We are very happy to be here again. Kick off the day for us. We got Mr. David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery. Thank you for being here. It's great to be here. Good to see you guys. Thanks for being here, David. Let's start big picture first. Now that you have officially one year under your belt, full ownership and control of the WarnerMedia assets, where do you think you had the most positive influence on the enterprise so far? What are your key priorities from here? First, I think we really have begun to have our real bearings around this business. It's really a diversified media company, which is our strength. The first nine months was: What businesses do we own? What's the right structure for those businesses? How many people should be there? There was a lot of discussion about synergy. We really were focused on how do we build a company for the future? What should HBO look like? What should Warner Bros. Television look like? Get a leadership team in there running each of these businesses to drive scale. We're a storytelling company. In each case, get more people spending time with our stories and our content. What's the right structure for in-investment and spending? Have a real leadership team running each of these businesses. We ended the year with a real team in charge of our gaming, a strong team in charge of our gaming business with command and control. We have Warner Bros. Television, which is a great. We're the largest maker of content in the world, with over 110 shows. Shrinking, Ted Lasso, Abbott Elementary. We make most of the high-quality content. How do we really take advantage of that? Drive all the value of our traditional business. We had two businesses that were really facing challenge. You know, one of the things that I've learned over the last 18 years of running a public company is it's hard to run a company successfully when you have a real bleeder, when you have a business that's losing money, and you don't have your hands around it. You're making a lot of money in your other businesses, but then you have this hole. We've had it before at Discovery, where we spent too much money on sports rights somewhere. How do we fill that? We had two. We had HBO Max that was losing a lot of money, and we had the motion picture business that was a great business for Warner for 25 years, but now it's losing a lot of money. In addition to just how do we run each of these businesses to drive free cash flow and EBIT and how do we create the right creative culture at each of these businesses is how do we focus on these two businesses? Because, you know, if we Which we've done now. you know, HBO Max, which will be Max on the 23rd, was profitable $50 million last quarter. It will be profitable in the U.S. this year, a year ahead of schedule. I think that's a huge deal for us. It's a huge advantage. We have more TV, motion picture content, more original than probably anybody. Now we have a director streaming business that's making money. Two is this whole strategy of putting motion pictures on a streaming service. One, it didn't work. It didn't reduce churn. It didn't increase subscribers, but it also reduced the quality of the product. When people thought it was going on a streaming service, it wasn't the same. It was like they were going out for the basketball team, but no one was gonna see it. They weren't gonna be a scorecard on a Thursday or a Friday. The quality of the movies that were done were really not that good. We've wound out of that now. You'll see The Flash, you'll see Barbie. We have Meg 2, Dune 2, which is fabulous. We have a good team now at the motion picture business. They're working really hard on these pictures. I think we've made the turn. As we go into this year now, all of our businesses are making money with the exception of motion picture, but I think we're making that turn now. We're well-positioned. I think that's that's a big deal. Real leadership with real focus. Two is one company. Warner Bros., and Time Warner was always run as independent entities. We're not there yet, but running this as one company is really powerful. When we launch House of the Dragon, we could have a dragon going across 30 channels in the U.S., where we reach 30% of America. You know, during the baseball playoffs, the dragon was running across the field. We have Shaq and Barkley talking about the stuff that we're doing. Using this globally, what are our... We're probably the biggest marketing company in the world with all of our channels around the world. Using this company as one company. Every week we have three meetings, one with all the creative people from each of the businesses. That never happened. My direct report staff, all the businesses together. What's everyone doing? How can we work together? Who's having a problem? Did you have this problem before? How could we help each other? The third is a business operational meeting, which is where are we on free cash flow and EBITDA? Fight to get these businesses back to their really strong businesses, get them back to making money with real diligence and focus, and then run this as one company. We're not there yet on all of this, but I think that's the power of Warner Bros. Discovery. If you think back from the time when you announced the deal two years ago, I remember it was right after our conference two years ago, like this week. The market was in love with streaming stories and money losers and bleeders, as you'd say. How much of the market's rethink of these businesses has led you to where you got to? Were you moving into this business already thinking that these models were broken, and you needed to, you know, revisit the HBO Max