All right, we're gonna kick us off here on day 4 of the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference in San Francisco. We're really excited to have Mark Lazarus, the CEO of Versant, which spun off from Comcast in early January. A quick disclosure. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales rep. I'm joined by Thomas Yeh from the Morgan Stanley Media and Entertainment Research Team. Mark, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having us. You just reported earnings and reiterated your outlook for 2026. What have been your biggest learnings in the first few months of operating as a standalone company following the separation from Comcast? We've learned a lot. I think that we really realized that while we have big, iconic, well-known brands, they were really hidden inside of Comcast, and that's been a lot of the premise for the entirety of the spin that we can unlock value with these very popular big brands. Taking, you know, CNBC, MS NOW, Golf Channel, E!, Oxygen, Syfy, Fandango, GolfNow, and really exposing them. Then bucketing them into vertical businesses where we can expand beyond the pay television ecosystem that we've been so successful and are so successful in, but we'll be able to invest into them. We'll be able to do that, I think the biggest learning is how important our strong balance sheet is, right? We have very low leverage. We're able to invest in the businesses and return money to shareholders. I think learning that as we've gone has been really helpful. The independence that we have, we've been able to do a few things, you know, in these first few months. We've closed 2 small acquisitions. We've announced 3 organic investments. While that could happen over time in a big company, it would have taken more time. We're able to be more nimble and fast-moving. Excellent. That's a great place to start. Yeah. We have CNBC presence here at the conference, which is great demonstrating. We travel with our own crews. We appreciate that. I start my day every morning with CNBC. Thank you. We'd love for you to maybe walk through some of the four core verticals, what you think are maybe most important and most underappreciated as you look at the portfolio and what you see as the most immediate areas of growth within the company. I'll start with CNBC and, you know, focusing a vertical around CNBC, the global leader in business news, a very influential network in terms of who comes on and who's watching, has, you know, focused on business news, personal finance, and the retail investor. Our ability to do that through television and digital is one thing. We're gonna invest in a renewed and revitalized direct-to-consumer products that will allow us to build out tool sets using AI and for stock recommendations, charting tools, that will allow us to expand quickly in an area that we really weren't investing in before. That's one important vertical. The second one would be in political news and opinion around MS Now. MS Now did not have a digital video strategy. Hard to believe in this day and age that a big brand, really the number two or three, depending on the year, rated linear television cable network, did not have a digital video strategy. That was by design from the NBCUniversal News Group, decided to put their resources into other digital video products. They did not create one around MS NOW. Puts us a little behind. It also has massive opportunity. It's the number two engaged audience of all linear services. Nine hours a week, our audience watches. Over the last 10 years, the primetime audience for MS NOW has doubled. In a world where distribution has gone down, our audience has doubled. A very important and valuable audience that is highly engaged in that product. We'll be able to focus with a direct-to-consumer product around newsletters, around podcasting, around, and then on the digital video side. The third, and you and I talked briefly, is golf. You know, that's a fun vertical to have, and it's really a model home for what we want to do with the rest of the businesses. Golf, 12, 15 years ago was Golf Channel was the entire business that we had in golf. We then acquired a business called GolfNow, and it was a roll-up of tee time businesses. We now have a tee time business that is of significant scale. We booked 40 million tee times last year. We're in the early stages of our growth there. We only book roughly 10% of all the tee times, so there's a lot of organic growth. We're early in our international expansion. We bought a company in Belfast and now serve the U.K. very, you know, with great penetration. We have Austria, France, Germany, South Africa, and Australia that we're growing into. GolfNow. Extensions, that is a software services business and enterprise software that helps with yield management and inventory management for golf courses and helps them run their businesses. A video subscription business where we're partners with Rory McIlroy called GolfPass. When you roll that all up, it's now the same size as our, as our linear golf business, so roughly 50/50 in terms of how the revenues come in. That's a model home. That's what we want to do in all four of these verticals, go from where we're roughly. In 2024, we were 83% paid TV, that's gone down in 2025 to 81% on our way to 30%-33% over the next 3-5 years. Eventually, hopefully, the whole portfolio lives in a 50/50 world. The final one is our entertainment and sports vertical. On the sports side, you know, we have very strong sports product. We're the biggest provider of golf content. We've roughly 2,000 hours of live golf, 200 events. We have the Premier League. We have roughly half the Premier League schedule exclusively on USA Network. We have the WNBA, we have NASCAR. We've had two weeks of incredible Olympics as part of our programming partnership with NBC. We'll have that again in 2028 for the L.A. games. We did a deal with women's volleyball league