CuriosityStream Inc. (NASDAQ:CURI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

In addition to that, we have thousands of hours or thousands of titles that haven’t run on large FAST and AVOD platforms. We dipped our toe in the water last year, as it relates to FAST. But to maximize the money here, you need to be on the top six platforms with good positioning and some promotion. That’s really important. I mean there’s — you now have like thousands of FAST channels, some of which make no money. You don’t want to be yelling into the wind. You want to have the right alliances. And so I think, if you look at how companies that are looking to expand in FAST that have this kind of positioning, I mean, they will typically look at it, it’s like, okay, with FAST channel we can generate $3 million to $4 million per year and that assumes you have 250 hours of good content to roll through.

So we have probably better content available than anybody that I can think of broadly in the media space that’s also operating. So we kind of know what the value is there in AVOD and FAST space. There’s a lot to exploit with and we just want to do it the right way. We don’t want to just throw up content and even though it might mean a short-term hit, we want to make sure that when we are doing this, we are doing it in the right way and we are maximizing the opportunity around it. And the opportunity is certainly clear and more predictable today than it even was six months, nine months ago. You could argue we should have moved into this area earlier and I think that’s a fair argument. But our focus has really been on building our subscription businesses.

On the content licensing side, you can see the value that exists there in the AVOD, FAST space, if you just license your content as compared to licensing it and then continue to operate channels. As it relates to kind of traditional content licensing and we licensed over $45 million of content outside the U.S. in territories representing about 30% to 40% of the world. We have not sold U.S. or North American package. So there’s a lot of value here left to exploit, but we are not going to do a deal that we don’t think is in our long-term best interest. Even if it meant exceeding the analyst expectations by $1 million or $2 million in the quarter, that’s not the race that we are trying to win. And then getting back to the — and then I think the last question was around the price increase.

We did a lot of testing around the price increase, tested over nine different combinations over 3 million sessions. New customers are now seeing that pricing as of Monday. It’s a blended — on a blended basis, it’s about an 83% price increase. So new customers coming on, we will say that. Over the next few months, we will transition our current monthly customers to that pricing and then over the next 11 months to 12 months, our annual customers will transition to the annual price. So our technology team did a lot of work there. We are really excited about the opportunity there and that will flow through later this year in ours and then more over the next few years. Frankly, we should have done this earlier. But now it’s certainly an extraordinary value as it relates to what’s available in the marketplace.

It’s a long answer, Dan. Hopefully, I hit everything. But if I didn’t, please let me know what I missed.

Dan Kurnos: No. That was very comprehensive Clint. Thanks very much. I appreciate it.

Clint Stinchcomb: You bet. Thanks.

Operator: We will take the next question from Laura Martin, Needham.

Laura Martin: Okay. Clint, so the first one for you. So my revenue fell by $13 million year-over-year to $14.5 million and I thought what I heard you say is that about $9 million of that was from lower content licensing and then $2.6 million was for the client that didn’t renew. Did I get that right?