All right, everyone. Welcome again. I'm Chris Marangi, President and Co-CIO of Value for Gabelli. We are very excited to have a first-time presenter here at our conference. First time because it's a newborn company. Happy five-month anniversary. Thank you. I think most people know that Versant was spun off from Comcast at the end of last year. It's 140 million shares. Stock's around $40. You've had a nice bounce off of the bottom, but still embarrassingly low. I mean, way low in my view. I am sheepish about that. I think we are undervalued, and the market's starting to recognize our value, and we're moving in the right direction. Hopefully, we can help with that. It is a little bit of a unique story because even though you're new, you have some very well-seasoned brands, CNBC, MS NOW, USA, many others. Like the company, you're very young, but you've been around the block, Turner Entertainment, NBC. I think this is really exciting for this conference because you, Versant sit at the intersection of sports and live and media, which is our focus. For those who don't know, why don't you just review how you differentiate yourself from all the other media companies out there? Right. We spun, at the time was 11 businesses out of NBCU, and seven of them were linear networks, four digital businesses. We've since divested one business and bought three other businesses that fit into our verticals. We don't really look at it as linear and digital. We bucket our businesses into four large, growing vertical industries. Those four are business news, personal finance, and retail investing with CNBC at the center of it, political news and opinion with MSNBC at the center of it, golf with Golf Channel at the center of it, and then sports and genre entertainment with USA, E!, Syfy, Oxygen, and then Fandango. The reason we bucket it that way is because we believe investing in these verticals will allow us to take what is a strong portfolio of iconic brands with more than 60% of our audiences being live news and sports, and you pointed out, MS NOW, CNBC, USA, and then Golf Channel, another major sports asset. We're investing into those verticals, and I think the best example of it is what we've already done in the golf industry with Golf Channel being the center of it. Golf Channel's around 50% of our revenue in our golf vertical. The other 50% comes from a very large-scaled tee time business called GolfNow, where we book 40 million tee times each year. GolfPass, which is a direct-to-consumer business where we're partners with Rory McIlroy and have somewhere between three and 400 paid subscribers. A software services business that connects with golf courses and helps them with yield management and inventory management, and helps them manage their business. A multifaceted biz. We're in the golf media business, yes, but we're really in the golf business. The intention is to work across all four of those verticals in a similar fashion. I think that helps differentiate us from those who believed we would just come in and try to roll up other cable networks, and we would be an aggregator of cable networks. Might there be something of interest? Maybe. Our focus, and I believe that our colleagues around the industry have been doing their jobs the way we had been at NBCU. There needs to be revenue synergy. It can't just be cost synergy because I think most of the cost synergy is squeezed out of these businesses. Great. We're to touch on a number of those topics. I think one of the most salient opportunities that I see there is to take MS NOW and CNBC DTC, direct- to- consumer, and you could probably do some customer research here, but I don't know, I'd be willing to pay $15- $20. I don't know what the number is per month for CNBC. I'll take both of those numbers. Okay. Sure. Sounds good. You've got a little bit of a runway. Yeah a little bit of a timeframe to do that. Maybe just talk about that opportunity and what it'll take. Yeah. To go back to kind of our core goals, right? One is to have a strong balance sheet, and we have that. We left Comcast with a strong balance sheet, and it's even stronger today than it was then. The second tenet is to make sure we return capital to shareholders, and we've done that through dividend and share buyback. To invest in the businesses, and that's really the core of your question here. That can come in two forms. That'll come in organic investment and then inorganic investment. We're working on three, and we've discussed very significant organic investments in terms of changing within those verticals. CNBC direct to consumer is one, and MS NOW direct- to- consumer is another, and I'll start with MS. As part of the NBC News group, MS had no real digital footprint. It had a text-based website with show clips. That was essentially the investment that they made. Probably over the last five years, missed opportunity, but for today and now, it's a real white space opportunity for us. The MS audience is the second highest-rated cable network every year, and sometimes it falls to third behind ESPN, but Fox News is one, MS is two. It also has a highly engaged audience. Our audience watches us nine hours a week. That's the second highest engaged audience. Fox News is just