called League One. and we're looking at other sports properties. we're heavily invested in sports. On the entertainment side, Fandango is, I think, an underappreciated part of our portfolio. Mostly known as a movie ticketing service. We sell roughly 70 million movie tickets every year. It's also a top five home video business for streaming movies and TV series at home with Fandango at Home. And we're gonna move that business and all of that audience and circulation we have for movie tickets and home video into a free AVOD business. We have the content both that we own and that we license from third parties, for both our TV networks and for AVOD, and we'll be able to create a service for, with just an advertising base. Again, moving and transitioning our business from, heavy dependence on paid TV to a more balanced dependence, across other revenue streams. That's an excellent overview. We wanna get into a bunch of those pieces. I think one of the things you hit on was the importance of live programming in there, which I think is over 60% of your audience distribution across news and sports. Yep. Maybe you can talk about the resilience you've seen in viewership trends, how important live programming assets are for you, and how you see that portfolio evolving over time. Yes, 4 of our businesses are heavily reliant on live programming. MS NOW live, CNBC live, Golf Channel, a lot of live, and USA Network with its sports portfolio live. There's also some live on E! with live from the red carpets and award shows and other things. We do have a live portfolio. When you look at ratings trends, live has held up better on linear television than scripted or unscripted. Sure there's hits in scripted and unscripted, and some do well, but on the whole, live ratings are holding up. Our sports ratings are either in the area of flat or growing. MS NOW is up double digits since we rebranded in November. Some of that is news cycle, some of that we like to think is how we're programming it. CNBC's ratings have been steady and continues to garner a important and valuable audience. Live is gonna be the bastion of linear television, and it's part of our thesis around the vertical strategy as opposed to a horizontal strategy of just rolling up other businesses. We don't want to overly dilute that live element. It's important for advertisers, it's important for distributors, and it's important for audiences. I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into the strategy that you mentioned about evolving the revenue mix over time. You mentioned the 33% target over a midterm timeframe. We all clearly know the headwinds in the linear ecosystem. How should we think about your clearest opportunities to really offset that? And whether that's, you know, continued mitigation of potentially some of those declines on the linear side versus the growth drivers that you're seeing on the CTC and? I mean, we have to do both. I mean, we need to mitigate the secular decline as best we can. Some of that will be by the mix of programming and maintaining audiences, so we can continue to drive ad revenue. There are premiums on ad revenue for live content, that will be helpful. Some of it will be through, you know, renewing distribution deals with some increases and, you know, I'll call them marketplace increases, not expecting outsized increases. So those will be forms of mitigation. In terms of growth, which I think is more important, you know, we need to mitigate what we can, but we need to grow. I mean, to get to the right mix the wrong way isn't gonna be, you know, make anyone get excited. It's gonna be about either organically growing new revenue streams. We've got the three initiatives I laid out, MS NOW, CNBC, and the Fandango AVOD as growth vehicles organically. We've made two small acquisitions to date as we were spinning Free TV Networks, which is a free to air linear over the air form of FAST channel, but it's built on solely on advertising. Free to air television and free AVOD are two areas in our ecosystem that are growing. It's demonstrable that those are growing. We're very bullish that we'll be able to grow revenue streams there. We bought a company called INDY Cinema, which like we have in the golf business, is an enterprise software platform that ties very closely with our movie ticketing service, and we'll be able to implement it across all the relationships we have in the film and cinema industry. Again, a diversified revenue stream. We'll continue to look for bolt on some acquisitions that fit in our verticals, really, we're focused on those organic growth plans for now. Can you talk a little bit more just in terms of how you see the opportunity for the Free TV Networks acquisition and, you know, as we head into the Fandango AVOD launch, how we should think about that, given the fact that, you know, FAST is a very competitive space, which is growing, but clearly a lot of alternatives? On the free TV, it's already an established brand. We bought a small company that was led by a gentleman who had done this before and sold that business to Scripps earlier named Jonathan Katz. He relaunched another set a couple of years ago. It's four networks in specific genres around African American audiences, Western audiences, and true crime. Places that we already. Certainly with true crime, with Oxygen, we already have some expertise. It's mostly direct response advertising now, but we believe that that can grow to, you know, to nine-figure ad revenue very quickly. There's expansion opportunities in terms of getting distribution there, which just grows the audience. You know, there's a big appetite for free. I mean, the cost of media is hitting people hard, and people are looking for free options, and the same thing on the free AVOD. That serves a little different role with us. If you look at what others have done in terms of revenue, say a Tubi or a Pluto, they've been able to get big audiences. What