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

Clint Stinchcomb: Yeah. I am going to

Laura Martin: Is that the right of the $13 million decline?

Clint Stinchcomb: I am going to have Peter correct me here. But it’s a combination of accounting correction that we took.

Laura Martin: Okay.

Clint Stinchcomb: It’s also — so that was over $2 million and then

Laura Martin: Okay.

Clint Stinchcomb: yes, the deal that we did not renew, that we didn’t like the overall economics on as it related to our bundled distribution. And then the other difference was in presales content licensing, which we have pulled back on as we are trying to build a different approach there. The accounting treatment around our presales content licensing, as it’s existed for the last 18 months to 24 months has been zero margin. And so there are some changes that we need to make to how that works in order to generate higher content licensing revenue. So it’s really those three things. Peter, do you want to clarify?

Peter Westley: Yeah. I will clarify slightly.

Clint Stinchcomb: Yeah.

Peter Westley: So the — if I were to put it in the categories that I typically talk about, overall, the content licensing was down year-over-year by $9.5 million. That includes the $2.2 million charge taken in Q4. The bundled distribution revenues was down by $2.2 million, but in the comparable quarter, a year earlier, there was $2.6 million of revenue in that category that was associated with the distribution agreement that we did not renew in the middle of 2022 and then $2.1 million was a reduction in other revenues. But those were somewhat offset by revenue growth in our direct and enterprise categories.

Laura Martin: Okay. Super helpful. Okay. So now when I look at the next quarter, I still have this company at like half the size, right? So I still have — the top end of your guidance is $13 million next quarter after doing $14.5 million this quarter. So that is my question. Do I have — is this company now have the size, it was 90 days ago or are we holding back that $9 million of licensing rights? What I heard you say in the answer to the prior question was, you are holding back some of that licensing income in the near-term, because you think you can do global distribution rights on these big platforms. Is that what you are saying, Clint?

Clint Stinchcomb: In part. I think that, as Peter guided to in the first quarter, we pulled back a little bit, more than a little bit in some areas. And so we will have certainly greater growth as we go through the year, but we did a bit of a reset here in the last, I would say, four months, five months as we looked at opportunities that we could take advantage of and opportunities that we might want to consider later on in the year.

Peter Westley: If I could add. I would say, our key focus is improving our overall economics and cash flow. Even if it means sacrificing some revenues, it’s really the bottomline that we are focused on. So there’s a couple of things that are happening here. There with a lower overall content spend, our content licensing is coming down, because we are going to have — and particularly, going into 2023, as we talked about in the kind of forward guidepost. We had a lot of roughly $19 million of content licensing revenue in 2022 that was effectively zero margin revenue, it was presales revenue and something that we don’t make a margin on. So that is going down — that number is coming down substantially. And the second big element is we had certain agreements with large enterprises where the overall economics are not terribly compelling and we are not going to do those deals again.