosystem and, you know, we've always seen it come back and I have no doubt that when it comes back and I'm not gonna make a prediction, you know, if that's gonna be in Q1, Q2, whatever, we'll find out. I don't know that any better than anyone else.
I have no doubt that when it comes back, we're gonna be participating disproportionately just because of this enormous reach of our portfolio, the ability to optimize content spend across this broader network portfolio. Frankly, the fact that we're still in the ad market monetization, that we still have catch-up potential, that we've been able to chip away at again and again for the past couple of years.
That's great. On synergies, you recently raised the long-term synergy target from $3 billion - $3. 5 billion, and you said $2 billion of that will come this year. Based on the work that's underway, I assume nothing's changed on the synergy front. You still feel good about that?
Yeah. Look, this is actually one of the most inspiring parts of this combination for me. We're essentially doing the same thing again that we've gone through with Scripps and Discovery. We've got a proven methodology. We've got an experienced team.
Yeah.
That's done this before. I was just exchanging emails over the holidays with a number of the individual initiative owners, and it's just, it's so great to see, what you can unlock with a delayer organization, with people feeling that they actually have the ability to make a real impact, to come up with an idea, put a price tag on it, and then, and then grab the ball and run. It's, it's absolutely amazing. It's, it's contagious, and it's spreading through the organization. As I said earlier, you know, we, we set this original $3 billion target. Obviously, the pipeline is much, much fuller than that, and that's why, you know, raise the expectation to $3.5 billion in terms of delivery.
We're still adding ideas to that funnel, and I have full confidence in what we said earlier that we're gonna see at least $2 billion of additional value capture flow through. I also wanna reiterate there was, you know. This started as a synergy program. It's really a continuous improvement program, where we are just consistently and continuously looking at how we're running the business, how we're running the company, what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, and we're setting up the company for, you know, future growth and value creation, you know, regardless of, you know, the integration or, the transaction in and of itself.
There's a lot of opportunity and, as I said before, part of the upside here is that we're really integrating, you know, 5 or 6 companies, given the very divisional setup.
Yeah.
Frankly, you know, suboptimal system and process set up for large parts of legacy WarnerMedia.
Right.
Very, very exciting. you know, everything we've learned over the past months since we last spoke has been positive.
In terms of the $12 billion Adjusted EBITDA guide for this year, you, I think, recently, relatively recently added the caveat of assuming a normal ad environment. I was just wondering if the slight erosion in the ad market that you've talked about that's happening now, if we end up in just a plain vanilla recession, you know, not a COVID recession, not a Great Financial Crisis recession, just a plain vanilla recession, how would you help investors frame how they should think about the downside to that $12 billion number if it's, if it's not a normal ad environment, it's just a normal recession?
Well, what is a normal recession? We're still working through the various scenarios and have finalized a budget. I wanna be careful here.
Mm-hmm.
With sort of, you know, giving out any new numbers. A couple of things I think that are worth considering to your point from the perspective of how should investors think about it. You know, the ad market environment clearly is the number one swing factor, you know, positive and negative. As I said, I'm not calling the turn here for Q1 and we'll wait and see. The things that we're focusing on is what we control, and there's a lot of very positive building blocks that are gonna come through. We've already covered the incremental $2 billion in value capture for next year. There is going to be, as we indicated before, significant improvement in the profitability of the D2C business.
Mm-hmm.
Again, just taking a step back, we've got this amazing combination. We're making the tech investments that are necessary, but that's essentially just a one-time, you know, resetting it to a new technology backbone. Then obviously you gotta keep maintaining that, but it's an investment that we're making right now, and then, you know, we very soon should have a state-of-the-art setup there. On the content side, I have no doubt that we'll always be more efficient than anyone else because we have that great access to talent, to creativity. We have a massive IP library that we can that we can exploit. We have the data to inform decision-making here.
Frankly, we have this global footprint that we're utilizing our content on, not on one single platform. I think we're always gonna have a competitive advantage here. Frankly, one thing that we have started leveraging much more and that we're gonna see more of next year as well is this enormous marketing power that the company has. We're reaching, you know, tens of millions of people every day in the U.S. alone. We're harnessing that to get behind our key content priorities. That's gonna be a significant positive driver for next year as well.
You know, on the revenue side, as I said before, you're gonna see a very significant increase in film output, content in general, in games as well. There are a lot of positive building blocks that we at least to a large extent control. The big negatives or question marks are what the environment is gonna be like. I'm not gonna lay out any sort of, you know, base case, upside, downside case scenarios. You guys all know that as well or better than I could model it. But that's really.
Okay.
question mark right now.
