We are really pleased to have Nexstar management here with us. We have Perry Sook, Chairman and CEO, Lee Ann Gliha, CFO and Executive Vice President, and along with me, Jessica Reif Ehrlich. I have Brent Navon on my team, so we will be tag-teaming you guys. I hope that is okay. Perry, we will start with you. Nexstar started over 30 years ago with a single television station, but you have now become the largest local broadcaster in the country, and you have other assets, including The CW and NewsNation. Following the TEGNA acquisition, which hopefully we will get into it. Anyway, how should investors think about what Nexstar is becoming over the next three to five years? Are you leaning towards a larger local broadcaster, a national media company, something else, something in between? Well, I think it is a great question. I think of us as a local media company with what is approaching national scale. We have focused primarily on the local end of the media ecosystem. We think it is surprisingly durable. We also think it is the most sticky part of the media ecosystem. We have business relationships with approximately 47,000 SMBs in 80% of the U.S. We operate in 44 states, so that is approaching national scale. But we look at everything through the ends of kind of bottoms up what is good for our local stations, which The CW has been for those owned and operated stations. What will benefit the stations by making changes at the network or adding NewsNation, a national news service, on top of what we do locally. I think the correct way to think about us is in the local media space being without peer in terms of our size and scale and balance sheet and flexibility, but also just being a local media company, but with national scale. Being able to do local activation at scale, I think is our secret sauce. Maybe just taking a step back, given the secular transition toward streaming, it is easy for some investors to question whether local broadcast is a structurally declining business and how this high cash flow generating business transitions in a new paradigm. What do you think the market misunderstands about the Nexstar model and its durability? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'll take some of that. First and foremost, I think it's our programming. I think people tend to overlook the fact that almost 50% of our audience comes from our local news and our other local programming that we source ourselves. So we, in and of ourselves, are a very important programmer for the local communities that we service and the advertisers that do business with us. I think that's number one. Number two is our distribution model. There's about 20% of the audience out there today that receives their television signals over-the-air. So when you are thinking about any sort of third-party programmer, like a sports organization or any other kind of entertainment content, you're immediately getting 20% more audience than what you would get if you were just in the pay TV ecosystem on a standalone basis. We've seen that time and time again, even with our own CW Network, when we acquired the rights for the O'Reilly Auto Parts series for NASCAR, we've seen double-digit, 20%+ improvement in ratings that accrues to the benefit of the network and the sports league, and then also with respect to the viewers. So there's incremental value in the distribution that we bring to bear that is very important. Then I think, the evolution of this ecosystem is, I think, come in our favor. If you think about over time, what has been the reason that you've seen the decrease in the pay TV ecosystem and that attrition? Well, it's really been because you've had a lot of these major network companies launch these direct-to-consumer services at price points that were very low. What you're now seeing is those price points are now increasing because those direct-to-consumer services were generating massive losses for these larger media companies, and that's no longer sustainable. As you're seeing those prices increase, you're seeing the distributors actually rebundle some of these services into their pay TV profile. You are getting an ability to now, as a consumer, access whatever content you want on whatever method you want, but you're going to be paying the same price. That is what we think is very important, is that we are, Nexstar and our content, we are available. We're available on any sort of service that you're going to want. We're available on streaming. We're on YouTube television. We are on Hulu. We are on Peacock. We're on Paramount. We are over-the-air. We are on via the satellite companies. We're on via the cable companies. I think over time, as we see the pricing more start to equalize, you are going to start to see a stabilization in the overall ecosystem, and that is going to accrue to the benefit of the broadcasters. Just maybe continuing on that, but there are multiple concerns about the current ecosystem, whether it is the decline of pay TV subs, advertising headwinds, advertising transitioning from linear to digital, reverse comp, changing viewing habits. I mean, the list goes on. Do you think these are overstated at this point? Or what are you concerned about, and what are you not concerned about? Well, I think that Lee Ann addressed the distribution paradigm, which now with the average streaming service is $150 a