Good day, everyone. Welcome to the CuriosityStream Q4 and full year 2022 earnings call. If you have a question today, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand things over to Ms. Denise Garcia. Please go ahead. Thank you. Welcome to CuriosityStream's discussion of its fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results. Leading the discussion today are Clint Stinchcomb, CuriosityStream's Chief Executive Officer, and Peter Westley, CuriosityStream's Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will be happy to take your questions. First, I'll review the safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. Please be aware that any forward-looking statements reflect management's current views only, the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update these statements, nor to make additional forward-looking statements in the future. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our investor relations website, as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in today's press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022, when filed. In addition, reference will be made to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures can be found on our website at investors dot CuriosityStream dot com. Now I'll turn the call over to Clint. Hello, everyone. I appreciate you all joining us today. Also on the call are our COO and General Counsel, Tia Cudahy, our CFO, Peter Westley, and our Head of Content, Rob Burk. We've been hard at work since our last call, and I'm delighted to update you on our progress. We made some strategic commercial decisions in our content licensing business in Q4 and more recently that while sacrificing immediate revenue and ostensibly better quarterly performance, we believe have put us firmly on the path to achieving positive Adjusted Free Cash Flow in the near term and even firmer sustainability in the long term. We're focused on driving operational efficiencies and leveraging opportunities made possible by our strong, unique cash position. We also continue to focus on improving the economics of all of our partnerships and vendor agreements. We believe these decisions and actions and some others that Peter will address, expand our overall opportunity and maximize profitability and sustainability despite short-term revenue impacts. As part of our continued focus on building long-term success, I'm happy to share that we exceeded our year-end target cash balance of $50 million by over $5 million, ending the year with over $55 million in cash and short-term investments and zero debt. Zero debt. We believe our strong balance sheet and past positive cash flow are major competitive advantages in the current environment. While some industry players must raise capital, which is increasingly expensive and difficult to secure, we believe we have the cash resources to turn cash flow positive without the need for outside capital. Consistent with our focus on long-term value creation over short-term revenue opportunities, we also remain highly disciplined in third-party licensing and distribution negotiations. We know the value of our content. We won't enter into agreements that do not meet our valuation thresholds. We're in control of our own destiny and our future is bright. Specifically, our direct consumer SVOD revenues grew 12% in the fourth quarter and 25% for the full year on a year-over-year basis. Looking ahead, we're optimistic about our ability to drive accelerated subscription revenue growth and profitability as we implement our new pricing structure, as we migrate to more efficient performance-based marketing, and as we execute on product innovation that will produce measurable return. On the pricing front, we recently completed an extensive 3-month pricing test with over 3 million interactions. We expect the changes we made to our standard tier subscription pricing on March 27th will create a tailwind to revenue growth later this year and beyond. Specifically, we increased the cost of our standard service to $39.99 from $19.99 per year for new annual subscribers and to $4.99 from $2.99 per month for new monthly subscribers. We long maintained our $20 annual standard service price point despite the significant investments we've made to expand our content library and improve the user experience. We established our new price points following a rigorous process of testing and analysis that helped us to estimate the subscriber acquisition and retention impact of various pricing combinations. Specifically, we analyzed over 3 million sessions during the course of many weeks using nine different combinations of pricing and messaging. After thoroughly reviewing the data, we confirmed a range of pricing flexibility, we believe we are striking the right balance between delivering value to our subscribers, optimizing lifetime value, and enhancing profitability. Even at a higher price point, we continue to believe our service represents an extraordinary value compared to other offerings in the market. We expect the financial benefit of the price increase to build sustainably and gradually as new subscribers join and as annual subscribers renew over time. Our direct consumer subscriber retention remained industry-leading during the fourth quarter as our incredibly talented content and marketing teams continued to leverage our critical mass content library of over 15,000 programs to deliver new and engaging experiences. A great example of this was our highly successful 100 Days of Curiosity campaign. The campaign kicked off September 23rd with our landmark original feature Pompeii: Disaster Street, and continued through the end of the year with a different existing series or special refeatured on our service each day and highlighted across all social channels with gratifying success. Many of the titles refeatured in the 100 Days of Curiosity campaign received more than 10 times the number of views they would normally receive on a typical day. Top performers included everything from Secrets of the Solar System, Ancient Engineering, and Eternal Egypt