Good morning. My name is Michelle, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Corus Entertainment Q2 2021 analyst and investor conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question -and- answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Thank you. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Doug Murphy, President and CEO of Corus Entertainment. Please go ahead. Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Corus Entertainment fiscal 2021 second quarter earnings call. I'm Doug Murphy, and joining me this morning is John Gossling, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before I read the cautionary statement, I'd like to remind everyone that we have slides to accompany today's call. You can find them on our website at www.corusent.com under the Investor Relations section. Let's move to the standard cautionary statement found on slide two. Today's discussion contains forward-looking statements that may involve risks and uncertainties. Additional information concerning facts that could cause actual results to materially differ from those in our forward-looking statements are contained in the company's filing with the Canadian securities administrators on SEDAR. I'll start on slide three. This was another strong quarter for Corus. Our team is making meaningful progress as we execute our strategic plan with discipline to deliver consolidated revenue growth year over year, over year, as we prepare to put the COVID-19 pandemic behind us. Throughout the pandemic, you've heard me discuss our experience at Corus using a metaphor, the Book of COVID. Starting with the first chapter, Shock and Awe, followed by chapter two, Stabilization, then chapter three, Modest Recovery. Our most recent chapter, coined Up and to the Right, not only characterizes the sequential improvements we have been experiencing in advertising revenue, but also describes our confident long-term outlook for consolidated revenue growth at Corus. Today, I'm excited to reveal the next chapter in the Book of COVID at Corus. It's titled Spring Forward, as we expect to post consistent advertising revenue growth. Our Q2 results have hit the mark on all fronts. We are demonstrating strong operational momentum, highlighted by sequential television advertising revenue recovery, accelerating paid streaming subscriber gains, double-digit growth in our content licensing business, and once again, another quarter of impressive free cash flow generation. Key financial highlights for the quarter include consolidated revenues of CAD 359 million, consolidated segment profit of CAD 113 million, impressive free cash flow of CAD 90 million, and improving financial flexibility with bank debt repayments of a further CAD 61 million in the quarter, which contributed to a further reduction in leverage to 3.02x net debt to segment profit. I'm also delighted to reveal two other key milestones on today's call. First off, we now have more than 500,000 paid subscribers on our streaming platforms. Second, our strong free cash flow and the significant progress we have made in reducing our bank debt has resulted in today's official announcement that Corus is now setting a new leverage target of below 2.5x net debt to segment profit. Over to slide four and a look at our prime time schedule performance on Global. Last time we spoke, we noted the uniqueness of this year's programming schedule with delays and timing shifts of content deliveries owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. As expected, our spring programming lineup has performed well with exciting new series and returning hits. This robust schedule has delivered nicely from an audience perspective, positioning us to benefit from the inevitable economic recovery. Global has 11 shows in the top 20 this season, with new dramas The Equalizer and Clarice debuting strongly out of the gate, along with returning franchise fan favorites 9-1-1, FBI, Big Brother Canada, and New Amsterdam. I know all of you on the call today tuned in to Oprah's much-anticipated interview with Meghan and Harry. What a blockbuster. Propelling Global's overall prime time audience for the week to its highest level of the year. Oprah with Meghan and Harry, a CBS prime time special, delivered an impressive 3.2 million total viewers, becoming the number one non-sports broadcast in Canada this season and almost taking over in overtime the World Junior Ice Hockey Gold Medal game. I would also add that this massive audience drove massive free trials to our StackTV product, further accelerating its growth. Moving to slide five. Our studio business continues to grow with strong double-digit results once again this quarter. Let me provide a few highlights. Nelvana, now with a total of 20 series in production, continue to pursue more and more exciting new projects. After a successful launch of The Hardy Boys over the past few months, we were pleased to share that we have greenlit a second season of this popular series. This recent foray into live action is a truly notable one as we expand the genres in which we produce content to meet the demands of the global marketplace. Other recent notable green lights include two new series now in production as part of our Nickelodeon co-production framework and announced at the Nick Upfronts last month, ZJ Sparkleton and The Hamster Show. These series will premiere on Nickelodeon and Treehouse in 2022. We have announced a third series as part of our redknot co-production partnership between Nelvana and Discovery Kids, titled Super Wish. This in addition to the second season of Agent Binky: Pets of the Universe, and The Dog & Pony Show. Development investments in our future film initiatives look promising, with the announcement that Nelvana, Duncan Studio, and Peter Dinklage's Estuary Films were joining forces to develop an animated feature based on the award-winning graphic novel by the author Ryan Andrews, This Was Our Pact. Expect more exciting new announcements from Nelvana in the quarters ahead. Corus Studios' slate features 18 series now in production this year across a wide variety of content genres, with new partners and exciting new and innovative business models. Today, we announced the largest output deal to date for Corus Studios as the business scales with the sale of over 200 episodes to Hulu. This breakthrough sale consisted of nine Corus Studios original