month for the full package. That is about where the bundle is or was when people started to gravitate away from it. So it is no longer a skinny bundle. It is a very robust bundle, and if pricing is roughly the same, people might tend to stay where they are, because I still think that the traditional cable or MVPD bundle offers a superior navigation tool to a la carte streaming services. So if attrition begins to level out, I think that is probably one of the primary issues that people have had some existential dread about the melting ice cube nature of the sector. From an advertising perspective, there is no question that buying linear television is more expensive of a process than buying digital for the agencies. We have a former CFO of an agency holding company on our Board of Directors, and it is indisputable that the agencies have less of a margin placing linear than they do placing digital, which it is surprising to me we do as well as we do if the frictional costs are higher. We, Nexstar, are attempting to address that by developing a seamless pitch-to-pay system that we hope to be able to bring out and at least announce and talk about at next year's upfront, that would allow an advertiser to go through the process, access customer data, and go pitch to pay, and basically access linear television inventory more in a programmatic fashion. Which puts us then on par from a buy-sell process with digital, and I happen to believe that money will flow to the sector because people see the superior value proposition of the linear relationship that we deliver at the endpoint. I think that from that perspective, we are trying to address the two things that I think are the biggest drag on the business, and we also, the money has migrated to connected TV. We have dramatically increased and will continue to grow our presence in the connected TV space to at least be competitive and offer a full suite of audience extension products in addition to our primary linear or digital products. As promised, let's shift gears to TEGNA. Maybe just beyond just scale, can you talk about the strategic rationale of the TEGNA acquisition and what it brings to Nexstar? First of all, the acquisition as modeled was substantially accretive to Nexstar shareholders, so it made it worth doing. It increases our national footprint of local stations from roughly 70% to roughly 80% of the U.S. There are 35 markets of the 50+ markets where we will operate or derive an economic benefit from more than one television station in the marketplace, which allows us to rationalize a cost basis across two platforms. Add additional local content in markets where we had a CW and maybe TEGNA had a Big Four station with a robust news organization, and can produce news for The CW now rather than us having to go out and buy that a la carte elsewhere. There are all kinds of industrial logics and touchpoints rationalizing the real estate portfolio, two buildings down to one in those overlap markets. We still make our money selling local content, so it's very important to us to have as robust a local market content offering. There's no savings there, but there might be savings in housing the two different studios in one building and not having to pay to heat and cool and cut the grass of the building down the road. So, there was a lot of industrial logic, a lot of synergies. But again, it's the kind of acquisition that we have made, and we feel that getting to approximately $3 billion of EBITDA puts us in the neighborhood of Fox pre-Roku and Paramount Skydance pre-Warner Bros. Discovery, and that's a different neighborhood than most of the rest of the pure-play broadcasters are from a financial standpoint. Unfortunately, you're stuck in the regulatory process. Can you give us an update on exactly where you are and the key timelines from here? Sure. First of all, on overall regulatory, the FCC has voted to eliminate the national cap, and we're waiting for that order to be published or released by the FCC, which will then cause it to be published in the Federal Register, which is, as we used to say in Schoolhouse Rock!, how the bill becomes law. There is also the quadrennial review of the local ownership rules, which we believe that those should be addressed this fall in attention to that rulemaking, which would then modernize the local ownership limitations, eliminate some of those limitations, modernize the rules for both television and radio. I would say that, I think if Chairman Carr is able to affect both of those changes, those will be signature pieces of legislation and administrative rule changes that will really have modernized and given additional life to the local radio and television industries. I think those will be signature achievements of his current tenure as FCC Chair. So we're optimistic about all of that. As it relates to our jurisprudence issues, we will be heard in the Ninth Circuit in the middle of November. That is on our appeal on the hold separate order, as well as attempting to determine if the states have standing to proceed in this litigation. That oral argument will be heard in the middle of November. When we get a ruling on the results of that is anybody's guess, but we're anticipating probably sometime in early to mid-first quarter. Then the trial on the actual initial court case that was brought in the Sacramento Federal