to Planet Insect, Amazing Dino World, and Radioactive Forest, each of which saw their daily viewership increase from 5x to 25x in a single day. Nearly a week after we refeatured each title, they continued to deliver viewership levels much higher than they did previously. During the 100 Days of Curiosity campaign, social engagement jumped more than 200% from the previous three months. This was powered in large part by our strong video content, which drove a nearly 275% jump in video views during the 100 Days of Curiosity campaign as compared to the previous quarter. The social growth we saw during that campaign continued into the first quarter, with engagements up 1,400% from January 1st to today. Throughout the quarter, we also continued to premiere more brand-defining original series like Oddly Satisfying Science, the second season of NYC Revealed, new episodes of our award-winning science and technology strand Breakthrough, featuring flying cars, reefs of hope, and voyage into the sun, as well as our one-hour special, The Lucy Mission: Origins of the Solar System, and our ever-popular year-end wrap, Top Science Stories of 2022. Building on the success of 100 Days, Curiosity has already created several more campaigns to enhance program discoverability throughout 2023 and beyond, including Ancient Egypt Week, Space Week, and Dino Week. Turning to product innovation, we've been encouraged by the continued embrace of our Smart Bundle subscription plan. In fact, December was an all-time record month for Smart Bundle subscriber additions, resulting in 32% year-over-year Smart Bundle subscriber growth. While the Smart Bundle continues to increase as a percentage of our base, we believe there's excellent runway for growth, considering that less than 10% of our DTC subscribers are on this plan. We believe our Smart Bundle subscribers, many of whom have upgraded from our standard subscription, appreciate the plan's curated content value. At $70 per year, our Smart Bundle represents an 83% savings compared to subscribing to each service individually. We have broad global rights with majority of our six content providers, including Da Vinci Kids, which we added to the bundle during the fourth quarter. Da Vinci Kids significantly enhances our proposition for kids age 5 to 12 and is available in over 16 languages. Controlling a broad scope of rights with a majority of our content providers enables us to provide the Smart Bundle globally and expand our market opportunity. Based on our recent testing, we found, not surprisingly, that our increased standard tier pricing generated a higher rate of Smart Bundle conversions. As I mentioned earlier, we believe the macro environment with rising interest rates and diminished access to capital creates many challenges for most. It has significantly, though, increased our volume of inquiries from potential strategic and commercial partners. Besides strategic combination considerations, we're engaged with more scale partners around the world who are seeking high-quality, cost-effective alternatives from services like ours as compared to increasingly pricey content from legacy media companies. We believe our strong cash position increases our flexibility with regard to how we can structure our partnership agreements, both commercially and strategically. We believe our strong cash position also enables us to lock up important tools and services at meaningful discounts as we can buy in bulk and over a longer term. Nearly everything is on sale today. By that, I mean, you know, certain acquisition advertising inventory, certain influencer marketing services, technical products and services, you know, and even non-core assets of other companies. We are aggressively taking advantages of these discounts, which may result in more cash out over a short period of time, but which we would trade for improvement in our longer-term performance. Looking ahead, we are confident that we have the right assets and capabilities in place to execute on our innovation and growth strategies. Despite all of the macro noise, we are currently in the midst of more global opportunities are opening up as Curiosity and One Day University are rolling out with several new partners who will deliver millions of paying subscribers in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Australia, and even North America. While we barely dipped our toe in the water in regard to third-party FAST and AVOD opportunities, we have considerable upside here through aligning with the right partners around the world. We have thousands of titles that haven't run on any AVOD or FAST platforms. We recently hired a great leader and executor, an industry vet, Tom Pope, head up our brand partnership efforts. Well, the turbulent macro environment has been a challenge in many respects. It has also presented new and compelling opportunities that didn't exist even 1 year ago. With the decisive actions we have taken to rationalize our annualized cost base, the heavy lifting of critical mass content creation and languaging behind us, an increased DTC pricing structure, and optimized scale partnerships, we see many ways to win in this environment and come out stronger on the other side. Before turning the call over to Peter for more detailed discussion of our financials, I'd like to thank our colleagues across the Curiosity ecosystem, full-time employees, freelancers, sales agents, producers, editors, and our deeply appreciated third-party business partners. Thank you for focusing on the signal through the noise and for your tireless commitments and your quality work. Together, we'll continue to help people around the world satisfy their curiosity through premium factual content and deliver durable, profitable growth for our shareholders. Over to you, Peter. Thanks, Clint. As Clint mentioned, we made further progress towards our positive Adjusted Free Cash Flow objective during the quarter, and we remain intensely focused on expense discipline and operating efficiency. We believe our Q4 results demonstrate the excellent progress we've made over the