story? Well, when we did this deal, when I was talking to John Stankey, you know, we don't see the future, you know. At that point, everything was about streaming. We were looking over, the thought was Netflix had made it. They had made it across the lake. They'd built the house. Right. Disney had made it, and they were building their house. Right. That we were kind of stuck in the middle, and together we could be the 3rd. We also assumed three years ago that those streaming services would have another 100 million or 150 million subscribers, and that our biggest challenge woul d be, you know, we probably have 35%- 40% of the great IP in the world. How quickly can we get it all together so we can prove that we're the 3rd? Maybe our biggest issue would be that we're late, and they're going to run away. Well, here we are three years later, or even when we closed our deal, it was pretty clear that the world had changed. Yeah. They weren't growing anymore in any meaningful way. The marketplace was a lot harder. All of our expectations about how easy it was gonna be to grow were wrong. Having said that, there's a real positive to us, which is that they're not 100 million or 150 million subscribers ahead of us. We have a scale service with HBO Max, which will be Max, that's about 100 million homes. We have great quality content. Before the market said anything, we did. We saw it completely differently. We took a lot of flak, but we said, "This makes no sense. There's too much. The movies don't work on the streaming service. There's too much spending. The investment in the streaming service is too high. There's an issue with pricing of the streaming services. We're gonna act. We're gonna build a streaming service that is profitable." HBO was profitable from 2015- 2019. Made about $2.5 billion. We have the best quality content curated in a way that people love it. It was losing a lot of money. We really said, "We're gonna go at this a different way." It's not gonna be how much, it's gonna be how good. We had the luxury of looking at what was on the service. A lot of it wasn't being monetized or wasn't being viewed. We went on this aggressive journey of saying, "We can turn this bleeder around and make this a great... what it deserves to be. Highest quality content that's loved and profitable." I think now what you're seeing is that, you know, it's, as I said, it's hard to run a business when you're losing $2 billion or $3 billion. It's worse than debt. Right. If you have debt, you could pay it off. When you have a business that's losing money, it can lose more money. Right. you gotta get your bearings, and we've done that across the board. Maybe just following up on that, I mean, you've already mentioned the earlier ahead of schedule in terms of reaching profitability in the U.S. on Max and set to launch again, relaunch next week. How do you balance the need to invest behind the platform and versus finding that right balance to make sure that you're hitting your profit goals? Well, in, you know, there are a number of markets we're in. The U.S., we're really in. We're launching this new product next week. We're very bullish on it. We have all of the Discovery library, home, food. We've seen with discovery+ that the churn is very low. People are spending a lot of time with it. If we put it together, our thesis, as part of the thesis of this transaction, is that we have a, a product that enough content that more people in the family will be using it, and there'll be more engagement. The biggest problem with all the streaming services is churn. We're really gonna be driving both with the robust amount of content that we have in the U.S., together with the product itself, that will help us, we think, reduce churn, 'cause we'll be able to reach customers more effectively. We also have other artillery. You know, this is really a war. It's a very disrupted market. A lot of what's going on makes no sense. Big overspend. Pricing of the products are too low. Imagine you were back 30 years ago, and you wanted to watch CBS, and you had to download and buy something. You wanted to watch ABC, you had to download and buy something. You wanted to watch MTV. It's not a good consumer experience. A lot of that is gonna change, I believe, you know, over the next couple of years. We're gonna try and push toward that change because we have a lot of great content. In that war, a big piece of the artillery is the great content that we have. The fact that HBO can generate with House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, Succession, White Lotus, Euphoria, can generate a Sunday night cultural experience that is only matched by must-see TV at NBC. Those services over a few days were generating 20 million, 30 million, 40 million people. Musk called me the other day, and he was talking about the explosion on Twitter, you know. We have something very unique. Shared experience together with great content, but we also have the additional artillery of sports and news. We have our sports, and if we wanna put it on our streaming platforms, we can. We have news, we can. Live sports, live news. You know, as we go into this war. We have all of that artillery with us. Outside the U.S., you know, in a market like India, that's challenging, you know, if there's a market we weren't gonna go in for a year or two, or the market that's been really difficult to make money, if there's someone there that wants to give us a lot of money to get all of our content in the short term, that's a big win for us. You know, we're about driving free cash flow and driving value. When we sell all of our content into a market, it's powerful. One, we generate real economics, but it