District Court, that trial will commence in July of 2027. That will probably take a couple of weeks, and then we'll see where they rule. Whomever loses may well appeal, and we may be taking this all the way to the Supreme Court. I think the most important thing for us is that we've closed on the asset. We have the benefit of the cash flows of the TEGNA acquisition, and we paid down in excess of a half a billion dollars in debt from the March closing through close of business yesterday. We will pay down in excess of $1 billion in the acquisition debt between now and the end of the year on a cumulative basis. So it's not the 100% solution, but it's also not a 0% solution. So there's no negative implications as time goes on. It's only positive as we'll continue to carve away at that debt balance. Right. Well, just to maybe continue the conversation. You alluded some of the strategic rationale for the acquisition, but given the requirements to maintain independent operations, what exactly can Nexstar do to extract the economic value that underpinned the deal itself right now? Yeah. So for right now, we are subject to this hold separate order. So we have in place a team, a CEO, Pat Paolini, who came over from Fox, who is running TEGNA in the interim. He is very business-focused, and you probably saw he had an interview the other day with TVNewsCheck where he is working on trying to invigorate the organization and continue to operate the business. So we think the business is in excellent hands with his operations. So in the interim, it is really kind of his show with respect to operating the business. But as Perry just mentioned, we do own the company, so we get to benefit from all of the cash flow of the combined business, and we are using that cash flow to repay debt, which is extracting economic value for our shareholders from the acquisition. Hopefully, if we are successful in our appeal, we will be able to at least narrow the scope of the litigation, which would potentially allow us to enact some synergies sooner rather than later. Switching gears, let us move on to advertising. Core advertising still is a key driver of your model. How would you assess the overall health of the ad market at the moment? As we think about the drivers of your ad business, where do you see the most opportunities? Yeah. I think from an advertising perspective, we were down mid-single digits on a non-political basis in the first quarter, or sorry, in the second quarter, and expect to be down a similar, maybe slightly a little bit better in the third quarter. That really is driven by a number of factors. Number one is we're in a political year, so there is a good amount of crowd-out as we are selling advertising for political. We cannot sell it for non-political purposes. Number two is we are impacted by just the general competition from increased AVOD inventory that's out there, CTV inventory, and then just general economic weakness that we are seeing a little bit of that. But having said all that, we have a number of different areas where we are working very hard to grow the business. Number one is on our local digital side. Just because there's a lot more CTV out there doesn't mean we can't be selling it. So we are utilizing our local sales force. We have a very large local sales force to not only sell our core linear inventory, but then extend the audience for our advertisers by selling third-party CTV inventory as well. That business has been doing incredibly well, growing at a double-digit rate, and that's really helping us stem the tide of some of the impacts on the linear side of things. As Perry mentioned, we're working to transform our go-to-market from an advertising perspective and being able to make our inventory look more similar to advertisers as CTV inventory is, make it easier to access. But that's a longer-term sort of strategy, but something that we're focused on. We've got a number of really good organic businesses within our organization. We own NewsNation, which from a ratings perspective, peaked at number 35 in terms of the ranked of all networks in the first quarter. CW Network is at the number eight ranked network that's out there. So these are businesses that we are continuing to focus on and grow the audience, which then will have a positive impact on our ability to grow our advertising revenue. So we have a number of interesting areas where we're focused, not the least of which is what we're dealing with right now with the political cycle. Because broadcast television is known far and wide as the best place to put your dollars to work if you're really looking to get people out to vote and to influence how they vote. That's a great segue. We're heading into this robust political cycle. What are your expectations for advertising and political, and how does your footprint overlap with some of the key competitive races that we should expect to see? Yeah. Political is doing incredibly well this year. I think there's a third-party research firm out there named AdImpact that I think has called for, this is on a gross basis, $5 billion of political advertising coming into the broadcast space, which is up versus 2022 and up versus 2024. We're feeling good about that. With respect to our portfolio, we have a pretty broad portfolio, and prior to the TEGNA acquisition, we were already covering 80%-90% of the