I don't feel like you gave yourself enough credit early on in the conversation that when investors were clamoring for growth, you guys always focused sort of on this DTC business, you know, being for profits and for being more balanced. I wanna ask you a question about content spending. You said theatrical releases will go up, but what do you think is gonna happen to aggregate content spending across the whole industry? Do you feel like we will look back on 2021, 2022 and say, "Wow, that's the high watermark," and everyone will begin to get a bit more disciplined, and content spending will go down in the aggregate, not just on DTC, but just in the aggregate?
I wouldn't go so far to call it a high watermark, but what I will say is, you know, as you all saw very publicly, we shaved off a lot of the excess last year. I think that's something that everyone else in the industry is going to go through. We're coming from an irrational time of overspending with very limited focus on return on investment. I think others are going to have to make some adjustments that we, you know, frankly, have behind us now. I think that is gonna be a factor. For us though, you know, we've rightsized the content spend.
I think we have a huge advantage in the enormous amount of data from all the different consumer touchpoints that we have. I think we're gonna get a lot better in allocating capital, and we have every intention to continue spending. Content is the lifeblood of this company. We are a content company.
Sure.
We've got the ingredients in place. It's obviously a hit-driven business. You win some, you lose some. If you look at the creative lineup that David has been able to assemble, this is a, you know, first-flight lineup of creative talent. I got so much positive feedback on some of the announcements. James Gunn and Peter Safran are working on a DC.
Yeah.
lineup and are, you know, getting close to being able to communicate a plan. We got Channing, we've got Casey Bloys with his winning team in place. We've got that. Some of these changes might take some time, obviously, given the lead times for content, but we've got the team in place. We've got the most iconic IP and brand portfolio that I could think of. We've got a global footprint. We've got the data, and we're putting in place the management system to bring this all together. From the perspective of the ingredients being in place, I don't think we could be in a better position. Now we've got to execute.
How much on content spending, since we don't really know how the linear business will fare, right? We don't really know exactly how the DTC business will fare for the industry. How much fungibility would you say that there is across those two buckets? I mean, clearly, sports is sort of a contractual piece that I'll just push to the side. As investors sort of think about how much flexibility you have in terms of where you direct the funds for new content, how would you characterize that?
Well, to your point about sports, there is some flexibility there as well that we.
There is.
that we can talk about. Look, I think that's one of the great strengths of what we're putting together here. We've got this massive library, and we've got all these platforms. One area where, you know, if you look at what we did last year, we've made a lot of, you know, small steps into experimentation. There was a Thanksgiving West Wing marathon on HLN. You know, those are the kinds of things. It's small individually, but you got to try these things. We've got this massive library. We've got this portfolio of networks. That was one of the big drivers for the success of the Scripps Discovery merger that we were able to, you know, play with programming strategies a little bit. Kathleen has perfected this.
What's exciting right now is the new team's willingness and ability to cooperate and talk about, you know, you've got that in your library. Can I try this here? To talk about the windowing and to, for the first time, ironically, to bring together all the data that we have and all the knowledge that we have about, you know, what works, you know, what demos, were sort of, you know, over-indexing, et cetera. We can bring that all together. So as such, I think there's gonna be an enormous amount of flexibility. You've seen some in some of our decision-making already that we're willing to take that perspective and make rational decisions. We don't have to have everything, every last title fully exclusive.
There may be other ways to monetize internally and, you know, at times externally as well. We're willing to, you know, run the numbers and form a strategy and make those decisions.
Come to the right answer. You wanna touch on the sports point? You brought up sports where you said there was some flexibility.
Well, look, I mean, yeah, we do have flexibility in most of the deals, at least from a simulcast perspective. Again, I think what's important for the sports discussion is that linear is still, you know, by far the most important platform for sports monetization.
Sure.
By a wide margin, right? You know, some of these discussions about the transition seem a little premature 'cause the linear reach dwarfs even the most successful streaming case studies. It's important to have that flexibility. It's important to be able to experiment, to dip a toe in the water. You know, we've seen some real success in the streaming space for sports in Europe or with our Eurosport asset, the Olympics deal. We've found a way, you know, not as a fully integrated bundle, but as a sell-through tier to generate some value. It's important to have that flexibility there as well.
Again, the other point is, you know, for a decade or so, especially in the U.S., you know, the big rights are, you know, are gonna be, you know, locked up on linear. There's a lot of longevity there as well.
Okay. When you bring Discovery and HBO sort of under a single app this year, Are there any sort of? It feels like something that sounds easy to do, but actually seems pretty complicated when you think about it. Can you spend a second and just talk about some of the things investors should think about and some of the tactics you're pursuing to sort of minimize the disruption as that occurs?
Well, the most important point is the decision that we've already made a while back, which is to rebuild the whole thing, right? I mean, that was a little frustrating 'cause we all wanted to get out and, you know, get the products combined and. The reality is, you only get one chance for a first impression with the consumer, and we're not gonna launch something that's not adequate.
Yep.
