Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSSE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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William Rouhana: Yes. So as you know, we accumulated library in a variety of ways over the last 5 years, building it up to over 21,000 films and TV shows that we have long-term rights or intellectual property ownership of. And I always said to — I mean, to you and everyone else, I view this as a savings account. Someday, it will — we may not continue to buy, but we’ll actually license and harvest. And what you’re starting to see is signs of that in everything we’re doing. So the KC Global deal is a great example of it. Thank you for mentioning it. KC Global is a fantastic company across Asia, and they needed certain rights in order to launch a new channel. They came to us. We were able to enter into an agreement with them.

It’s probably the first step towards a broader partnership with them. And we’re getting revenue we didn’t get before. The Keshet deal was an early example of that. By the way, Locomotive, which is a slightly different approach to international, is also generating revenue. And Rana Naidu, which is the show that Locomotive made for Netflix in India, is a big hit, and I expect it’s going to be renewed for season 2 shortly. So we’re monetizing content in lots of ways, but we’ve always said that, that was what we wanted to do. Specifically, in the FAST space, this is a really interesting development the way it’s evolving. And you are right, the bigger companies are starting to look at their libraries and go, wait a minute, I don’t need exclusivity on everything.

This is something we’ve been saying for how many years. We’re better off monetizing. We’re better off monetizing the content we have in as many ways as possible. And that is what they’re starting to do. But that’s always been our strategy. If you go back to the way we control cost of revenue on our networks, and our O&O networks have the lowest cost of revenue of any of the big ones, we do it by making sure that we monetize the rights we don’t need to use on our own networks. And getting capital — getting money back against that, which reduces the net cost we have in the content. And when we put it on our networks, it means most of it’s going to be profit. So these strategies that you’re seeing the bigger companies adopt are really things we’ve done from the beginning.

Now I would say we’ve done it from the beginning because we’re small and scrappy and we needed to, but it’s also what we believe was right. So that’s what we’re seeing. I think we only have time for one really short question, operator. We got to wrap up.

Operator: Our next question comes from Mike Grondahl with Northland Capital.

Michael Grondahl: Bill, it’s Mike. Three really short ones. So for fourth quarter, can you break out revenues between Redbox and Chicken Soup legacy? I don’t think I saw it. And you guys had, I believe, like a $40 million cost synergy goal with the acquisition, kind of specifically where are you towards that goal? And I’ll leave it at those two.

William Rouhana: Okay. Why don’t — we’ll break out the numbers for you in our separate one-on-one because I’m already over time. But the quick answer to your question on the synergy are they’re achieved. I expect them to be — expect them ultimately to be higher. And the one that was the most important was pulling back the rights to sell the ads for Redbox AVOD and Redbox FAST, giving that to our own sales force, saving 35%, increasing CPMs and increasing fill rates. The combination of those 3 things is a very important number towards the $41 million we identified. I know it’s 9:30, the market is going to open. So I want to thank you all for attending today, and we look forward to speaking with you all soon. Thanks, everybody.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s presentation. You may now disconnect, and have a wonderful day.

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