series, such as Backyard Builds, Wall of Chefs, Home to Win, Big Food Bucket List, and more. We've secured new sales worldwide over the past few months, including Great Chocolate Showdown to The CW Network, Big Timber sold to the world's largest international streamer, and a multi-territory sale of Island of Bryan to Discovery International. Our growing production investments at Nelvana and Corus Studios are taking flight. They provide our Corus networks with great content to drive audiences and leverage our Corus advantage to prime the pump for accelerating revenue growth. Moving to slide six. We are following our audiences wherever they are with more content in more places to delight our viewers while also increasing our impressions and sellable ad inventory that drives revenues. The very strong growth we are seeing in our streaming business is truly remarkable, as most of you have noted, and it is accelerating. StackTV and Nick+ are runaway success stories now with more than 500,000 paying subscribers combined. That's up from just over 400,000 on our Q1 call. Our streaming and new platforms businesses now contribute over 8% of our combined television advertising and subscriber revenues, very, very close and in line with our U.S. media peers. One year ago, we launched our new Global TV App, providing authenticated subscribers access to up to eight of our premium specialty TV channels in addition to Global. The Global TV App also provides viewers with ad-supported content and 14 regional Global News streams free in front of the paywall, creating additional impressions and advertising revenue opportunities while enabling sampling of our great content. Let me provide you a few other quick stats to demonstrate the evident momentum in our streaming businesses. We've had more than 6 million downloads of the Global TV App this year. That's an increase of 35% over last year, and 1 million of those downloads are on connected TVs such as Roku, growing extremely quickly. In terms of viewership, our video starts are up 22% over this time last year, and our Global News OTT live streams are driving important engagement with Canadians over 1 million hours of time spent per month as we provide Canada with important, timely, regional, local, accurate information wherever and whenever they need it. With that, I'll turn it over to John. Thanks, Doug. Good morning, everyone. I'll start on slide seven. Our second quarter results reflect meaningful progress against our strategic priority to operate with discipline. With results trending up and to the right and our track record of driving strong free cash flow, we are on the cusp of achieving our long-time leverage target. We delivered CAD 90 million of free cash flow in the quarter and have repaid CAD 95 million in bank loans for the year to date, achieving improvement in net debt to segment profit to 3.02 x, which is down significantly from 3.18x at the end of last fiscal. The hard work of our team has helped us to achieve this goal ahead of our expectations. Given our confidence and this momentum, today we are excited to announce our new long-term leverage target of below 2.5 x net debt to segment profit. We have now paid down CAD 575 million of bank debt since implementing our revised capital allocation policy just 2.5 years ago. This change in target reflects the confidence we have in our ability to spring forward and further increase our financial flexibility, supporting the advancement of our strategic plan and shareholder value creation in the years ahead. Over to slide eight and a review of our consolidated results. As Doug mentioned earlier, Corus's consolidated revenue was CAD 359 million for the quarter. That is down 5% over the prior year, but reflects a third consecutive quarter of sequential improvement. Importantly, we have turned the corner as we spring forward into growth in the second half of the year. Consolidated segment profit was solid at CAD 113 million for the quarter, that's down to 3% versus the prior year. The current year quarter did benefit from relief on CRTC Part I and Part II regulatory fees of CAD 7.8 million and the estimated wage subsidy benefit of CAD 4.4 million, those were offset by the impact of a stronger share price on stock-based compensation expense. We delivered consolidated segment profit margins of 31% for the quarter. That's consistent with last year. Net income attributable to shareholders for the quarter was CAD 35 million or CAD 0.17 per share, that's up meaningfully from CAD 19 million or CAD 0.09 per share in the prior year. Our free cash flow of CAD 90 million was ahead of the CAD 65 million in the prior year quarter. The current year quarter did benefit from wage subsidy received of CAD 4.4 million, reduced interest payments on bank debt and lower programming rights payments and film investments, and that was offset partially by lower working capital contributions. I'd also like to quickly highlight this morning we declared a dividend of CAD 0.06 per share for Class B shareholders, and that's payable at the end of June 2021. Turning to our TV results for the second quarter as detailed on slide nine. Overall, TV segment revenues were down 3% over the prior year, reflecting a third consecutive quarter of sequential improvement in TV advertising revenues. Our networks and sales teams were once again able to successfully balance rating supply with advertising demand to maximize the value of our inventory. We are now starting to compensate last year's shock and awe chapter, and as mentioned, we expect to see advertising growth in the back half of the year as vaccination programs accelerate and lockdowns subside. Despite the declines in legacy linear TV subscriptions and the impact of shutting down some of our less popular channels over the past year and a half, the impressive growth on StackTV and Nick+ has driven an increase in subscriber revenue this quarter. We delivered strong double-digit gains in our content business from international advance from Nelvana and Corus Studios content, as well as animation software sales at Toon Boom. This led to impressive growth of 14% in our merchandising distribution and other revenues in the quarter. TV expenses in the second quarter decreased by 6% over the prior year. That reflects lower film amortization and other costs of sales, partially offset by higher programming costs as the timing of