we have that they don't have: First, we have a very strong brand in Fandango. It's well-known, it's got high awareness, and it's a very popular brand. We haven't ever really marketed or advertised it as what it does in home video or certainly not in AVOD. We have a lot of information on our customers that those others don't because they're purchasing tickets and TV series and movies from us, so we have a lot of information on what they're buying and what they're doing. We'll be able to serve them content that fits their viewer profile, and more importantly, we'll be able to work and target advertising to them. We'll be able to use, because it's digital advertising, we'll be able to be more effective and be in sort of the newer forms of advertising, programmatic ad sales in other areas. We're very bullish on growth for both of those. Got it. For INDY Group Cinema, can you just maybe talk a little bit about how that fits into the broader portfolio? I think there's obviously ebb and flow in terms of the sentiment about the health of the box office. Yeah In terms of just the opportunity... I think if people make good movies, people will go. Yeah. We also believe, you know, we can tie it in with our, with our, with who we work with now, the theater owners and cinema operators. It gives us the opportunity to potentially think beyond theatrical films as a ticketing service, and it gives us a technology offering that could go into other parts of the ticketing world, which we don't have current plans, but it gives us optionality to expand what we do in ticketing. Got it. We wanted to go back to sports. You clearly articulated, you know, your leadership position in golf as a vertical. Maybe you could talk about, obviously, that's the most competitive space, the sports rights backdrop, given how important it is and how live viewership is really driven by that. How important is your ownership of kind of the sports rights and programming and your ability to get those sports rights, given you're obviously a bit smaller than, you know, some of the other competitors that you're going up against? Well, I've personally had a long career in sports. I ran, in parts of my career, Turner Sports, ran NBC Sports. I've been smaller, I've been bigger, I'm back to smaller. We believe 2 things. One, we have a very attractive portfolio now. We have product that has big, passionate fan bases. It's not the NBA, it's not the NFL, they also don't cost what those cost. NASCAR has a big following. Each and every week, it's typically a top 1 or 2 rated sport on the weekend. There's 1 race, everyone who's interested in it watches it. You know, there's been a lot of buzz around F1 and F1 has done really well and done nice growth. Every week, the NASCAR race is 2 or 3 times bigger in terms of audience. It's a big, popular sport. Premier League, where we have half, roughly half, a little less than half the games exclusively, is an important product. And we, over the last 12 years, as part of NBCU, really feel like we've helped build up the Premier League in this country. And now, as part of this new company, we'll get the benefit of... WWE is also an important, big, popular sport. Call it a sport 'cause it's live, but we... And does really well for us. We have a very strong portfolio, and we talked Olympics and WNBA. I think what's happening, what we're gonna see over the next year or 2 is, as the NFL comes back to market and extracts more rights fee from those who are, either in it now or stay in it or come to get in it, I believe it will cause some dislocation of properties from other places. We would still, over 60 million homes, have broad reach with USA Network and will be in a position to potentially bring some other sports to our portfolio. We have a strong sports division. My personal history in sports, we have a gentleman named Matt Hong, who's running our day-to-day sports vision, was COO at Turner Sports for years, and now is the president of our sports division. We have our own production company facilities, so we're ready to go. We have the relationships. As those opportunities develop, you know, we're not chasing the NFL, we're not gonna be in the NBA, but there'll be good live sports properties that will fit our profile. I'm curious how you think the NFL kind of renegotiations play out, and as you alluded to, other players might have to kinda divest other things. How do you kinda see that playing out and where Versant can fit in that? I think that the NFL is gonna come to market shortly. I think they're in preliminary discussions. I'm not in any of those, so I don't know for sure. I believe that all of the current players will want to stay in and will pay a sizable increase to maintain their NFL relationships. I think they're all gonna have to make hard decisions as other properties come up, what they can stay in and what they can't, what they can afford and what they can't, and I think that will create opportunities for people like us. Makes a lot of sense. I wanted to turn to general entertainment. How does that fit into your broad strategy? I would say investors are obviously a bit less enthused about that vertical versus kinda news and sports where you guys play. How should we think about the appropriate level of investment in scripted original content? We're doing. Sorry. There's general entertainment. I like to call it, based on what we have, focused entertainment. Right? You know, USA is sort of broad-based, but we're kinda leaning on the sports arm there. We'll do a few scripted originals for USA Network. Not a massive amount. A few that will help us with ad sales and be good for our discussions with distributors. Candidly, we're not gonna make enough that is gonna change the profile of USA Network, but it's an important part of our to have as part of our portfolio. When you look at something like Oxygen, that's why I say focused. It's heavily focused on true crime. True crime