contested election markets in any given year. Usually what happens is you'll have a race that you think is going to be very strong and it's not strong, but then you'll have another race somewhere else within our portfolio that you didn't think was going to be strong that ends up being very strong. When you go back and you look at Nexstar's history in terms of how much political advertising revenue we're able to achieve, and we look at it on a market share basis. If you look pretty consistently, Nexstar is able to achieve low double digit to low teens percentage of the dollars that are spent on broadcast for political advertising. You have to be a little careful because the AdImpact number is gross, and we refer to our revenue on a net basis, so there's a 15% differential there. TEGNA, historically over time, has done high single-digit market share. We're feeling good about this year's political cycle, and we've had some unusual things happen, like first quarter with Texas being a very big number, and we're looking forward to seeing what happens throughout the rest of the year. Overall advertising does appear to be getting more competitive. What is the path to returning non-political advertising back to growth? Again, I think if we can remove the inequities in the buy-sell process and make ourselves more user-friendly, that will be a conduit. We know that most automotive advertising, when you get below the tier one level, is done through certified OEM vendor relationships. We have worked with and worked to become one of those certified OEM vendors, which our automotive spend, I think, is holding up probably comparative to the rest of the industry relatively well. I think we need to continue to do things like that, continue to make our digital offerings more robust so that we can sell nationally and locally, and a total audience profile that we can offer you CTV, we can offer you apps, we can offer you other streaming opportunities, we can offer you linear, as well as sponsorship opportunities. We are doing that with our national sales team across all of our national inventory on our local stations, as well as our national inventory on our networks, our diginets, as well as our cable networks as well. I think the one-stop shop nature is another reason yet to continue to try and scale, to compete with those that sell enormous amounts of advertising, Meta and others, in a one-stop basis. I think that is where we need to get to, and we are working and striving very hard to get to that point so that we have a competitive value prop. Because we know that from an audience delivery perspective, with the sports leagues we deal with, there is a tremendous appetite to be on broadcast to get that full potential distribution, to get the audience uplift from streaming only or cable only. We see that as driving our sports portfolio on The CW, but also applying that kind of enthusiasm across the entire buy-sell process and all of our inventory, I think will, again, if we can remove the structural impediments to doing business with us, that we will end up doing more business. You kind of just touched on this a bit, but search and social and increasingly connected TV are also taking share from local advertising budgets. I guess, what are the opportunities for Nexstar to migrate some of the advertising businesses back toward some of your digital properties? You want me to take that? Yeah, go ahead. Okay. One of the things that we've done is we've launched OTT apps in all of our local markets over the course of the last year. We've got our local news that's available on OTT's CTV capabilities, so that can be a way of doing that. We also have The CW app and NewsNation has CTV capabilities as well. That's part of it, is creating our own content, kind of driving that. I think as I was saying earlier, part of it is not only leveraging our local sales force, but leveraging third-party content and relationships that we have to actually sell that. Make it more about our local advertiser and what we can provide to that service. Perry, you just mentioned that you've beefed up your sports. CW, you're positioning it on a path to profitability, but can you talk a little bit about where you are in the transformation of the network? What opportunities still exist, including managing programming costs or building an audience and really driving profitability? Sure. Listen, I have to compliment Sean Compton and Brad Schwartz and the team. We took a money-losing network, and we now will be cash flow EBITDA positive in the fourth quarter of this year. We've added 800 hours of sports while our entire expense for programming is half of what it was at the time of acquisition. We're playing Moneyball, and we are acting like an upstart, which we are. It's been a tremendous turnaround from a reducing of cost and redundant overhead. It's a very lean organization now, but I think appropriately structured for the time. We believe that The CW, and by extension, kind of the Fox network model, is the preferred network model for local stations, where there's a prime-time component of marquee programming and a mix of scripted and game shows and police shows, reality shows, but then there's just 800 hours of sports on the weekend, which allows our stations to sell sports that maybe haven't had that opportunity, and our network sales organization to