deliveries, particularly on Global, continues to shift. Our G&A expenses reflect continued disciplined expense control, which resulted in a reduction of 13% from the prior year, including the benefit from the waived regulatory fees and the wage subsidy. As we lap the noteworthy impact of reduced programming costs brought on by the initial programming hiatus in the third quarter of last year, we embark on the necessary path to return Corus to a more normalized run rate for programming. This will continue to be one of the key variables impacting costs in the future quarters. As a partial offset to anticipate increases in programming costs, we will continue to tightly manage discretionary spending. This year, as we move through the recovery phase, our wage subsidy benefit has been reduced compared to the start of the pandemic a year ago. That will also have a notable impact on our expense profile moving forward. Overall, TV segment profit increased 4% in the second quarter. Margins were 35%. That's up from 33% in the prior year. The benefits of our revenue diversification strategy are highlighted by the growth in our two new revenue performance metrics, New Platform Revenues and Optimized Advertising Revenues, both introduced last quarter. Highlighted on slide 10. These metrics underpin some of our most prominent growth opportunities in streaming, digital video advertising, and the automation of advanced advertising initiatives. We're making great progress. New platform revenues of CAD 24 million were approximately 8% of TV advertising and subscriber revenues in the quarter. That's up from 7% last quarter and increasing materially from 5% in the prior year quarter. This reflects revenue growth of 62% over last year and demonstrates our continued progress in driving new sources of revenue and further building our connections with audiences wherever they are. Optimized advertising revenues, which reflect our progress in transforming how we sell television advertising, represented approximately 28% of total TV advertising revenue in the second quarter. That's up nicely from 26% last quarter and 22% in the prior year quarter. We're very encouraged to see the benefits of all the work that we have undertaken to advance our strategic priorities throughout the pandemic. As we gain traction from the initiatives highlighted in these metrics and meet the insatiable demand for content in the international marketplace through Nelvana and Corus Studios, our confidence in our plan to deliver consolidated revenue growth year over year over year continues to build. Let's just briefly turn to our radio results as outlined on slide 11. Radio segment revenues decreased CAD 7.8 million, as radio continues to be impacted by pandemic-related restrictions on businesses, especially in local markets. Radio segment profit decreased CAD 3.2 million in the quarter given the challenging market conditions. Segment profit margin of 7% was down from 16% in the prior year as we continue to diligently manage costs to offset the revenue decline. Overall, this was a traditionally light quarter, and we are very pleased with how our team continues to deftly navigate through the pandemic. Our strong consolidated Q2 results and the progress we've made in advancing our strategic priorities have positioned us very well to spring forward with consolidated growth year-over-year. We're excited about our plan to deliver growth in the second half of the year and in the years ahead. With that, I'll turn it back to Doug. Thank you, John. Finally, over to slide 12. This year has been quite the adventure. Early on, we made a commitment to you that Corus would emerge stronger from this crisis. Our commitment is once again evident in this quarter's results as we faithfully execute our strategic plan. Metaphorically, we have used the Book of COVID to tell our story, and today I was excited to reveal, as its author, a new chapter, Spring Forward. Last year's pandemic-impacted advertising revenues are in the rearview mirror, and as we see more Canadians vaccinated, we will experience waves of advertisers investing on Corus networks. There will soon be an historic consumer-led economic recovery as more than CAD 100 billion of savings are revenge spent once governments provide the all clear. As a consequence, Corus will post eye-popping revenue performance when compared to prior quarters last year, hence Spring Forward. In that regard, investors will aptly be able to describe Corus as a recovery play. Let me step back for a moment with a couple big picture comments. Big is still big in television. Big is front and center when we reflect on the reach and frequency of television, and clearly evident with the record-breaking viewership of the Meghan and Harry interview with Oprah. A few more important facts. According to the latest CTAM Canada research, 73% of Canadians subscribe to a channel bundle. At Corus, we are making investments in our Global TV App to further improve the value proposition for subscribers in the authenticated pay TV system. For those who don't subscribe to the channel bundle, we offer new ways to access our content on fast-growing streaming platforms such as StackTV and Nick+ Now, with more than 500,000 paid subscribers. Other new platforms are in our sights. Expect more announcements in the quarters ahead. History was made a few weeks ago in regards to broadcast television. No, I'm not talking about Meghan and Harry this time. I'm talking about a commitment. The NFL struck a groundbreaking 10-year deal predominantly with traditional broadcasters in the U.S. This is an important tell as to what some of the smartest programmers are thinking about the resiliency of the channels business. This deal effectively anchors the bundle and underscores the sustainability of the channels business in the decade ahead. Corus has a strong and resilient core channels business. We demonstrate again and again that our very attractive economics generate significant free cash flow to pay down debt and invest in new opportunities to grow our company. With a generous free cash flow yield, a low payout ratio, and a dividend yield of 4.1%, we believe that Corus remains a standout investment thesis in Canada. Corus is positioned to benefit from the pending economic and advertising recovery. Our focus remains on the delivery of consolidated revenue growth year over year, driven by