past year to improve profitability and cash flow. Fourth quarter Adjusted EBITDA improved by $2.6 million compared with the prior year quarter, while Adjusted Free Cash Flow improved $22.7 million year-over-year. Before I get into more details about the quarter, I'd like to make a couple of comments. First, I'd like to note that the metrics that we will refer to most frequently in this and future calls are revenue, Adjusted EBITDA, and Adjusted Free Cash Flow. We think those figures will give you the best sense for the overall economics of our business. We're particularly focused on Adjusted Free Cash Flow, which for the record, is simply calculated by taking cash flow from operations, less capital expenditures, and any adjustments that we think are appropriate, as disclosed in further detail in our earnings release. We have not taken any adjustments to free cash flow for any of the historical periods discussed in this call or presented in this quarter's earnings release. The other thing I'd like to point out is that we made some important revisions to our SPIEGEL TV joint venture during the first quarter of 2023. These changes, which included allowing the JV to directly offer subscription video-on-demand and FAST services, are intended to help drive the success of the business. These changes also resulted in a reduction to revenue of $2.2 million during the fourth quarter and the full year. Fourth quarter revenue was $14.5 million compared to $27.3 million in the prior year quarter. The year-over-year change was primarily driven by a $9.5 million reduction in content licensing revenues, a $2.2 million reduction in bundled distribution revenues, and a $2.1 million reduction in other revenues, partially offset by continued revenue growth in our direct and enterprise categories. Our largest revenue category this quarter was our direct business, which includes our direct-to-consumer and partner direct revenue streams. Direct revenue came in at a combined $8.6 million, an increase of 10% compared with the fourth quarter of 2021. As Clint mentioned, we're implementing a price increase for our new standard plan subscribers and have transitioned to a performance-based customer acquisition marketing model as we enter 2023 with less than $1 million of marketing commitment for the year. We continue to be excited about our high-value Smart Bundle offering, where we achieved 32% subscriber growth this year. With the increase in our standard pricing, we expect an even higher percentage of new subscribers to opt for the Smart Bundle in 2023. Turning to content licensing, which was our second-largest category this quarter, we generated $3 million of revenue compared to $12.5 million in the prior year quarter. Our fourth quarter revenue in this category was negatively impacted by the SPIEGEL TV-related charges discussed previously. Content licensing is an inherently lumpy business. While we expect this characteristic to continue, we're encouraged by the level of interest in our library. Our next largest category this quarter was bundled distribution, which saw $1.5 million of revenue in the quarter. Q4 was the first quarter which included the full impact of the contract discussed last quarter that we did not renew. Excluding the $2.6 million of revenue we generated from this contract in the fourth quarter of 2021, bundled distribution revenue grew 29% year-over-year on an adjusted basis. We remain actively engaged in discussions with distributors around the world and are focused on signing new contracts to drive both top and bottom line growth. Our next largest category was enterprise, which grew 18% year-over-year to $1.4 million in the fourth quarter. Fourth quarter gross margin of 9.4% was negatively impacted by lower revenues and our elevated content amortization expense relative to our run rate investment in new content additions. Content amortization in the fourth quarter was $9.8 million, nearly double our $5.2 million of cash content spend in the quarter. We expect content amortization expense, the largest component of our cost of revenues, to decrease going forward and ultimately converge with a lower level of new content investment that we require now that we've achieved critical mass in our content library. As we discussed on our last earnings call, our Q4 advertising and marketing expense of $9.1 million continued to reflect sizable legacy advertising commitments. Moving forward, we expect significant improvement on the advertising and marketing line as we enter 2023 with less than $1 million of marketing commitments for the year. Turning to G&A, we continue to make progress in reducing our overhead costs, including a 29% workforce reduction between the end of 2021 and the end of 2022. G&A expenses were $7.6 million during the quarter, down 15% year-over-year and 13% sequentially. Moving to profitability, despite lower revenues and ongoing legacy content amortization and advertising expenses, Adjusted EBITDA loss of $13.6 million improved year-over-year from a loss of $16.3 million in the prior year. Moving forward, we expect Adjusted EBITDA to benefit from lower levels of content amortization and advertising and marketing spend. We also reduced our fourth quarter cash spend on content by more than $2 million on a sequential basis and by greater than 75% compared to the prior year quarter. Adjusted Free Cash Flow improved year-over-year during the quarter by $22.7 million, from negative $31.5 million to negative $8.8 million. At the end of the fourth quarter, cash, restricted cash, and available for sale investments totaled $55.5 million ahead of our $50 million year-end target. Our overall balance sheet was in great shape at the end of the year with $154 million of assets and $36 million of liabilities, translating into book value $118 million or approximately $2.23 per share. Moving to our first quarter guidance, we expect revenue in the range of $11 million-$13 million and Adjusted Free Cash Flow in the range of negative $8 million-negative $6 million. Included in this amount is approximately $4 million of payments