sell and compete for sports dollars, where previously they were closed out. We've done a great job. We were with the NASCAR folks last night at a charity function, and we're told, A, we're the best partner they have, and B, we are the growth entity for NASCAR. When we put NASCAR on, we're doing numbers for those races that they haven't done in six or seven years. As Lee Ann said earlier, it's 20+% year-over-year growth, and that's the power of broadcast, the power of being able to form viewing habits that every Saturday the NASCAR race will be on CW. There's no ambiguity about that. That's what we saw as the opportunity and as a proof point now, and we're bringing additional sponsorships in addition to selling that inventory at sports CPMs in both the upfront and the scatter market. I think as we go forward and think about the renewal of the NFL, I know you have a question on that. We think there could be opportunities as people rationalize their spending for the NFL. There may be other sports opportunities that fall out of those Big Four network portfolios that could potentially benefit The CW, and things that might come to us that we otherwise might normally not have a chance to bid on. Going into Brent's question. Yeah. A big part of The CW has been the incremental sports rights you have acquired. What have you learned about this market, the audiences that it attracts, the affiliate and advertising and economics associated with sports rights, and how do you balance driving profitable growth, especially at a time when sports media rights continue to escalate in price? Sure. Well, our opportunity to monetize sports on The CW is through advertising and through increased distribution fees for our affiliated stations, including our owned and operated. Three years ago, when we told everybody what we were going to do, they said, "Well, we're from Missouri, so show us." Right? Now we have proof points. We have 800 hours of sports on The CW, sports every weekend. Most Saturdays this fall, The CW will program 12 - 14 hours of continuous programming, starting with a college football game, then a NASCAR race, then maybe a primetime and even late-night college football game. So it's the full portfolio of sports. Our Florida State, New Mexico State game, which was our week zero game, did approaching 2 million viewers for The CW, which is an all-time high for sports on The CW. Not that that's a huge large sample size, but it's also the highest gross audience that The CW has delivered in a dozen years. Since Buffy? Huh? Since Buffy? Yeah, exactly. Back when the market was not as fragmented as it is. We feel very good about that. I think what we see, we're very full on Saturday sports. We could use more Sunday sports. Sunday right now for us in basketball season is where we have women's basketball. We've actively added more women's basketball from both the ACC, the Pac-12, and the Mountain West because there's advertiser demand for it. Even though the ratings are lower, the advertisers want to be associated with that product. We could use more Sunday sports throughout the year, and we'll look for those opportunities as they come available to us. But again, the advertising piece is fairly immediate proof. The reverse compensation from affiliates takes time because they have to reset before they have the money to pay us. But we've seen tremendous progress in our affiliate fees, albeit from a fairly low base, but we've shown tremendous growth there as well, and it's kind of unfolding as we had expected it would. Let's go back to the NFL, which you mentioned. There's an opt-out in 2029 for the current rights holders. To the extent that the broadcast networks are successful in getting those rights, we expect a big step-up in rights fees. One of the offsets for the networks is obviously to try to get higher reverse comp from the local stations. How do you view the implication of rising sports rates in your portfolio, and what can you do as you get larger? Is there something you can do about that? Sure. Well, it's interesting because I do expect that the sports rights fee bubble will continue to grow, certainly through this cycle of the NFL. As I mentioned earlier, that may create opportunities for The CW. As it relates to our local affiliates, we have typically, as a group, paid, deferred approximately 10%-12% of the cost of the total rights fees that the networks have paid. I would expect that to continue. So as they get an increase, we will get an increase as well. I think you have to look at that at what cost, or what's the offset to that? The offset is that I'm willing to pay for sports rights, but I may not be willing to pay as much for general entertainment programming that is ubiquitous across multiple streaming services. I may pay more for sports, but want to pay less for everything else. That would certainly be our position, and we'll see how that all plays out. Again, I think the Nexstar opportunity there will be not only as the largest affiliate group of each of the Big Four pro forma for TEGNA by a significant margin, by the way. I think we'll have a more balanced discussion than smaller players. Who knows? You look at what we've done with ESPN in putting our CW sports in partnership on their app. There may be, as these sports costs continue to balloon, opportunities as the largest affiliate group to enter