ahead of us. MS NOW is next. The ones behind us are, for nine hours, they're five hours or less. It is a highly engaged audience. A real opportunity to take that fully engaged and large audience and work with them on a direct-to-consumer business. We're investing in that now. We're building it out. We will launch it before year-end, planned to launch before the midterms, because that's a real opportunity for us, and it'll be more than just our linear network streaming. It'll have a lot of other content. It'll be interactive with our talent and consumers. It'll be bringing in other talent who have like-minded voices and work to bring in younger people who are interested in the messaging that MS has. CNBC similarly, while today there's CNBC+ and CNBC Pro, I would say it's a little bit of a disorganized direct to consumer message. We're working to create something that is more focused, not only for professionals like yourselves and everyone in this room, but more focused on the retail investor, building out tools, building out a product that is interesting for people to manage their portfolios. The number of people who invest has gone up, we all know that, and they all want to know what their portfolios are doing or keep track of them. To that end, we bought a small company called StockStory, which is an AI stock recommendation engine. That will be a toolkit that will fall into CNBC's direct- to- consumer business. I'll just touch briefly the final organic digital investment we're making right now. Everyone knows Fandango. It's a very strong brand, mostly known as a movie ticketing business. We booked 70 million tickets last year. It's a huge upside because that's only around 10% of the number of movie tickets that were sold. There's also a home video business, buying and renting movies and TV series. About six years ago, we bought a platform from Walmart called Vudu, and that's the base of our essentially home video service with Fandango at Home. There's a small layer of AVOD, free with advertising content available on Fandango, and we're investing into that. We are going to take the strength of the Fandango brand, the data and information we have for people buying tickets and people buying and renting TV and movies through us, and be able to target them with content in a free AVOD environment. Free is growing, whether it's free AVOD is growing in terms of time usage, free over-the-air is growing. We bought a company called Free TV Networks for small multicast channels that are now growing. In fact, we are tenants of Gray in Atlanta. We lease space from them in their offices. That's a business that is growing. We have four networks there centered around African American, True Crime, and Western content. Those acquisitions and that investment in free is a real opportunity for us to transition our business. Today we're 80% or roughly 80% pay- TV centric, 20% not, and we want to move that more over time towards 50/50. Since you just talked about some of those digital platforms, how does GolfNow fit into the mix other than owning the Golf Channel? How do you plan to grow that? Well, grow it, there is a big growth opportunity. We book about 10% of the tee times. We book 40 million tee times, as I said. We are partners with roughly 25% of the public and resort courses, so there is upside in getting more golf courses. One of the things we are doing, and this was again capital constraint when we were part of NBCU, was we were not going out and adding sales staff to something like GolfNow. It was not a priority. We are now loading up and adding sales staff both domestically here and internationally. We think there is a big international opportunity in GolfNow. We bought a company called BRS out of Belfast. We have expanded pretty quickly into the U.K., Ireland, the U.K., and then we have also now expanded into Germany, Austria, France, South Africa, and Australia. Adding sales heads in a business where we're only booking 10% of the tee times. The competition isn't another tee time business. The competition is the telephone. As we can just get more people, as more people get comfortable with booking tee times online, tying in GolfPass and GolfNow together, for sort of rewards and loyalty programs is a real opportunity and upside for us. We're seeing our platforms business, which is essentially the majority of which are Fandango and GolfNow, are growing in the high single digits. We see that as a real growth path for us. I didn't know people still picked up the phone to make tee times. Anyway, big opportunity. Let's get back to sports rights. We've heard in the last two presentations about the power of sports. Anybody who stayed up last night to watch the Knicks is aware of that as well. I think pound for pound, you're one of the bigger sports complexes out there. You've got WWE, Premier League, WNBA, lots of others. NASCAR, WNBA. Yes. Olympics. Are there other opportunities there, especially given the NFL rights negotiations? I do think so. My personal background is rooted in a lot of sports. I ran Turner Sports for many years. For the last 15 years has either run directly or overseen NBC Sports. The NFL is going to come back to their current partners and ask for and receive more