has proven to be a very durable genre. It works on linear television, it works in FAST channels, it works in streaming. We're gonna do a lot of that in AVOD. We've talked about true crime as part of Free TV Networks. I believe we can continue to focus on that. It's relatively efficient to make. I know you asked about scripted, but we're gonna lean more into unscripted as a, as an entertainment company. We'll have a few scripted originals, but we will, which will mostly be USA and some co-productions for Syfy Network. True crime are on Oxygen. E! really centered around pop culture, also has a strong digital, E! News digital business, has a strong traditional digital business, but we're starting to make video content with them. Again, that will be largely unscripted. We got a lot of press around a redo of The Real Housewives of New York, the originals. We, I think we were trying to call it the golden... Not the golden girls, 'cause that would be stealing. The golden something. We were gonna make unscripted content for E! Then focus on live, on pop culture, on the award shows, on our red carpet, and on our digital business. A long way of saying scripted will be a piece, but a smaller piece, and we'll focus on the unscripted. Makes sense. I'm curious, you know, AI has obviously been a huge topic of this conference. I'm curious, you know, as I think about some of the things you just talked about, crime could be one area where you could leverage, you know, AI production. Do you think of that as something that could, you know, increase the velocity and output of content, make things a lot cheaper? Is that something that you guys would leverage? 1,000% we believe in that. We have to obviously just be respectful of unions, guilds, et cetera, but I think in that space, we think that's imminently doable, and I think it's exactly the types of opportunities that we look at. It's also exactly the kind of things we can do as an independent company, where we can move quickly. You know, inside the bigger company we had, there was a lot of competing constituencies, and you had to balance all of that every single day as you were making these decisions. We have a much narrower, you know, path now, and so we can make informed decisions more quickly and do some things that we might not have done inside the bigger company. Great. We wanted to turn to CNBC a bit more. As you alluded to, you're kind of the leader in the space. Maybe talk about tapping into, you know, that really dedicated, sticky fan base. Then I also wanted you to hit on prediction markets. You had signed a deal with Kalshi. We had Tarek here at the conference. Maybe just talk about how you're integrating prediction markets into your programming. Yeah. CNBC is, you know, an incredibly valuable, big global brand. And I went to Davos for the first time and saw it on full display. I mean, it was, you know, every business leader, every political leader wants to come talk to CNBC. It's a influential voice. And I think of this, you know, go to our 6:00 A.M. window, where Squawk Box lives and Morning Joe lives. I think between those two shows, we reach more influential people every single morning than any other media company. That's a really nice calling card for us. CNBC, you know, the number of live interviews with influential people and the people that we reach, I think stands in as one of one. That's a really important part of who we are. Every politician, regardless of party, wants to come on and send their message. Most business leaders or many business leaders want to come on and send their message to whether it's employees or investors or others. very powerful network and has always been, but I think we can help accelerate that inside of this company. it won't be a hidden gem anymore. It's just gonna be a gem. Mm-hmm. That's one. On the prediction markets, it's, you know, it's a little bit of the Wild West out there now. We did a deal with Kalshi, and it's got several components to it. We liked that they had gone through sort of the regulatory processes and we're on the other side of that. The deal has multiple components where we, you know, by advertising from us, that's one. That was sort of, you know, our table stakes. But we're integrating their content into our shows and into our messaging. They're putting CNBC and access to CNBC information into their app, which is good for us as it gets us into other and new and younger audiences. They're providing us data and information for all of our content on air and digitally. Finally, we hope that we will be able to get more people to use their platform. As that happens, we have a piece of revenue stream from that. Multifaceted, very new, just getting started. You know, the prediction markets around sports and other things, some of it's got its ups and downs. We like the discipline that Kalshi has shown in terms of what they're getting into and what they're not. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the linear business, which is still a large part of your revenues. I think you mentioned on the earnings call a degree of visibility into that revenue stream, just given the timing and the renewal schedule, in particular, with some of your partners. Can you maybe just talk about, maybe it's early days, but what you're seeing in terms of how your negotiating leverage might change with these distributors going forward, now that you're no longer part of the broader Comcast structure? I think we have roughly 16% of our subs up this year towards the back end of the year. You know, we were being negotiated as part of the bigger NBCU or not. That comes, you know, with-without having football to drive, but it also comes with things that are benefits. Let's start with we like that we have 62% live news and sports, which has value to the linear television distributors. That's an important element. CNBC, MS Now are big, powerful engines. MS Now, certainly this year as we come towards election cycles, we expect more and more growth as the year goes on, then the sports portfolio. One of the things that has been part of big media companies, I'm sure everyone's read over time, is the stress between distributors and media companies, not really about the price of the linear networks, but what's the streaming service and the stress, you know, why should we pay you for all your linear networks when we can just tell people to buy your streaming service and get most of the same content? None of our content today is on any streaming service, so it's exclusive to the paid TV ecosystem. We think that has value. 