reminds me of when we were in the regional sports business with Chuck Dolan when I was at NBC. You know, you get all the sport from, let's say, you're in, you're in Cleveland, and you get your sport from the Browns, and you get your sport from, you know, from, you get, from. You get baseball and basketball, the Cavaliers. I ran a business like that when I was at NBC, and at the end of the three years when your deal is up, we were making a lot of money. When your deal comes up, the league turns around, and they say, "We're either gonna take it back and do our own regional sports network, or we're gonna raise your price by the $100 million or $200 million that you're charging us." In markets where we decide to sell all of our HBO content, I think it gives us It sees the market with all the great content that we have, and HBO's never been stronger. We're not doing, for the most part, we're doing a few long-term deals in markets where we don't really think we wanna go into for the long term. Mostly we're doing it so that in a few years, when we want it, we could take it back and go, or we could charge more. Can you talk about churn as one of the issues in this model? Pricing's another issue. Talk a bit, how you think about HBO Max Max pricing, and then the build-out of the ad tier, which I know you've had success at the old Discovery, you know, discovery+ launch. How do you think about pricing and maybe the gap between ads and no ads? Our first objective is we have about 100 million homes. We have 97 million, 98 million homes. We have meaningful scale in a lot of the markets. 2/3 of the markets we haven't launched yet. Number one, we have a product that's well-liked, well-respected. We have real scale. Let's get this transition in place and do no harm. Let's emerge with our new brand. Let's have people understand it. We have a very strong technological platform that gives us a lot of advantages. We didn't have a recommendation engine. When people wanted to renew HBO Max, and they gave us a credit card, and it didn't work, we couldn't even reach them. Like, there was all kinds of. We didn't have child bearings, kids bearings. If you... We had great kids content. First thing is, let's not worry about price. Let's over deliver on quality, and let's get more people in the home. Let's get the transition effective. Let's get our 100 million or so homes. Let's get people really enjoying and loving the product. More people in the home using it. Kids back on the platform, recognizing we have DC, we have Harry Potter. We got the best documentary library. Take a beat 'cause if churn comes down, which we will be driving, there will be very significant growth just on reduction of churn. Generically, I think all of the overall pricing for the streaming services are, is irrational. You know, if you're in the sports business, if Goodell added a football game, he doesn't charge less. He adds a football game, he charges more. The streaming services doubled or tripled the offering of what they were doing. They reduced price. People are paying a lot less for content now than they were. If there were 50 million people that liked premium five years ago on basic cable, they were paying a lot more money for HBO, Showtime, Starz, Epix, Encore, than they are right now for these streaming services, and the investment in content is, you know, 3x or 4x. That'll all work out. The key for us, how do we create a product that people love? How do we get more people feeling nourished and loving that product? I think we're really onto something with what we have once you have that, the ability to either raise price or provide sport and other product that they either spend more money on or that further enriches their experience on the platform, that's a winner. Another big reason why people seem to love Max and HBO Max is the vast library that you guys have on the service. Hit titles, Friends, Big Bang, clearly driving a lot of engagement, I would imagine. As you think about the need to reevaluate the strategy going forward with the relaunch, can you just talk about how important some of those shows are to be exclusive to Max versus if you can license them out to other people? I think one of the real advantages of this company is we have a lot of content that people know everywhere in the world. If you're sitting down for dinner at eight o'clock anywhere in the world, and somebody says Harry Potter, they say, "I gotta go." Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones. These are assets. Hanna-Barbera, Looney Tunes. These are assets, you know, that are really distinguished. You know, It's a very different thing than launching a series and then trying to get people to know what it is and building it up. It's a big advantage. You know, for us, we have to recognize what are the jewels. Those are for us. The things that we can see, the great thing about coming into this business later is we can now Monday-morning quarterback. We can look at HBO Max. They put the entire library on there. What are people watching? We could see that, you know, five shows are 90% of what people are watching on HBO Max. If we put it to 20 shows, it's 98% of what people are watching. When we see they buy the service, where do they go quickly? They go to, like, three or four of our series. We're not giving those to anybody else, you know. The distinguishing factor between us and a lot of our peers is we have great content that people love, and that's gonna be, I think, what gets us, you know, with a platform that really works together with a shared experience. We believe something different than Our belief system is that powerful storytelling. We're just a storytelling company. Great