money. Paramount will go first. They have to, given the consent rights the NFL had as part of the Skydance-Paramount merger. That will take place probably sooner and will, I believe, set a market or set the bar for what the other folks will be asked to do, and one way or another, I believe they'll all find a way to do it. That being said, those broadcasters, those networks are going to have to make choices on how to spend their money. Most of that money will come from the bottom line. They'll have to make programming choices, whether it's entertainment, news, or sports. Rebalancing of sports portfolios is one of the ways that these folks will be able to cover that NFL number, and I think that will create opportunity for us. The next sets of sports rights that are coming up will, in terms of leagues here in the U.S., are Major League Baseball and the NHL. We have discussed with both of those parties that if they come to market outside of their right of first refusals and their negotiating windows, that we would like to talk to them. I personally have had long-term relationships with them. Matt Hong, who runs our sports division, has had long-term relationships with them. I think there will be opportunity for us to expand our sports portfolio appropriately. We're not going to be in the NFL business. We're not going to be in the NBA business. I think we can be in some of these other leagues to a modest degree utilizing USA Sports. Well, we'll talk to the Braves a little bit later about their perspective of the MLB taking the rights back in 2029. An important topic and I'm sure highly valuable rights. You've got a certain amount of investment dollars for content. I assume you're allocating those dollars to the highest return. You have a general entertainment business or what used to be known as general entertainment business in USA E!. How do you think about investments in those particular- We have very specific networks, so I call them focused entertainment networks now. E! around pop culture, Syfy around the science fiction genre, Oxygen around true crime, USA a little more general, but that's really a sports and entertainment network. We do invest in original content. We do some scripted content, an amount that helps us with our advertising sales and shows distributors that we're still investing in scripted content. Unscripted content is a place that we've had a lot of success, and we will continue to have a lot of success. Over time, we've built libraries in the unscripted area. We just did a licensing deal with Hulu to license The Kardashians for multiple years, so our library has real value to it. We have other content. We have hundreds and hundreds of episodes of True Crime from Oxygen in its library that we utilize and will utilize on AVOD, we'll also be able to license to third parties. We have experience in, we'll call it, the conflict genre of reality television. We are bringing back the original Real Housewives of New York, a group of them into a show called The Golden Life, as they've now, with the rest of the people my age, moved to Palm Beach. We've captured them down there. We're going to do another season with them, that will not only, we think, have built-in demand and popularity for E!, it'll also have downstream value to us as we build out that library. Focusing on that entertainment. On these cable networks, the acquisitions business of buying libraries of content, whether it's a Two and a Half Men for E! or Law & Order: SVU for USA, those businesses are very high margin returns in terms of what we're able to pay for them and then what we'll be able to sell in terms of advertising. In the conflict genre, which is not a term I've heard before, may fit some of your discussions with distributors, and that's a question I often get. I think 55% of your distribution agreements are after 2028. Maybe just comment a little bit about how you see that playing out? Flip that around. We only have 16% of it up this year. Okay. Small amount this year. Our early discussions, none of them are imminent. None of them are in the next month or so. Early discussions are that the value of our portfolio with the emphasis on live news and sports, and our ability to be flexible and work with them on packaging, work with them on things that are important to their customers. What I've heard in going around the industry and talking to the distribution world is there's more focus on the customer than there ever had been before. I think as an industry, the distribution world didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the customer. They were thinking about the business side, and I think there's now a renewed focus on the customer, and we are going to be very good partners. We don't have the constraints we had being inside Comcast or NBCU. We don't have competing constituencies to try to live to what everyone else is, how the other parts of the company think. We're going to be willing participants in doing new things, and I think that's been well-received. Actually, that's a good segue to my next question, which is one of the reasons that we as investors like spinoffs is because management tends to be more focused, and there's often new capital. Not to overuse the sports