related to marketing activity in the fourth quarter. Our Adjusted Free Cash Flow guidance reflects our continuing focus on bringing down our cash burn, which is a top priority for us. I'd also like to provide some further guideposts for 2023 that I will hope will be helpful to you as you think about our business. First, we expect our content amortization, the largest component of our cost of revenue, to decline from approximately $39 million in 2022 to $25 million-$30 million in 2023. Second, we expect our advertising and marketing expense to decline from approximately $41 million in 2022 to $20 million-$25 million in 2023 as we move to a performance-based marketing model. Finally, turning to our cash flow statement, we expect our cash spend on content to decline from approximately $42 million in 2022 to $10 million-$15 million in 2023. Along with our planned reduction in cash content spend, we expect our zero margin presales content licensing revenue, which amounted to approximately $19 million in 2022, to be in the low to mid single-digit million dollar range in 2023. With that, operator, let's open the call to questions. Thank you, sir. Just a reminder, everyone, it is star one if you have a question today. We'll take our first question from Dan Kurnos, The Benchmark Company. Great. Thanks. Good afternoon. Clint, just maybe a couple things. Obviously, Peter, thanks for all the help on kind of walking through the pieces. Just help us think through first just on the parts of the business that, you know, you strategically decided to exit. I know you have kind of the core DTC, but, you know, if there's any way that you can kind of parse out impact on advertising, or on the corporate or any of kind of the segments that you used to disclose, podcast, ODU, just anything that helps us understand sort of what we're left with here, given the guide. Secondarily, you talked about tailwinds as we go into the back half of the year from pricing. Can you just talk to how the pricing increases are going to play out? When do consumers see them as on their renewal date? Do you phase it in? Just to help us kind of understand the timing of how that unfolds. Happy to. Let me try to tick those off and kind of one by one. Appreciate the question, Dan. Let me say, first of all, you know, we have a really competitive team. You know, we like to win, I like to win, and I probably hate losing more than I like winning. We like to win every quarter. You know, at the same time, that can be a fleeting victory that's less important than winning the race. We'll win the race, I can assure you, by focusing on, you know, what is essential. I don't know that we've given up anything. I would say that, you know, we passed on some licensing opportunities that were really meaningful because we balanced, you know, that revenue against what we believe to be possible through retaining certain rights and through broader licensing rights and frankly, through combination considerations. Those decisions are not made lightly. What I will say is, as we, you know, look out over this year, you know, where we plan to grow and beyond where we've grown in the past is, you know, one, international rollouts with large channel stores like Amazon, like YouTube, and the usual suspects there. These international environments are great because the number of SVOD services offered, it's a fraction of what it is in the US, you know. Like, in some cases, maybe 10-15 services as compared to hundreds. It's not just CuriosityStream, but also One Day University. This is kind of low-hanging fruit. In the U.S., you know, ODU will continue to roll out there. We're able to do this because we control kind of broad global rights to our content. Historically, we haven't leaned in at all to international rollouts with channel stores. We focus largely on bringing people directly to our service. That business is rolling and, you know, we anticipate increasing. Bundled rollouts, you know, we have four launches just this month: Eastern Europe, Northwestern Europe, Australasia. Millions of paying subscribers, Strong margin, recurring revenue with no marketing costs in areas where, you know, the direct consumer opportunity is not necessarily as good as it is in other places. I think, you know, AVOD and FAST. AVOD, FAST. Our brand partnership business has been a little bit, you know, lumpy in the past because oftentimes it's, you know, we might do a $1 million deal that, you know, happens in a quarter. This will get a little more predictable as we do two things. One is we turn on traditional advertising with the, you know, millions of linear subscribers that we have around the world where we haven't turned it on. 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 the last year as it relates to FAST. You know, to maximize the money here, you need to be on the top 6 platforms with good positioning and some promotion. That's really important. I mean, there's you know, it's like thousands of FAST channels, some of which make no money. You don't wanna be yelling into the wind. You wanna have the right alliances. You know, I think if you look at how companies that are looking to expand and FAST that have this kind of positioning, I mean, they'll typically look at it as like, "Okay, the FAST channel can generate $3 million-$4 million per year," and that assumes you have 250 hours of good content to roll through. We have probably better content available than anybody that I can think of, you know, broadly in the media space that's also operating. We kinda know what the value is there in AVOD and FAST space. There's a lot to exploit with. We just wanna do it the right way. We don't want to just, you know, throw up content and, you know, even though it might mean a short-term hit, we wanna make sure that, you know, when we're doing this, we're doing it in the right way and we're maximizing the opportunity around it. The opportunity is certainly clearer and more predictable today than even was, you know, six, 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, you know, our subscription businesses. You know, on the content licensing side, you can see the value that exists there, you know, in the AVOD FAST space if you just licensed your content as compared to licensing it and then continue to operate channels. As it relates to kind of traditional content licensing, I mean, we licensed over $45 million of content outside the U.S. in territories representing about 30%-40% of the world. We've not sold a U.S. or North American package. There's a lot of value here left to exploit, but we're not gonna do a deal that we don't think is in our long-term best interest. Even if, I mean, even if it meant, you know, exceeding the, you know, analyst expectations by $1 million or $2 million in the quarter, that's not the race that we're trying to win. 