storytelling really works when it's a shared experience. That's why we're all in on the motion picture side. You know, we don't want our entire slate on the streaming service. You know, $1 billion, $2 billion worth of content. Put it in the theater, have that great shared experience, put it in PVOD, have people buy it, and then when we put it on the streaming service, it's much more powerful. We also have the only place for that shared experience that I talked about. I think that we'll sell a lot of stuff, but we need to hold on to the stuff that really makes us different, because you can't buy that. Can we dig a bit more on the sports and news, you know, angle here? You've said you're gonna put it on at some point. What are the gaining factors for you, sports and news on streaming? How does that decision relate to also your linear business, right? Which is complicated. What are the gaining factors that you're thinking about before you make this transition? We're already using sport in different ways in Latin America and in Europe. We don't have the same model in every country. In a number, we're offering the sport right on the platform itself. In other areas, we're offering the sport as an add-on. In some markets like the U.K., where we haven't launched yet, we have a very big sport service with BT. We find that offering the sport is very helpful. The more people go to a service, the lower the churn. We know that there are super fans of sports. We think that it'll be a real helper to us. It has been in Europe. We wanna get this product launched. We wanna get to know exactly how people use it. You know, most of HBO Max, people are watching at night. It's appointment viewing. It's lean in. Most of the Discovery library, which is huge, is lean back. People are watching that while they're doing homework with their kids, while they're cooking, while they're on Zoom calls. You know, how does this whole thing work? We'll be then talking to our users, and then we'll decide how do we deploy news and sports. We'll be back soon with that, you know. What we need to do is we have a real theory of the case about how this could be a real weapon and a real advantage for us- Right. -in helping to create a better product. We first wanna see and talk to the users 'cause ultimately they're gonna decide. You talked about this. There's a theory in the case that sports fans wanna watch content in one place, and you mentioned turning on different apps. If someone came to you and wanted to build a sports and news-led skinnier bundle, is that something that interests you out of the channels you have? It seems like the vMVPD bundles are too big. Someone needs to narrow them down and skinny them out for people who are not leaking content all over. Look, one of the challenges in the business right now is, as I said earlier, that the difficulty for a consumer in aggregating the content that they love, entertainment, nonfiction content, sports content, everyone's googling, where is it? How do I get it? Where. You know, it's not rational, and it's not really sustainable. It's not sustainable 'cause it's not a good consumer experience. It's not sustainable 'cause there are a lot of people in this business that are just losing too much money. You know, that. How do you keep, you know, how do you keep doing that? Consolidation is one answer. I think that's unlikely to be a big answer. First, from a regulatory perspective, it's not easy. It takes time. This industry is changing so quickly. Saying, "I'm gonna take two years, and then I'm gonna emerge with a new set of assets," you know, or 2.5 years, you know, who knows what the world looks like? I think there's a lot of risk in from a regulatory or even a time. There should be a consolidation. I think it's more likely to happen in the repackaging and marketing of products together. That's what really, I think, makes sense. We have to, as an industry, reach that point. For me, it seems very clear that if we were to package this great product that we have with others, you know, if we were to wake up tomorrow, and in each market, you know, if we're the number one, two, or three product, if we were marketed with two or three for a specific price, it would be great for consumers. It would probably reduce churn. We'd both be marketing one product. It would provide a meaningful consumer experience, not just on price, but that, okay, I now have a bigger package of content that's broader. I think the two ways it could happen is we could do it, the content owners in markets or more broadly across regions can do it, whether we do it this year or in three years. I think eventually something like that will happen. If we don't do it to ourselves, I think it'll be done to us. You know, it'll be Amazon that does it. It'll be Apple that does it. It'll be Roku that does it. They're already starting to do it, and it makes sense. A lot of people will go to some of those platforms as an easier curation of finding what they like. I'm curious what. One more on sports, just in terms of, you've already touched on it, the streaming platform is clearly global for you guys and the reach that you have. How important is that when you think about future negotiations of sports rights? If you wanna touch on specifically NBA, but just maybe even broadly thinking about future renewals. Look, sports is a little bit different for us than every other business. In every other business, we're the owner. We're the owner. We own DC. We own Harry Potter. We own Lord of the Rings for Motion Pictures. We own Game of Thrones. We're the owner. Anything we build and the value that we build around the world, you know, whether it's on the screen or whether it's