analogies, but what inning do you think we are in terms of rebuilding the internal infrastructure that you need to be a standalone company? Maybe just talk a little bit more about the management incentives. Yeah. There's two sides to that. We're in the seventh or eighth inning in sort of building out the public company structure, right? We had to create a Treasury, IR, HR, benefits plans, everything that employees expect and that you have in a company our size, we had to build, and we did that in a year, which was very quick. We are fully up and running, and we've had two earnings calls, and we're here speaking today. We've built out the infrastructure. One of the things we had to do to expedite the spin was to sort of lift and shift a lot of the processes and applications and things that we had to do. How we went on air, how our HR systems worked, how our finance systems worked, how we approached the legal. We lifted and shifted those processes and programs. We don't need the infrastructure that we had at NBCU or Comcast for that. We are right now in the middle of the process of using technology to think through what the next generation of our company looks like. We have a goal set out to have that planned and underway by the end of the year, and we'll be able to realize real savings in how we do things, from whether it's from data center stuff to more cloud-based, a variety of pros, and using AI, using offshoring. We'll have a real discipline plan, and we'll be able to reap the benefits of that from into 2027 and 2028. Ultimately for us, it's all about the cash flow. You've got a lot of that. You hit your numbers in your first quarter. One of the things that surprised me is just how much stock you bought back and promised to buy back while reducing leverage. Maybe just again, the general question, what are your plans for cash flow, priorities for cash flow, and how does M&A fit into that? Similarly, we believe in returning money to shareholders. You guys seem to like that. We're going to continue that. Our dividend is set. We bought $100 million back in the first quarter. We did a commitment to do the same in the second quarter. We'll look at that down the line. What we want to also, though, be able to do is invest in the growth and changeover of our company from being so heavily reliant on pay television to be more focused on our verticals and to diversify our revenue streams outside of pure pay- TV. We want to make sure we have the flexibility to do that. We have done that. As I said, we've made three acquisitions. We will continue to look at acquisitions that fit into our verticals. We'll continue to think about broader M&A as opportunities come in, but in a discussion that we had with the board, they're like, go fast, but don't hurry. That's the mantra that we're kind of living by. Let's look at things, right things. We don't need to do anything just for the sake of doing it. We have cash flow. We have a very strong balance sheet. We are going to target 1.25x of leverage. Our goal will always be to get back to that if we were to exceed that in a very short period of time. That's what we call home base. We've come out at the balance sheet with our Comcast sort of history, which was always to have a strong and fortress balance sheet, and we were fortunate to have that coming out from Comcast, and we plan to maintain that. As we end up here, anything I didn't ask that you think we should know or? If you want me to talk about the news environment, we can talk about that. I was trying to stay away from that one, but yeah, why don't you just talk a little bit. Well, we'll talk about CNBC. Sure, okay. Also in news, obviously a lot of people are glued to financial news. Yeah with all the things that are going on. Yeah, I think more importantly, one of the things that we believe is that both of our news networks serve an important audiences and reach a lot of influential people. One of our calling cards, and certainly in the ad market, is between 6:00 A.M. and 9:00 A.M. in the morning, we believe we reach the most influential people in the country each and every day between Squawk Box and Morning Joe. Whether it's business and policy or whether it's pure policy and politics, we can tell by the feedback we're getting, by the emails and texts and tweets that we see out there, that we reach the most influential people each and every day, and that's a really big calling card for us in the ad market. We will continue to do that. Programming those shows with both influential policymakers and the influential people in business, certainly around the markets and banking and all the industry sectors, is one of our great calling cards, and I think that's important to distributors, advertisers, and audiences. You probably have some pretty affluent golfers out there, too. We have some pretty affluent golfers. The CNBC and Golf Channel audiences align very nicely, and certainly with certain audiences around the country, if I show up with CNBC and Golf Channel, I receive a warm welcome. That's right. All right. Live and sports, sport and live, we love it. That's what this conference is about, and we really appreciate you being here. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.