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, you know, over 3 million sessions. New customers are now seeing that pricing as of Monday. You know, it's a blended on a blended basis, it's about an 83% price increase. New customers coming on will pay that. Over the next few months, we'll transition our current monthly customers to that pricing, and then, you know, over the next, you know, over the next 11-12 months, our annual customers will transition to the annual price. Our technology team did a lot of work there. We're really excited about the opportunity there, and, you know, that will flow through later this year, you know. You know, more over the next few years. Frankly, we should have done this earlier, you know, 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. No, that was, very comprehensive, Clint. Thanks very much. I appreciate it. Thank you for that. Thanks. We'll take the next question from Laura Martin, Needham & Company. Clint, the first one's for you. My revenue fell by $13 million year-over-year to 14 and a half, 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 this client that didn't renew. Did I get that right? three things. That's the breakup of the $13 million decline. I'm gonna have Peter correct me here, but it's a combination of an accounting correction that we took. It's. Okay ... it's also, you know, so that was over $2 million. Okay yes, a deal that we did not renew, that we didn't like the overall economics on as it related to our bundled distribution. The other difference was in pre-sales content licensing, which we've pulled back on as we're trying to build a different approach there. The accounting treatment around our pre-sales content licensing as it's existed, you know, for, you know, the last 18-24 months has been zero margin. There are some changes that we need to make to how that works in order to, you know, generate higher content licensing revenue. It's really those three things. Peter, do you wanna clarify or? Yeah, I will clarify slightly. Yeah. 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. Then $2.1 million was a reduction in other revenues. Those were up. Those were somewhat offset by revenue growth in our direct and enterprise categories. Okay. Super helpful. Okay. Now when I look at the next quarter, I still have this company at, like, half the size, right? I still have the top end of your guidance is $13 million next quarter after doing $14.5 million this quarter. That is my question. Is this company now half 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're 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're saying, Clint? I think in part, I think that you know, as Peter guided to in the 1st quarter, we pulled back a little bit, you know, more than a little bit in some areas. We will have certainly greater growth as we go through the year. We did a little bit of a reset here in the last, I would say 4 or 5 months as we looked at opportunities that we could take advantage of and opportunities that we might wanna consider later on in the year is 1 way to put it. Yeah. If I could add, you know, 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 bottom line that we are focused on. There's a couple things that are happening here. With a lower overall content spend, our content licensing is coming down because we're gonna 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 pre-sales revenue and something that we don't make a margin on. 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're not going to do those deals again. The most obvious example of that is the bundled distribution deal that we elected not to renew in mid-2022, where even if it had, you know, revenue and gross margin associated with it, when you took the whole package into consideration, particularly very substantial marketing commitments that went alongside it, marketing commitments that we needed to make, to that partner, overall, those deals just didn't make sense. obviously, when you look at the Q1 guidance, you are seeing a lower number, but improvement, you know, ultimately, it's gonna be improvements on the bottom line, improvements in the adjusted cash flow and position us to, as Clint suggests, grow from there. Oh, that makes a ton of sense. I wanna stay on this marketing point because I think it's super interesting. You did $9.1 million in the quarter of advertising and marketing. It sounds like you had this massive commitment, maybe $40 million on its way to $20 million. If we're gonna go into the FAST and AVOD business, the issue with those platforms is they are cluttered, and you do have to spend a bunch of marketing dollars and ad dollars to drive discovery that you wouldn't have had in the past. Can you speak to why you think you're gonna be able to save so much money on that line if we're starting a whole new revenue stream that CuriosityStream has never done in the past, Clint? It's a great question, Laura. As it relates to, and you hit it on the head, we've run off almost all of our obligated marketing expenses as of... We know, as Peter said in his comments, we paid for some of those in January that were for fourth quarter. Going forward, you know, we're going virtually 100%. Not quite there yet, but, you know, getting close to that on performance-based marketing. You know, that's around our direct business. That's