180 Premier League games, 10 NASCAR races, 50 WNBA games, you know, 52 weeks of WWE, that is all exclusive to pay television. Not having our own streaming service, and we're not gonna create a aggregated SVOD service, we think puts us in a very good position. We also have the history of just 2025, where even though we were part of NBCU, it was obviously known that we were spinning, and we were gonna be our own company and have to bifurcate the contracts, and we were able to successfully complete a series of deals on terms that worked for both parties. Does the launch of MS NOW on a DTC platform change that dynamic, you think, at all? We don't think so because it's not gonna be a replicate service. We're not just gonna stream our network. It's gonna have community access to our talent, other talent with differentiated shows. It's, it won't be just a replicate service. It'll be a much different service with a lot of other things attached to it. Got it. There's also greater focus, I think, on the directionality of the universe subscriber declines. I think some green shoots in recent quarters from some of the major distributors in terms of the stability. Yeah ... that they're potentially seeing, but also increasingly maybe some concern on skinny bundle fragmentation. Can you maybe just talk a little bit about your networks and how they're positioned? The green shoots are very exciting. I mean, I think Charter in particular, you know. We have modeled for sort of, you know, decline, industry-wide decline. If that moderates, that will be good for what we've planned for. Right now there's some indications that we may see some moderation to that, as you point out. As it relates to the bundles, most of the skinny bundles are focused on news and sports, and we are in all of those bundles that have been built out as part of our, with our networks because we are heavily news and sports. I do think, you know, candidly, entertainment, you know, is. Those networks have some distribution risk over time, the preponderance of our, not only our content, but the revenue attached to those services is higher than it is for our entertainment services. We feel like we're in a very good position to be as part of the skinny bundles evolve, especially around news and sports, we'll be part of them. As a portfolio of networks, is there an interest or, I guess, a focus on establishing minimum thresholds based on the tiering of sports and news relative to some of the entertainment networks that you? Well, those. There are minimum thresholds in the industry now that exist. You know, I won't talk about individual negotiations, but yeah, we certainly would like to maintain certain levels of minimum thresholds and work. Most of the distributors are working with the programmers on that. It's not just us. I mean, you know, it's an industry-wide thing, so. Makes sense. Again, we've been able to be part of all that. Got it. Quickly, you mentioned political. Can you maybe just talk about, from an advertising perspective, how you think that shapes out as we head into the second half of 2026 and how you're positioned to potentially benefit from that? Yeah. Well, MS obviously and CNBC both, you know, could serve in that role. We don't get... A lot of political advertising is very local. We get some national political advertising, mostly around advocacy and, props and other things that are up for vote. What we do get is a halo around ratings. That, that is good for the entirety of our, for the entirety of our advertising sales unit. Ratings around for, MS in particular in the even years, has typically a nice spike to it, and we're seeing that early on. We saw it, we saw it around the State of the Union. We saw it around certainly the election last November, and we saw it just Tuesday night where MS was the fifth-rated network in all of television, regardless of distribution mechanism, with 2 primaries in Texas and a few other states. We feel like we're on a very good trajectory there. Great. In our last couple of minutes, I just wanted to ask more around the M&A and strategic considerations that you've highlighted, you know, during your analyst day and on your earnings call. There have been some small acquisitions already made. How are you thinking about M&A going forward in terms of the philosophy of what you might be looking for and, you know, just in terms of size and opportunity set and- We will be disciplined and opportunistic. We do, as I said, you know, our balance sheet is really important to us. We wanna maintain the strong balance sheet that we have. We come from a very disciplined background at Comcast. Anand Kini, who's here in the room with us, is our COO and CFO. We come from a very disciplined background, and we're gonna maintain that. That's one. We're not looking to... Second is we will invest in these 4 verticals. Our criteria will be, does it help expand 1 of those 4 or more of those 4 verticals? That will be an important filter for us. Finally, returning money to shareholders is important. You know, when we announced our dividend this week and the authorization for share buyback, I think we've put our money where our mouth is on that. Great. I think that's all the time we have. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you all very much. Appreciate it.