into some sort of a co-venture for certain aspects of their sports relationships, which could be a benefit to those stations as well as benefits to CW through other opportunities. Can you expand? That's really interesting. Could you like mini local rights? Potentially. Yeah. I think you'd have to think through it, and is there shoulder programming that we could produce our own or, I don't know that you'll see Nexstar necessarily bid on Sure our own for NFL rights. Could we participate in some way, shape, or form in partnership with the network? Again, we're not just an affiliate. When you deliver more homes for CBS than their owned and operated stations do in local marketplaces, that's different than if you're 8% of the U.S., right? I think that our discussions should necessarily seek a different level maybe than the rest of the affiliate universe, and I think we're open to any and all of those discussions. We need to start working to create opportunity rather than working for a zero-sum value transfer, which is how the negotiations have been in the past. Very creative. Yeah. Time will tell. Shifting gears to NewsNation, that continues to generate significant audience growth. However, many advertisers avoid news programming. How should we evaluate how this progress translates economically? What are the key milestones that you're targeting for NewsNation, both from an audience and a revenue profitability perspective? Maybe just as a follow-up to that, there's a lot being made about NewsNation stations in themselves becoming political. Do you view that as an opportunity for NewsNation? Yeah. Let me take that last part first. That's the foundation of NewsNation, was to create a news network that really caters to the majority of America that is not very left and not very right, but really is more that 60% in the middle, but then will provide opinions and information on both sides. We are really focused on being an unbiased, fact-based organization, and we are consistently rated in that regard. We think that, over time, people will come to us. They like to fact-check the other two networks, the left and the right, and come to NewsNation for that perspective. We're very proud of what NewsNation's done. I think I mentioned earlier, in the first quarter, we peaked at, I think, number 35 in terms of the ranking of all broadcast and cable networks out there. NewsNation has been very successful and profitable from day one. We are just looking to continue to build and monetize on that. You say advertisers don't really like news. I don't know if that's the case. I know that Warner Bros. put some numbers out there about CNN, and I think CNN's doing something like close to $2 billion of revenue a year. When you look at the top-ranked networks, you always see Fox News right in there and MSNBC. We're really looking to aspire to drive our audience to be able to get to those types of levels. We think NewsNation has the potential for really a breakout success and a real good organic driver for the entire Nexstar story. I have a regulatory question, but before I ask that, just what are the demographics for NewsNation? Are they like upscale demographic? How do they compare to the rest of your programming? Well, not unlike other cable news networks, it skews older. It does skew a little bit more upscale than other cable networks. Again, when we started the company, or when we started NewsNation five years ago, a little over five years ago, with a $20 million launch campaign to introduce NewsNation, we did research afterwards and found that 11% of America knew what NewsNation was. Well, now, among news viewers, it's about 55% know, but that still means we've got to introduce ourselves to four out of 10 homes on the street. Little points of pride is when I have spent a long day or a couple of days in Washington, D.C., as I'm sitting at the Admirals Club, NewsNation is the news network that they have on in the Admirals Club at Reagan National. If you walk through the concourse at Newark, if there's a news network on, it's usually NewsNation. Again, people are saying, "Well, this is one that is not partisan." It's not going to tick off half of the people in the Admirals Club or half the people in the It is seen as down the middle. It's very hard to continue to stay there because so much bias is unconscious in the words we use. I'm married to a rhetorician, as you know. The words are very important, and the words that are used often have impact. For us to remain objective and balanced in everything we say and do requires constant vigilance. But yeah, I think we're pleased at the growth, the fact that this network now is relevant. I mean, success is Fox News, right? In terms of audience, in terms of revenue, in terms of profitability. But the fact that, as Lee Ann said, we were totally self-funded. As our syndicated program contracts expired on the old WGN America, we took that money and plowed it into expanding the journalism. So it is a profitable network and has been from day one. It's been totally self-funded. So growth for us is organic, and success is anywhere between where we are today and where Fox and CNN are today. So that's our opportunity. That's great. I just want to get a quick one in because I know we're sort of running out of time. Perry, you mentioned that the FCC announced they're repealing the 39% ownership