with, you know, certain key partners in the direct space. To your point, like, okay, how are you going to maximize your AVOD and FAST initiatives? You know, what became real clear to me in looking at this over the last handful of months is you have to have the right partners. You just. Unless you're, as you said, like, unless you're positioned well with the, you know, with the top six providers, and unless you're committing some level of promotion, you're not gonna. You know, you risk yelling into the wind or just making a fraction of what's possible. It takes, you know, it takes longer to create these types of alliances, but that's what we're, that's what we're focused on. We don't want to just. I mean, we dipped our toe in the water with some of the kind of, you know, secondary, in size FAST platforms, and we learned a fair bit from that. You know, obviously, we've done some work with our own and owned platforms in front of the paywall. What I will say is that as it relates to the amount of money that needs to be spent to grow those services, that's all a consideration in the way that we create our alliances in a go-to-market strategy with the larger platforms. Does that make sense, Laura? Yeah, super helpful. Thanks, you guys. Thank you very much. Up next, we'll hear from Dillon Heslin, Roth Capital Partners. Hey, this is Dillon for Darren. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to follow up on the FAST side. Could you sort of share what percentage of revenue is coming from that, the FAST channels themselves? It's minimal this. It was minimal in 2022, Dylan. Let's say we dipped our toe in the water with, you know, just in an effort to learn what we could, you know, to understand, you know, the real differences in the positioning of the service, you know, and also to just operationally make sure that we're doing all the things right. Minimal revenue from FAST last year. Going forward, it will be, it will be a component of, you know, our broader advertising and brand partnership business. It's meaningful, but, you know, AVOD is meaningful, and then, you know, the comprehensive approach that we take to these brand partnerships where we're, you know, including our partners on our O&O platforms, including social, it spreads out across a number of different assets. I think in 2023, FAST will be a component, but, you know, probably less of a component than it will be in 2024 and beyond when we're when we've got a full year behind us and when we're really rolling. The other benefit that we see to FAST is it's not just monetization for our brand partners. It's also a platform to promote to our direct services. You know, this becomes even more valuable as we move to, you know, virtually 100% performance-based marketing. As we have, frankly, you know, higher margin, more profitable subscription tiers to promote to. So we just wanna make sure that we leverage it as strongly as we can. Make sense? Yes. That's helpful. And then in terms of the SPIEGEL changes and then some of the deals that have gone away, like when do you expect to see the impact, one, of the SPIEGEL changes? Are there any sort of other partnership or bundled agreements that are potentially less favorable in economics that you can either try to restructure or possibly do similar things to what you've done in the last six months? Well, I would say as it relates to SPIEGEL, we like that relationship. That's a, you know, the fact that we have, you have two linear channels in German-speaking Europe, you know, reaching, you know, close to 5 million customers, and seeing the Curiosity brand, that's been really good. What Peter's talking about is that, you know, it's an accounting treatment that we think actually positions the, that JV for even greater success. As it relates to our other bundled deals, I think you'll read about, you know, a number of them over the next month. The economics that we have, with our other partners are good. They're all, you know, nice margin, recurring revenue, you know, multiple, years. You know, in the cases where it requires language content, much of that is behind us now, you know, as is like, you know, having built this critical mass library. The deals that we'll do are, you know, are gonna all fit that criteria, and you know, really excited about the ones that are, you know, come on over the past month and over the next month. Yeah. I just add that one distribution deal we walked away from, that was a real outlier in terms of the overall economics of that package. You know, we've instilled real discipline in some of our larger kind of enterprise types of deals and, we're not doing some of the types of deals that we had done in the past, but those deals are effectively all behind us as of the end of 2022. Got it. Appreciate it. That's helpful. Actually one more if I may. Did maybe I missed it, but did you guys share the subscription subscriber number at all for the end of the year? We didn't, no. It's, I mean, our direct customers grew, and they grew, you know, 25% year-over-year. On the bundled side, grew a little bit. That was a combination of, in certain cases, we're paid basically a fixed fee, you know, based on the numbers. Not, it's not a fee per subscriber, it's a fixed fee and, you know, the distributor customers, subscribers can go up and down a little bit. That's why it was kind of marginal growth over the quarter there. Great. Appreciate it. Thank you. The next question comes from Jim Goss, Barrington Research. All right. Thank you. As you've gone through these consumer tests, I'm wondering if you could talk about the pricing philosophy you have developed that caused you to arrive at the $4.99 and $39.99. Was there an element of you get what you pay for, so it was perceived that you were underpricing your service? That might have been part of it. The $39.95 seems like a conservative and compelling. Does $4.99 a month get you into more direct competition with some of the other services? I wonder if you might talk about that variation and the impact on maybe the mix of monthly versus annual. I'll take it