I have great confidence in the team. They're moving this project along. We're gonna come out with a great product, from a, you know, consumer experience perspective. That's frankly the biggest holdback for HBO Max right now, that the experience is not where it needs to be. We have made.
Sorry. When you say the experience is not where it needs to be, is that just in terms of the user interface? Is it in terms of sort of software, you know, flexibility that the consumer has within the app?
I don't wanna go too deeply.
Okay.
Into the sausage making on both sides. It's also, I think the product team as well, you know, let's just say it's not, it's not manageable as efficiently as you would like a modern-day technology product to work. More importantly, from a consumer perspective, and we've made great progress. But, you know, we've given this example before of the end card, where you did not, you know, after finishing a season, did not get the recommendation for what's next. We've got this bifurcation of the greatest content in the world, getting 5-star ratings for content, but then, you know, just a subpar consumer experience.
The team has made some improvement and the exciting thing is that even without relaunching the full technology stack, we're seeing improvements in our metrics. Engagement is coming up. Churn is better. As I said, through the fourth quarter, you know, we've retained more of the House of the Dragon gross ads than we had originally modeled. There's a lot of positive green shoots, but definitely more to do. The second point is, again, the fundamental thesis of this combination is the synergy between the event-driven HBO Max, HBO content on the one hand, and the daily engagement, hours and hours of daily engagement from Discovery +.
Again, we've done some content ingest experiments here and are pleased with the early results. Again, to your point, we're gonna make it as seamless as possible. There's a whole team that's focused on how to manage the transition from, you know, for the existing different types of, you know, HBO Max subscribers, different types of Discovery + subscribers, and I'm confident that we'll manage that appropriately. It'll take the time.
The key thing is that you're focused on is sort of trying to minimize the churn as this transition occurs. Is that the right way to think about it? Okay. All right. We talked a little bit earlier about the street being very focused on profits, and one of the things that I was struck by is just the enormous disparity in the profitability, and I'm just gonna pick two companies, of Netflix's DTC business versus Disney's. As I've gone through the numbers as carefully as I can, I talked to the buy side, everyone sort of agrees that that disparity is really mostly an ARPU issue. That seems to be the consensus.
It just raises the question of, are the new DTC apps that are launching, do they have sort of the right pricing, or do you think they're sort of priced too low because everyone was in this sorta catch-up phase to try and get sufficient scale? You know, whereas Netflix did this over a, you know, 12-year period or something.
Yeah, it was, it was a land grab. I wanna, before I answer the ARPU part of that question, I wanna go back to profitability overall. I mean, I wanna be absolutely clear, we put out this trajectory that we're working towards, and everything I've seen since we put that out, has been in line, if not better, with what we've put in the plan. You know, we're more efficient on the marketing side than we modeled. Again, we've rectified a lot of that content exuberance, as I would call it.
I think we're gonna get, you know, a great technology platform going, and we're seeing the most important point starting to happen, which is getting that churn rate down. I feel very, very good about the, let's call it the infrastructure and cost side of the business. To get to the core of your question, there's no doubt that these products are priced way too low. I think JB or David maybe on one of our earnings calls went into the detail here saying, look, the idea of collapsing seven windows into one and selling it at the lowest possible price doesn't sound like a very smart strategy. I think, you know, there was this partly capital market fueled phase of land grabbing.
You couldn't lose enough money and couldn't grow subscribers fast enough. I think that's behind us. If you look at trend lines over the past, you know, 24, 36 months, a number of the players have started, you know, gradually bringing up prices. So I think there's a, there's a, there's a building consensus that, you know, this phase of dumping pricing is over. Again, I think we're bringing something to the market. We will, with the combined product, bring something to the market that I, that I have no doubt is gonna be the best streaming product in the marketplace, and we're not priced at that level right now.
In the U.S., more so internationally, again, a lot of the initial push when HBO Max was rolled out internationally was, you know, strive for the largest number of subscribers, not necessarily value. There's a lot of opportunity, I think, you know, as deals come up, to adjust pricing on the positive side. As you know, ARPU is more than just pricing. The ad monetization for the ad-lite tier, I think is a major factor with a number of elements. You know, we'll get more engagement, more subscribers, but then, importantly, pricing power, CPM upside from better reach, better scale, better data, better targeting.
I think there's a lot of upside opportunity from an ARPU perspective in the industry.
Seems like that's one thing the industry has done really well in terms of for you guys and everyone else, just sort of setting the difference between the ad tier and the ad-free tier such that the economics where you're neutral to positive, right, in terms of the consumer.
It's classic segmentation. That's why, you know, David has been talking a lot about, you know, a FAST segment in the market that historically we haven't served very well yet, but that we're, that we're gonna do more for. But there's the Premium segment, then there's the Ad-Lite, you know, little more, you know, price-focused, and tolerant for advertising. Then there's the segment of people that are not gonna be willing to pay. Like no one else, we have the ability to cater to all of those audiences with, you know, a very well segmented product and content offering.