cap on broadcast networks. Not really getting into the specific deal, but how does removing the caps change the dynamics between the ecosystem of station groups, broadcast networks, and distributors? Well, I think that we want to continue to grow. There are some markets where once we have line of sight on clearing our current litigation, we could acquire stations to improve the distribution of The CW Network and give us a station in a market we're not in. We can do that now because the cap is removed. We think it's not unlike other businesses that five years from now, when you look at the local station industry, you'll have Nexstar, which will be the largest by a margin, and without peer, you'll probably have a second competitor that is maybe half our size. Then you'll have a bunch of smaller competitors that But you'll care about these big two as public equity investors. We are almost in that place now, but I think it will even become more defined in the next three to five years. I think others, as they create balance sheet capacity, will probably try and run the same play to expand their holdings or consolidate among themselves. I think it is just like any other industry where you have a dominant player, a significant secondary player, and then a bunch of smaller companies that make up the remainder. I do not see our industry following a much different arc than others already have. Shifting gears a bit to capital allocation priorities. You mentioned some of the de-leveraging you have done already, but how should we think about those priorities near-term, whether it be debt reduction following the TEGNA acquisition and capital returns? Yeah. If you go back and look at our history and what we said prior to the TEGNA acquisition, we always use the leverage capital markets to facilitate the acquisitions, which helps drive shareholder returns. We leverage up, and then we use our free cash flow to repay the debt. This is a great time to have done the acquisition going into a political year when we have excess free cash flow. So we look to de-leverage pretty quickly. We like to keep our balance sheet conservative enough so that we can be opportunistic if there are other opportunities that come along. As you know, every dollar of debt that gets paid down, it creates a dollar of equity value, and that really is what helps generate that leverage return for our shareholders that has been so beneficial historically with prior acquisitions. That is really our main point of focus is to continue to de-leverage. We are continuing to pay our dividend. We are, I think, somewhere north of a 4% dividend yield, so one of the highest dividend payer yields within the S&P 400, which is the index we are in, and we are going to continue to do that. Then, once we get our leverage down, we will re-look at the best possible utilization for capital going forward for our shareholders, which heretofore has been M&A. That has been the best strategy. But if there is no M&A to be done, then we look for another type of M&A, which is buying our own stock back and returning capital in that regard. As painful as it is right now looking at our stock price and not being in the buyback market, we do think paying down debt is still the right way to go for the time being. I'm going to sneak one last one in. I know we have a minute left, but you've talked a lot about the growth drivers. You're really thinking creatively on the sports side. I thought it was super interesting. Is there something, another. What do you think is the biggest opportunity that investors currently don't appreciate? We haven't the time to talk about spectrum, but we do see the opportunity to monetize our spectrum vis-à-vis high-speed data transmission being the single largest value creation lever in our business as it's currently known. That's probably a sidebar discussion or a whole other session. But we formed this consortium with Sinclair, Gray, and Scripps to ante our spectrum in and try and we've created a company called Edgebeam Wireless, and think of them as the leasing agent. We want to go to market with this robust collection of spectrum, which is about 98% of the U.S., so nationwide coverage. We think the opportunity for high-speed data transmission is significant, whether it's lower cost 5G network replacement, giving 5G networks that need more spectrum, we have that. There are other applications that I could go into. But it is living in Texas, so it's like finding shale oil and gas in the ground. It takes a while to monetize it, but the asset is there, and it is worth something. I know the minute money starts to flow, investors will start to pay attention to it. We've been telling this story for some time, but we're spending a lot more time on it now, and I think we're closer than we have been to having the ability to unlock value. Obviously, it requires some assistance from the FCC in sunsetting 1.0 requirements and allowing 3.0 spectrum to blossom across the full allocation of 6 MHz. But I think once we get there, it is a substantial value creation opportunity, not just for Nexstar, who has more spectrum than anybody else right now, but for the entire industry. I think it could rival distribution revenue in terms of what it could mean to the P&L of local license holders. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you, Jessica. Appreciate you.