to start, then I'll defer to my good friend and colleague, Peter. Jim, thanks for that question. Yeah, as it relates to the $4.99 price, if you look out over the landscape of subscription services today, $4.99 with, you know, without breaking up the programs with ads is still really compelling. The other value to, you know, to $4.99 and $39.99 is we think that, you know, because it's not as steep a discount as we had in the past as it relates to the annual plan, we believe our mix will change, you know, probably by 10-20 points. Peter, is that accurate as to monthly versus annual or? Something along those lines. It's definitely gonna skew more monthly. I think, you know, one of the things that was really interesting for us to test, and we tested a, you know, variety of different price points, you know. You'd hold a monthly price point constant and try a few different annual price points, then change the annual price point, always comparing against the control group that was seeing kind of our historical pricing. One of the things I was really interested to look at as we were going through it is historically, the $2.99, $19.99 historical pricing that we've had is a real outlier in that the annual price was basically less than seven months worth of monthly subscription payments if you would wanted to equate the two. You know, there are many, many services out there, whether it's consumer or enterprise, where the more typical combination is that an annual price would equal about 10 months. We were really interested to see kind of what the right mix was and ultimately ended up with what effectively is our new pricing, which is about 8 months, an equivalent of 8 months, in the annual pricing point. You know, that was certainly one of the things we thought was really interesting and that we were testing around to figure out, you know, where the ultimate kind of maximum optimized lift would be for revenue and value per session and lifetime value and all the other metrics we were trying to optimize for. Okay. Is it fair to think that you need to get to a significantly higher critical mass to consider an ad light option that's been successful in a lot of streamers? I think that's a great question. Here's my response to that, Jim. First is, I think, you know, Disney's recent price hike was instructive. They went out with a $3 price hike, and if you wanted to pay $3 more, you could continue to watch without ads. If you wanted to save $3, you could watch some ads. I think 6% of the people took the ad option. To your broader question, you know, how do you know, how do you use this service and how do you build a compelling, you know, advertising business? I think we have a, you know, we have a strategy to build our presence in front of the paywall, which, you know, enhance our overall advertising revenue, which, you know, enable us to promote to our direct service, but does not involve having a, at this stage, having a, you know, Curiosity Lite people pay for. When we look at how to. Because we've looked at it, and when you look at, you know, the efficiency of your marketing spend, it's gonna be much greater if you're promoting to a specific subscription offering as compared to, you know, spreading that out over, you know, multiple options. We like the options that we have right now because even though it's not Curiosity Lite, we have this Smart Bundle that sits on top of our standard service. You know, that's $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year. If you know, if you were to add up the cost of those seven services that occupy that Smart Bundle, it's $410 a year. We're offering it $69.99 a year. That's about an 83% discount. What we found with this new pricing is because our annual pricing, you know, because our monthly pricing is now closer to that Smart Bundle, we're seeing more Smart Bundle conversions. There's a lot that goes into that. It's a very good question, we're really confident in this strategy going forward. Okay. One final thought to bring up. You mentioned, incorporating performance-based marketing In your approach to creating visibility for the service, I wonder if you could talk about the cost-value relationship and how many of those sort of services you're trying to use and exactly how you're trying to create that visibility through those services. Sure. You know, when we talk about performance-based marketing, what we're saying is that, you know, our marketing messages are going to include a coupon or a call to action. You know, not dissimilar to, you know, traditional direct response in the, you know, the legacy TV business as an example. How we do that is through, you know, traditional digital acquisition marketing means Facebook, Google, YouTube, but also through working with certain YouTube influencers who operate in the factual space, who have, you know, passionate followings and whose subscribers and followers will be more likely to subscribe to CuriosityStream. Those are the areas. Yeah. We're really driving to, you know, very focused on our cost of customer acquisition and the model around that and where we can price marketing kind of on that basis. It's great, and we love to do that. We've obviously just significantly increased the lifetime value of our subscribers, so for new subscribers, and so, you know, that creates some new possibilities for us on the marketing side because of that uplift. We will now take a follow-up from Peter Henderson. Hi. How you doing? Thanks for taking the question. Clint, I just wanted to circle back to something that you stated earlier, which was I believe you said everything is for sale. I'm just wondering, have you broached anyone regarding a potential sale of the company itself? Just trying to sort of clarify that comment. I mean, fair question. When I'm saying everything is for sale, I'm talking largely about products and services. Okay. You know, at the same time, yeah, I think there are, you know, there are non-core assets the company own that are for sale. Yes, we've had, you know, we've had inquiries. You know, we've had real, you know, meaningful