Can I ask you a philosophical question on sports on the DTC side of the business?
You can ask.
Okay. I think there's a growing hypothesis on the buy side that after we saw Thursday Night Football go to Amazon and Sunday Ticket go to Alphabet, that more and more sports are gonna go, you know, over the Internet as opposed to linear. The question becomes, well, if sports are going to be consumed over the Internet as opposed to a linear package, some sort of streaming service, should it be bundled inside-
Mm-hmm.
the DTC offer? People say, some people say, "Oh, that would be great. It keeps engagement up, and it lowers churn." Another investor say, "No, no, you're just gonna go down the same sort of path that we went on the linear side, where the non-sports fan is gonna be subsidizing the sports fan because the sports costs are gonna be so expensive inside this app." There's a feel of it seems like a once in a lifetime opportunity to sorta correct past sins or adjust the business. At the other time, I could see it being quite enticing to say, "Well, we're just gonna layer in sports in our app to get the churn down." Can you just... Do you agree with that sort of construct, first of all?
Do you have any emerging hypotheses in terms of what the right answer is?
I generally do agree, frankly, because we've seen some success with that tiered approach in our own European operation.
Okay.
Also, if you look at, just generally TV markets that have fared better or worse, you know, the markets that are a little more a la carte in Europe, yes, they've probably never gotten to that level of monetization, but they're also holding that value much better today than the markets where, you know, it was the stuffed turkey with everything, and everybody had to take it all. Yeah.
Well said.
For us, importantly, a couple of points I wanna make. Number one, sports is a key part of our strategy. We've got this great global footprint with, you know, a strong presence in the U.S., but also Latin America, Europe. You know, it's a natural place for us to play. Number two, we're always gonna be super disciplined. It's so easy to overspend on trophy assets. We've got a great sports rights portfolio, and we'll look at everything, whatever comes up, and we'll look at it through the lens of, you know, financial discipline and strategic discipline.
again, as I said, I think we're bringing a lot to the table, given the capabilities that we have and given the reach we can create across platforms and across the globe. I feel very good about our position in that business.
Okay, that's great. Any questions from the audience? Happy to take them. Want to ask one last question on EBITDA free cash conversion.
Yes.
You, you've talked about 35%-50% of EBITDA converting to free cash. Can you just talk a little bit about the swing factors that cause that number to be lower or higher? Is it just a simply function of we spend more on content than we amortize, or is it more nuanced than that?
No, it's more nuanced. That is part of it, frankly. The single biggest factor is to just generate more profit, right? 'Cause with the higher EBITDA number, you know, cash conversion automatically comes up, and that's the core part of our plan. Like I said, we've got a lot of initiatives lined up. That's a super important point. You mentioned another one, the balance between content amortization and content cash spend, which is something that as well in this, let's call it, in this industry, you know, there was a lot of, you know, focus on the P&L, not so much on the balance sheet and cash flow. I think we can rectify that.
As a matter of fact, we have taken some measures to bring those two a little closer together, which is healthier for the business in the long run. There's a lot of other below the line opportunity as well over time from delevering, from finishing up our restructuring. Those are important factors that are gonna go away, lower interest expense, lower restructuring, cash out. I also see an opportunity in working capital. Again, it's something that hasn't been a huge theme in the industry. We're putting in place the instrumentation to properly manage for free cash flow, which hasn't been in place in the past, and there is enormous opportunity there.
You know, once we, once we get all that in place, as I said, I mean, I'm very, very pleased with the command and control that we've been able to implement already. I'm seeing great improvement in this company's cash generation against that target for next year with 33%-50%. Remember, we've also said long term, I think, the cash generation capacity of the company is even greater than this and w e're chipping away at that opportunity.
All right. General upward bias as the EBITDA gets larger, the interest costs drop.
Correct.
Did some undulations along the way based on the content spend and working capital.
Yeah.
Okay.
Then, you know, obviously there's a lot of focus on leverage in some of our discussions. As I've said before, I'm very, very happy with the capital structure that we put in place. Long dated, cheap debt. We don't have a lot of maturities coming up. We don't have a lot of variable interest, so I feel great about that, coupled with the cash generation potential of the combined company. We've also, you know, started a review. As David has said several times, we're not looking at any strategic asset sales. Beyond that, there is opportunity. There's a real estate portfolio where there may be, you know, better structures for us to, you know, just, you know, generate some liquidity.
We're in the process of analyzing a lot of the, call it, you know, less visible non-core, parts of the portfolio.
That's fantastic. Well, Gunnar, thank you so much for the time. Super informative.
Thank you.
Quite optimistic, so we're rooting for you.
Great. Thank you.
Absolutely. Thank you.