the ongoing advancement of our strategic plan and the expansion of our financial flexibility commensurate with our reduction in our leverage targets. As we conclude our call today, we recognize the pandemic still threatens the health and safety of Canadians. We are on the right path to move past this pandemic, emphasize the need to maintain vigilance on the protections in place to keep everyone healthy. I want to acknowledge and thank our talented and resilient team, who continue to serve the needs of our audiences, clients, and partners, and importantly, take care of each other. Over to you, operator. Thank you. At this time, if anybody would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Again, that is star one on your telephone keypad. Your first question will come from Adam Shine from National Bank Financial. Your line is open. Good morning. Thank you. Another good solid quarter, obviously, it is still challenging backdrop. Doug, can you speak to maybe some of the cadence in regards to how the ad trend dynamic is evolving? I mean, you acknowledged in the Q2 that, you know, much of the improvement came at the start of the period before the latest round of lockdowns and or other government restrictions. Obviously a very easy call up in the Q3, but maybe just talk about how the quarter so far is evolving. You know, maybe one for John in regards to the pattern of programming spend. There's no doubt that you guys have been very clear about, you know, some of the delayed dynamic of this unique broadcast year. Maybe, you know, as we go past, you know, the halfway point of your fiscal, you know, where your latest thoughts are in regards to the level of programming spend further bleed in terms of delays into the Q3 and or frankly, you know, an outright reduction in anticipated spend versus prior expectations. Thanks. Thanks, Adam. As regards the sort of pacing and trending on advertising, you know, our new chapter, you know, Spring Forward is specifically, you know, addresses the fact that we're definitely into growth year-over-year now on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Obviously, the comps are gonna be pretty easy. You know, the dollars are out there. This most recent lockdown certainly has delayed some spending. Some categories, you know, that really wanna get back to business, you know, have been affected. Those are the same ones that have been affected all throughout the pandemic, right? You know, airlines, travel, accommodations, those sorts of things. We know that the money's there, and I think they're basically just waiting for some positive news post this emergency lockdown, which is happening across the country. I guess my answer would be, it shouldn't surprise anybody that the most recent lockdown has affected some of the pacing, but it's not an if, it's a when. Our schedule, and I'll come back to this on the call, I'm sure I'll get a question, our schedule has positioned us extremely well to benefit from the inevitable return of investments and marketing by CMOs to drive their revenues because of our audience delivery and interestingly, the way that the deliveries of our content has played out this quarter. John, I'll throw to you to take the programming cost. Actually, Doug, Sorry, John. Doug. Yeah. Can I just follow up then? You know, obviously the context there being that, you know, perhaps if maybe the advertising in Q3 is perhaps a little bit softer than otherwise previously anticipated ex, you know, the latest government restrictions, can you speak at all to, you know, maybe some backfilling on the other revenue side of the TV line? You know, obviously you know, you talked about the big Corus Studios announcement today. You obviously put up some pretty strong double-digit growth in other revenue in Q2. Can you just speak to that particular line item and your confidence in, you know, double-digit traction there through the remainder of the year? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's part of the story here, right? Is that, you know, subscriber revenue is flat this quarter, but I mean, we're still comping against some channel shutdowns and some carriage agreements, you know, adjustments in the prior. We expect subscriber revenue to be, you know, growing, you know, single digits in the back half of the year. Content is really, really hitting a stride right now. You know, two really good quarters. You know, Q3 looks promising as well. That's good. I think just back to advertising, we're also seeing again, you know, up until the most recent lockdown, we were seeing local coming back, which is encouraging. The revenue portfolio, you know, is sort of designed, if you would, to be resilient and to backfill, as you might note, some of the softness that may occur given the pandemic situation. You know, that's really part of the story here, is that we're focusing on diversifying our revenue across the whole company and looking for pockets of growth. There's a number of them that we're pursuing aggressively, as we await the inevitable return to advertising recovery once the vaccinations are fully distributed. Thanks. Adam, just to add on the announcement this morning, about 80% of that revenue is actually in Q2. Okay. That program was largely spent, which is a little piece to come in the second half. On programming, it's been, you know, a little bit difficult or more difficult than usual, obviously, to predict given the timing of things. I'd say, you know, Q3 right now is looking like, you know, we're getting, you know, everything that we would usually get and then maybe a little bit more as we catch up a little bit. I'd say, the other dynamic there is that Canadian is ramping back up. You know, Canadian shut down very quickly last year, even faster than the Hollywood stuff did for us. I'd say, you know, as much as we have an estimate today, it could change by a material amount by Monday. I guess the good news, if you want to call it that, is it's tending to go down from the estimates we have. You know, Q3, big quarter, it's probably gonna be up kind of mid-single digit percentage. I mean, you saw a little bit of growth in Q2 on that line. Then Q4 is a little harder to call just given Olympics, and we're starting to see what the, what the programming strategies in the U.S. look like against the Olympics. Again, there's probably growth there, but I'd say for the full year, we're looking at a flat-ish to maybe a slight increase on total programming costs is the latest view. It, it can change. You know, we had it change in this last week down by a pretty material amount. We're keeping a very close eye on it, obviously. It's important, obviously, as well for the revenue side of the business to make sure we've got the audiences. Right. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Your next question will come from Vince Valentini from TD Securities. Your line is open. Yeah, thanks very much. First off, to clarify on the digital and streaming revenues, John, if it's 8%, I mean, that seems like it's about CAD 25 million, if you can correct me if I'm wrong. Y eah. Yep. We're annualizing, even if there's no growth, you're annualizing at a pace of CAD 100 million from those new businesses. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, the digital piece has a bit of seasonality as the TV advertising traditional business does, but the subscription business right now is only growing. That's probably not a bad estimate. Thank you. The Hulu deal, if I can just hit on that from a couple angles. I assume they have not bought any rights for Canada for those 200 episodes you sold them, correct? Yes. Okay. The quantum of it, you say it's 80% is in the second quarter. I don't know if you can answer this this way, if it's your largest single sort of output deal to date, can you tell us what your second largest was, historically, if you don't wanna talk specifically about the Hulu deal? I think it's probably the Discovery deal, John, right? The 85 hours we did last year to Discovery. Yeah, we can come back to you on that, Vince. I don't have it off the top of my head. Yeah. I mean, it's fair to say it's got to be like several million dollars, if not north of CAD 10 million, given how many episodes. Yeah. Not quite that big, but definitely in the several category. Okay. In terms of your own content buying, I mean, that's still a lingering concern for a lot of investors I talk to, that, you know, you're doing well now. You've done the deal, obviously, with Peacock and others. You've got a good partnership with Discovery, but people are still worried about the future. Can you give us any sense on two fronts? You know, given all the U.S. broadcasters have moved, you know, to these streaming platforms, and they seem to be rewarded for it with their share prices, are you getting any sense in your negotiations and discussions with them that they'll be reluctant to renew linear or digital rights the next time around? The second aspect of that is, can you give us any sense of the renewal cycle? Like, how many of your sort of key deals would expire in the next 12 months versus 24 months versus ones that may be longer term? I'll start, John. You can jump in. I think what's important to recognize here is, I alluded to it in my remarks around, you know, the sustainability and resilience of the channels business in Canada, in particular, the fact that almost 3/4 of Canadians subscribe to a channel offering. What's notable is that Canada is one of the most lucrative content licensing markets for our U.S. partners. Because of its market structure, Vince, you and I have talked about this. In fact, I've talked to most of you on the call about this, I'll take a minute to remind everybody, because of the market structure in Canada, number one, very concentrated three broadcasters representing 83% of all audiences. Two of those broadcasters are vertically integrated with distributors. Those two broadcasters are 59% of all audiences. Those two distributors are rolling out the two de facto video platforms in Canada, X1 and Mediaroom. We are regulated as well, highly regulated marketplace. We're looking for that to change, but for the minute, that's what's happening. There's a high degree of collaboration within the country in terms of shared, you know, looks on audience segment selling, you know, using automation in terms of audience buying. For all those reasons, the resiliency of the channels business in Canada remains very strong, you know, as opposed to the U.S., where the market structure is different, a lot more competition, you know, different regulatory environment, you know, experiencing what some have described as a pay TV apocalypse. When all is said and done, the U.S. players are evaluating their strategies in every given market based on each market's unique structure and evaluating it based on the licensing revenues that they pull out of those markets. In our opinion, and we've been consistently able to demonstrate this, we will be able to renew all of our deals, and we're working in concert with all of these, you know, channels providers to explore ways to work together to pursue the digital streaming opportunities. In some cases, we'll work collaboratively like we did with Peacock and others. As in terms of Disney, they'll go on their own. The Disney Channel business, for example, remains extremely important to Disney, and we have every piece of confidence that we'll continue to be in that business for years to come. As far as, you know, what renewals are up when, we do not, you know, disclose that as a matter. What I can say is that, you know, every year for the last decade, we've been working on various sorts of renewals, extensions, or recharacterization of our output deals or content supply agreements, and we have every confidence we'll be successful in renewing those that come up in the years ahead. That was good. Thanks. Let me just add one to try to clarify on Adam's question. In terms of the advertising sort of pacing in the third quarter, I wanna make sure we interpret this properly. You were down 31% in the third quarter last year, and by all accounts, things just fell off a cliff from mid-March through till at least the end of April, maybe through a lot of May. When you say things could be better if we were more vaccinated and there was more reopening, is it fair to say you're, you know, in a blue sky optimistic scenario? You know, a few months ago, you may have hoped that you'd be recover all that 31% in Q3 of this year, and now you're only recovering closer to half of it? Can you give us any more sort of context? I don't want to leave the impression that you're not gonna be up a lot in Q3 despite the renewed lockdowns. We're gonna be up a lot in Q3. Full stop. The question is how big, right? You