inquiries as it relates to, you know, CuriosityStream being in combination with other companies. What I, you know, what I like about the fact that, you know, things are on sale today is there are opportunities for us to, you know, to purchase, as an example, you know, acquisition inventory at a discount. Because we have the cash to do that, we can essentially, you know, buy in bulk and buy in advance and put that to work, over a long period of time in a way that really drives, you know, profitability and sustainability. So, you know, as Peter said, we are supremely, I think, disciplined in the way that we're operating the business. We've rationalized the cost basis in a way that gives us a lot of flexibility, a lot of optionality, going forward. We, we have the ability to be opportunistic, and so we're gonna do that wherever it makes sense. You know, notwithstanding the challenging times that we're in, I mean, I think I said in the script, like we've never had more incoming as it relates to, you know, strategic and commercial opportunities. It's just a function of the time. It's a function of the fact that we, you know, are on this march to positive cash flow. We don't need to raise, you know, any additional money, and we have cash in the bank. Those are, I've typically, in my career, Peter, I've been like the smaller underleveraged guy. Mm-hmm. It's nice to kind of be in this, in this position now. Sure. You know, and running a business that generates cash gives you a, you know, just gives you a lot more flexibility and opportunity. Thank you. Thank you. Next up is Sharon Gee, D.A. Davidson. Hello, thank you for taking my question. I have 1 question. I was wondering, can you compare and contrast your distribution efforts with Amazon, Apple, Roku, and other cable providers, and discuss how that has changed over time? Compare and contrast our relationship with them? Is that what you ask? distribution efforts. Sure. As it relates to Amazon, Apple, Roku, you know, their, in their channel stores, we launched with, you know, all of them on a, you know, to use a, you know, an à la carte vernacular. They offer essentially our subscription service, you know, through their, through their system and, and through their offering. They pay us a fee, based on subscriptions that come in. We have that same construct with, you know, Comcast in the U.S., and a few other traditional MVPDs in the U.S. That's one relationship. As it relates to, you know, other MVPDs, many of which are outside the U.S., we have a relationship with those providers where it's more of a fixed fee approach. They're paying us some kind of fixed fee that, you know, includes us, you know, conveying to them perhaps a linear channel, you know, some VOD content, and a set of rights where they're gonna pay us a fixed fee for that. We like that because it's multi-year revenue. It's recurring and doesn't require any additional expense from us in most cases. That's, you know, those are the deals that we have today. Where we've not leaned in and, you know, where we are over the next few years here is in rolling out with that first subset of companies that you mentioned, the large channel stores like, you know, Amazon and now, you know, like YouTube to do with, you know, prime time entertainment. There are real opportunities there. Again, what we really like about that is as you roll out in those international markets, the number of services that are being offered is just a fraction of what it is in the U.S. Like, I think Amazon's fantastic at marketing their subscription video on demand services, but, you know, there's a lot of them today. You know, just a lot. The same with, you know, Roku and same with Apple. I think you'll see us continue to enhance those relationships because not only are they helpful for our subscription video on demand products, and, you know, we have 3 of those now, they're also, you know, they're also, you know, typically occupy, you know, that top 6 to 7 category of FAST and AVOD platforms. I think you'll see us enhance the relationships, create broader, you know, global product relationships with that set of companies that you mentioned. Thank you for that question. Good one. Great. Thank you. At this time, I would like to hand the conference back to Mr. Clint Stinchcomb for any additional or closing remarks. Well, I just want to thank everyone for the questions. I thought they were really good and helpful. I want to thank you for the interest in CuriosityStream. We have a lot of day-to-day work to do, with our shoulders to the wheel, and I'm really excited about the actions that we've already taken, and the direction that we're headed in. As Peter shared, we've taken the necessary and ongoing steps to significantly reduce our annualized expenses, to focus on the essentials, and to move toward positive cash flow. This reset in combination with our strong cash position provides us with maximum control and maximum optionality. Again, we generated double-digit direct sales growth in Q4 and recently implemented a price increase, which we expect to drive significantly higher lifetime value while accelerating our path to positive Adjusted Free Cash Flow. Our Critical Mass content library of over 15,000 programs, combined with additional content, that's flowing in, you know, on a daily and weekly basis enables us to continually refresh our service while remaining highly efficient in our content spend. We're off to a great start this year in regard to global partner rollouts of our services. These alliances, they build our more predictable long-term recurring subscription revenues at zero to minimal marketing costs and complement our lumpier areas of content monetization. A strong balance sheet, zero debt, which we believe cements our excellent strategic position in the current market environment. Peter and I look forward to updating you on our progress this year as we execute on our plan. Thanks again. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference. We would like to thank you all for your participation today. You may now disconnect.