Daniel Kurnos: Bill, maybe just start on the AVOD bad side. We’ve heard some commentary around potential greenshoots in Open Web programmatic. I think there’s been sort of an uneven recovery. Q1 still is great for or OTT in general, but it sounds like things are still getting better, although everybody is kind of holding their breath for the back half of the year. I know you gave some good color around CPMs and fill rates. But just now that you’ve kind of — you fixed some of the distribution and app issues, we know what’s kind of embedded in the guidance, but just any color you can give just on the marketplace what you’re seeing sort of in March and then heading into summer on that front would be a helpful start.
William Rouhana: Okay. Yes. So I do know that everybody is worried. But everybody — about the advertising environment. But I would point out that everybody is worried about the banks, everybody is worried about inflation, everybody seems to be worried about everything right now. I don’t see a lot of signs in the ad market of the kind of slowdown in connected television that may be occurring in broadcast and cable. There’s been really — January is a little bit weak, but it’s always a little bit weak. It’s the worst month of the year generally, February was better. March was better yet, and we’re back to exceeding year-over-year numbers. But I think from our perspective, Dan, it’s a slightly different analysis that I do, which is with the growing footprint that we have, the increase in FAST channels, really great success of the Chicken Soup for the Soul AVOD, which will now be amplified meaningfully by its arrival on Roku finally, the — that amplification of growth in the O&O networks, in the — and then going from 2 to 20 ad rep partners, I’m going to have a hard time changing them to third-party clients in my vocabulary, but that’s what the guys want me to do.
That — the combination of that growth, the growth of FAST, the growth of third-party clients and the growth of the O&O businesses are really driving our increases more than the share of the marketplace that we’re getting. Although I did see a study yesterday that showed we were clearly #5, as we’ve always thought, in market share, but — and not too far behind FreeWheel actually, pretty close. So I think we’ll keep growing this year just because we keep expanding the footprint, because we have more territory, because we have more assets. So I’m a little less worried about what that means for the year’s numbers. If it’s a stronger advertising environment, it will probably do better. But I think what we’re doing in the overall way we’re running the business is the reason we’re growing.
It’s not just the market itself that’s growing with us, we’re also taking market share and approaching the business differently than others have. I have to say the — this Crackle Connex, which is a name for our third-party client business, is really poised to be a very, very profitable cash-generating business for us. And I think the arrival of Netflix and Disney to the industry has helped us because it’s forced some of the smaller AVOD to look for a way to sell their direct ads, and none of the other top 5 companies will sell someone else’s ads for them. So this gives us a pretty unique position, and it’s why we’ve gone from 2 to 20 in such a short period of time. And there actually are quite a few more of these companies that are in conversations with us about joining the club, so to speak.
So I hope that answers it, Dan, but it’s a slightly different perspective than just about the market.
Daniel Kurnos: Well, no. I mean I wanted to get into that because the dynamics of the market have obviously changed. It looks like SVOD is obviously kind of peaked and/or slowing. AVOD is still growing. Over the air is growing faster yet than that. But the conversation around FAST and rights management has obviously accelerated as well to the point where FAST rights and especially international, and I saw you guys do something with KC, right? I mean you’ve kind of built sort of an amalgamation of rights that you have rights that you don’t. I don’t know where you fit on that. But the large companies are now — from a content perspective, they’re scaling back on the number of products, and they’re paying more for quality because they all obviously have to rightsize their own balance sheet.
They can only release billions of dollars for so long, Bill. So in that regard, I’m curious, you talked about lower content spend, I’d just love to get an update from sort of a rights perspective and incremental distribution opportunity as well as on the content side, it sounds like sort of the base case for libraries, content actually — content costs are actually coming down on the syndicated or legacy library side. So I’m just kind of curious how that factors into your viewpoint?