know, the categories, you know, the categories that have been working, you know, are still working. Communications, direct to consumer, you know, those are working. Government is working. You know, all the usual suspects. You know, food is working nicely. Health communications is working nicely. It's just some of the categories that would be more attuned to the opening up, right? Entertainment, out of home dining, you know, retail, those are more affected. Not to confuse anybody, we expect to be up significantly in Q3 and in Q4. It's just a question of how big. Thank you. You're welcome. Your next question will come from Drew McReynolds from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Yeah, thanks very much. Good morning. Sticking with the high, big picture, Doug, just to some of your opening remarks and closing remarks, two questions. Just a comment on what you're seeing with aggregate audiences in your TV business when you combine linear and digital. Second, you know, you're probably one of the smartest minds out there on content cycles. Clearly, everyone on this call is aware Corus Studios, Nelvana, both benefiting from the current content cycle, which everyone says is unprecedented, at least strong. I'm wondering if you could, you know, from your perspective, where you stand today, just give an update on that content cycle here in 2021 versus maybe what it would've looked like a couple years ago and perhaps, you know, where you think it's headed over the next couple of years. Okay. Was there two questions there or just the one, Drew? Was there one before the content cycle question? Yeah, just the aggregate audiences to your TV properties. Yeah. properties. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, linear television, you know, continues to be in decline from a total audience delivery perspective. You know, I think the recent stats are somewhere between 8% and 10%, 12%, somewhere in that kind of category. Digital video views, not surprising, are growing. When you aggregate audiences, they're basically, you know, they're offsetting and then some. The opportunity for Corus is to super serve those linear television subscribers, as I mentioned in one of my remarks, the 73% with investments in Global TV App, which because it's got a free in front of the wall offering, can also reach, you know, a lot of those non-subscribing people as a sample mechanism to get them to potentially come into the bundle, and that's how we're working in concert with our distributors to ensure the resiliency of the channels business. Then we're pursuing, you know, those new audiences and the cord- nevers. Importantly, one user profile is sort of the super users, which are people that have bundles and have a variety of different streaming services. And that's where StackTV and other SVOD products appeal. You know, total content consumed video is up. You know, our job is to make sure we can participate, you know, in all of that demand for viewing. Accordingly, those are impressions that become inventory for sales, hence the growth we're seeing in our digital video business, both advertising and new platform subscriptions. That's just a comment just on that. You know, there's a big market out there that we're participating in. It's not just the one that's on the linear one. You know, there's lots of opportunity. As far as content cycles are concerned, we've been extremely prudent about our, you know, where to play and how to win decision-making. Animation remains an area we're quite excited about. We're, you know, with ramping up our production investments and development investments, not just in television, but now in, you know, YouTube short form product and also in feature animation, which we feel both areas have some enormous promise and still lots of growth opportunities there. You know, as we all know, or most of us probably know, I talk about NFL anchoring the linear bundle. You know, kids content anchors the SVOD appeal for subscribers whether or not, you know, your Netflix or Apple or Amazon. Everybody wants kids content. There's unlimited upside in there. The real gating mechanism for us on animation is having enough projects in the pipeline and ensuring that we make high quality creative that gets to two, three, four, five seasons, and the team knows that that's their job to deliver. The other part of our content cycle strategy is around lifestyle and factual reality. The team is doing a phenomenal job there. Witness today's big announcement with Hulu. We're making really smart creative decisions on the kind of content we're making to continue to resonate both with our audiences here in Canada, but worldwide. We're putting the pedal down in that piece of the business as well with increased development spending. Expect significant continuous growth on both Nelvana and Corus Studios. You know, we're continuing to look for other investments in content. At the moment, they're all organic. You know, we do not believe that there's any values out there in terms of M&A. We're delivering consistent growth by just, you know, investing in our own ideas. We'll continue to do that. I think this cycle for content is gonna be here for a very long time because there's so much demand out there, behalf of broadcasters and streamers alike. Just a last quick follow-up on that, Doug, from a supply-demand perspective, when you look at the supply and your, you know, component of that supply, do you think there should be any concern here on oversupply or just nowhere near that from your perspective? No. Here's where our model is so attractive. You know, the Corus advantage. You, you've been following us probably almost as long as anybody else. You know, we take money that we're required to spend anyways. We spend it on ourselves, and we, you know, use it to drive audiences in Canada. Those shows are virtually fully financed by the time they leave Canada. We don't have a big deficit investment like most producers do, right? We don't have to cover, you know, a big deficit when they go to sell. The margin on our product is extremely attractive, which is kinda why it's hard every time we look at any potential piece of M&A, we're going, "Well, you know, we can make that show." You know? For us, I don't really worry about, you know, the demand, you know, weakening because we don't have a lot of, you know, risk exposure. I also know that the real key, and this is the thing that we keep talking to our teams about over and over again. You've got to get to multiple seasons. One and dones don't work, you know? If we can build franchises like Island of Bryan or Home to Win, you know, those are what work because volume and repetition is what's really important to audiences and, you know, and the buyers alike. I mean, I'm sure all of us on this line have watched, you know, our wives, you know, binge view, you know, Property Brothers or Love It or List It or, you know, whatever the show is, and that's part of the appeal of that sort of content. That's helpful. Thank you. You're welcome. Your next question will come from David McFadgen from Cormark. Your line is open. Oh, hi. Yeah, a couple of questions. Maybe just pushing you a little bit further on the Q3 TV trends. I mean, would it be safe to assume, I mean, you said that, you know, it's gonna be up, it's gonna be up big, but you're not sure how much. Would it be safe to assume that it's gonna be up at least, you know, 10% plus? Is that a safe assumption? John, you wanna take that one? I think so, David. I mean, you know, as Doug said, it's just if there's gonna be growth, it's just a question of how big. You know, pre kind of wave 3, I think we would have been well above that. But I think we're still confident of double digits. Okay. Just on radio, with the comeback on radio, is it just gonna be a function of, you know, we need all the lockdowns to end and all these local merchants to be able to run their business normally and then they'll start, you know, advertising? Is it just a function of that? We're just gonna have to wait for that to happen before radio actually starts to come back? Yeah. Predominantly, yes. You know, we saw very impressive year-over-year comps out west, for example, where up until recently, the results from the pandemic were very promising, right? Now everybody's snapping back, you know, to emergency measures. It is a very, you know, there's a lot. As I said, there's a lot of pent-up demand to get back to business and open the doors and to get back to marketing businesses out there. I think, you know what? I think the best forecasting mechanism for everybody would be to just track the jabs in arms because that will be the kind of the leading indicator as to, you know, a more rapid recovery in terms of our advertising revenue. We are planning, you know, again, we are planning radio, you know, Q3 will be growth in advertising on both radio and television. Let's just be. I'll declare that. There's definitely gonna be growth. The question again is just how much. Yeah. Are there any other potential large output deals in the works, something similar to Hulu that you're, you know, in negotiation around? Yeah. Yep. Yep. There's a couple out there. The nice thing is that the team is pretty disciplined about ensuring, you know, we package together a significant amount of content for a variety of different reasons. Obviously, we wanna get as much revenue in the first instance as possible. The other thing we're trying to do is to establish ourselves as a priority vendor to some of these big streamers, so that, you know, they think beyond a simple acquisition. They now think about co-productions and co-development arrangements, right? All of those are in motion with the streamers. Again, we're always, you know, making sure that we continue to work with our broadcasters. Interestingly, one of the things that we're seeing out there, and I think it's in part a function of our co-production talents. I mean, we've demonstrated that, you know, we're great to work with, we're good with creative, and we're smart businesspeople, so we've got these co-production frameworks which we've spoken to a lot about. You know, we're able to, you know, put that on the table to look for other ways to grow. Broadcasters now are saying, you know, I need to get more content because the streamers are out there, you know, shopping as well. We can reach out proactively to broadcasters across the world and invite them into co-production agreements. There's a lot of, it's a very disrupted and yet dynamic market, I guess is the shorthand. Okay. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Again, if anybody would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. That is star one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from Jeff Fan from Scotiabank. Your line is open. Thank you. Good morning to both. Based on the jobs numbers we just saw, looks like your spring forward thesis or chapter is holding very firm, Doug. I want to ask some questions about StackTV. Since some of the market participants or the investment community really focus on the streaming subscriber numbers and the streaming P&L, are you at a stage where you can sort of break out not just the revenue, I think we can calculate that, but the P&L related to StackTV, just to give the street a little bit of an idea as to how we may be able to value this separately from your traditional business? The second question on StackTV is just about the structure and the economics of the deal that you have with Amazon. Looks like we're about two years into the deal. How long is that term of that deal? Furthermore, are you getting Stack subscribers from other digital distributors at this point, or is it primarily coming from, Prime? Thanks. Hey, Jeff, I'll start. There's a lot of questions in there. In terms of StackTV P&L, the way we look at it, you know, it lives within the overall TV ecosystem. Of course, just like our 33 specialty channels all live together, there's not, you know, individual operations for each channel. StackTV is, you know, is living and taking advantage of a lot of that infrastructure, whether it's programming, whether it's marketing, whether it's, you know, the technical aspects of delivering. You know, we don't take any allocated view of cost right now on it. We're just strictly looking at the overall incremental contribution. In that respect, it's a very high contribution. You know, obviously it has to cover the overhead that support it. As I said, we just don't really go to that level of trying to allocate because frankly, you could allocate however you wanted and that would potentially create numbers that aren't necessarily meaningful. Right now it's, you know, as it grows, you know, we're really watching what the revenue contribution is. There are some incremental costs associated with it, primarily around technology and marketing, but not a lot. It's, you know, it's providing a very good benefit to us for sure. I'll let Doug talk about the deal. Yeah. I mean, what I can say is that it's a multi-year deal with lots of room left. We got, you know, it's we were smart in cutting a long-term deal. There's, you know, many years still ahead of us. The economics of the deal are, they're pretty again, that's out there for a sleuthful, you know, analyst could dig that one up. It's a pretty standard economic. The lion's share of the economics, you know, come to Corus. We're extremely strategic for Amazon as a partnership because it, you know, it helps on their Prime. You know, Prime is under-penetrated in Canada. You know, we're part of a, of a value proposition, as they wanna grow, we're helping them grow, and they're helping us grow. It's a very collaborative and symbiotic partnership, which we're excited about. The opportunities in terms of advertising within Stack on Amazon are only beginning for us. There's another leg up in the coming years as some of the newer technology roadmaps kind of roll out. You know, we're talking about our new platform percentage of 8%, you know. I'll note that, you know, Viacom and Discovery were celebrated at getting to 10%. You know, we're gonna be there soon too. We're delivering streaming growth on par with our U.S. peers, yet, you know, with three or four turns of multiple below them. You know, we're in part wanting to make sure that everybody recognizes that, you know, we're able to pursue these growth opportunities, you know, very, very well. In terms of other platforms beyond Amazon, there's, as I was saying to an earlier question, there's a lot of opportunity out there in terms of, you know, fast channels. You know, free ad-supported streaming television, basically conventional television online, with premium video content. It's interesting. One of the, you know, the lanes which we think is open, is that lane, you know. The SVOD world, the subscription VOD with no ads is sort of a red ocean. There's a blue ocean out there, we think in ad-supported AVOD on online. You know, there's that's beyond StackTV, right, Jeff? StackTV is a product unto itself. We think there could be other iterations of StackTV in Canada on new or existing platforms, but nothing that we're able to discuss in any detail at the moment. We also think there's new opportunities to pursue other digital revenues as I just alluded to. Again, you know, we're investing to support the channels business in collaboration with our distributors to ensure that that 73% is as robust as possible. By the way, there's a couple of tailwinds in there which I can get back to, but you probably know. Also we're ensuring that we have lines in the water for, you know, all of these new digital video opportunities. The tailwinds, real quickly, you know, again, you know, the narrative always is about, you know, the channels business is going away. I'm here to tell you it's not. There's two interesting trends that we're seeing, one isn't surprising, is that's new Canadians, you know, are very likely to subscribe to a linear channel bundle of some sort. What's interestingly is that, you know, the Let's Talk TV mandated unbundling has actually helped in some way ensure the resiliency of the bundle. Our pay TV bundle is, you know, roughly half price as to that in the U.S., so that's interesting. We've all heard about the millennials buying homes. Guess what? More than half of every millennial that buys their first home subscribes to their first channels package. There are things underneath the surface that aren't being caught in the narrative of the decline of television, which, you know, we're pursuing to ensure the resiliency of the channels business. That's helpful. If I can just follow up on, I think it was Vince's question, regarding supply of content into Canada, and the resiliency and the ability to secure those. My question is, as you are able to sign some of these larger output deals, like your own supply deals to studios and distributors like Hulu, does it help the negotiation in terms of them thinking about how to bring shows into Canada? Is there a better balance as you become better partners so that, you know, you're able to sell to them and they in turn would sell it through you so that there is some kind of a protected, I guess, relationship there from your perspective? Just curious if you have any thoughts there. Yeah. That's precisely our approach. We've changed the conversation from a number of years ago from a one-way rental to a two-way content partnership. We're doing that now with We started that with Nickelodeon. We now have various conversations going on with all of our content providers for our channels business, and we're engaging in discussions with our streaming partners about co-producing content. The key for us is to establish ourselves as a source of revenue in the Canadian market. You know, as I mentioned, a lucrative market for many, but at the same time, as a source of content for the global market in partnership with these same players. That's this notion we talk about at Corus, about becoming indispensable to our partners, so that there's a lot of stickiness in the business, in the commercial relationships. That's, that's a fundamental part of our confidence in terms of being able to retain, you know, content for our linear business and be able to continue to work to pursue new revenues on the digital platforms, whilst all the time growing our content business internationally in partnership, potentially with those very same content players. That's great. Thanks, Doug. You're welcome. At this time, I have no further questions in queue. I turn the call back over to our presenters for closing remarks. Thank you, operator, Michelle, and everybody. We appreciate the time today on the call. As ever, we're always interested in talking more, so feel free to reach out if you have any questions. I'd like to thank the team of Corus for their commitment to the business and each other. I wanna encourage all of us to hang in there, stay safe. We'll get through this. Look forward to talking to you soon. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye. Thank you, everyone. This will conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.