in merchandising, belongs to us and maybe someone who's partnering with us in that. Sports is a rental business. We all got into that business because in many cases, you didn't make money on the sport, but when you put it together with your whole package, in any market we have 10 or 12 channels, then we have three sports channels. When you put it all together, owning football and owning all the tennis and all, and the handball and the Olympics, you know, overall, we make more money. You now have to look and see, you know, where does it make sense and where doesn't. I think we're in a good position. We have March Madness through the 30s, and it's a very good deal for us. It's good money. We have baseball. That's a, you know, that's a very good deal for us. Good deal, longer term. We have hockey through the 30s. That's a good deal. You know, March Madness is kind of a monster in a good way. You know, we have 70%, 80% of those games. People are watching them in groups. For the month of March, you know, you need to be with us. We have those digital rights also. I like the NBA. The NBA is doing very well for us. We just gotta be careful not to be silly. The good news is, Adam's very smart. They have great IP. There's gonna be a rationalization of regional sports networks. That'll free up a lot. We have something that's really unique for anybody that's in sports. We're global. Any league that wants to get more global drive, we're probably the largest global company in the world, and we have sports you know, in all of Latin America and Europe. We also have Bleacher Report and House of Highlights. For people under 30, we have 150 million people under 30 coming to us regularly with House of Highlights and Bleacher Report. That's great for the NBA. That's great for baseball. That's a demo they don't have, and they're hanging out on Bleacher and on House of Highlights. That's a big, you know, that's a big winner. We produce great content. The best sports show on television right now is with Barkley and Shaq and Ernie, you know. Our ratings overall are much better, and we get all of this extra rating going in. You know, those that are in business with us right now, domestically and around the world, they're very happy with us because our sports audience is growing, and we're nourishing, you know, those sports brands. I'm hopeful that we'll get a deal done with Adam. It'll probably look a little different. When we did the Premier League in the U.K., it ended up being a very good deal for us because we wanted it. It was 500 plus games. On renewal, we ended up with 500 games. Amazon ended up with, you know, another maybe 15 or 25 games. Our price was fine. We ended up with a very good deal to renew. Amazon got a bunch of games, which was good for Amazon. We have a really good relationship with them. We did a deal to produce the games for Amazon, and then we promote from our platform, if you wanna see those games, we have 90% of the games, 95%. You wanna see those games, go over to Amazon. Amazon would then promote, for the other games, "Come to us." We're working way too hard to drive free cash flow at this company. We got our Max product. It was profitable. It's gonna be profitable this year in the U.S. We're generating real free cash flow even in a very difficult market. Sequentially, we're seeing some real improvement, but it's not good. We are seeing improvement. We'll end this year less than 4 x levered, generating real free cash flow, and we're gonna protect that. This company is a real free cash flow driver. The next year, we expect that we'll be investment grade. We'll be somewhere between 2.5x and 3 x levered. We're modeling this not assuming that we're in some kind of a great market. Then we got real optionality. We own all of our content, news, sports. We got 35%-40% of the great IP in the world. We don't have a bleeder. Our balance sheet is looking good. We're facing a tough environment. I mean, I was saying earlier, advertising market is a challenge. The pricing of the marketplace is imperfect. The fact that there's multiple products the consumers need to find their way on. We all are building individual products, all of that is inclement weather. You have the rain, you know, from the bad advertising market. You got the wind coming in because we all have to build platforms. It's not rational. All of a sudden, you're getting a little bit of sleet, you know, on the side. It's inclement weather. We're now on the porch. We're not losing money in any of our businesses, and we're gonna hang in here now, make our numbers, fight to drive our free cash flow down, de-lever, get our product launched domestically in a number of markets around the world. I think some of those things are gonna begin to rationalize. With a company that has real command and control, as sun comes out on any one of those things, we're gonna really, I think, have an opportunity to take advantage of that. Can I add to this storm metaphor? There's also the lightning of cord cutting, which is running at a pretty high level. Right. Yesterday, we asked Lachlan Murdoch, do you think companies that leak their content, the best content over the top, you could say NFL games leaked into bundles at $3 a month, versus those companies like yours that have held rights back into the ecosystem, do you think there's gonna be a differential growth rate in terms of affiliate fees, rewarding companies that actually have kept their best content in the system? Will we see that at some point? You know, it's hard to tell. Right now it looks like the entire marketplace is saying, "We need to do some leakage. Everybody calm down. There's gonna be a little bit of leakage. Everyone's gonna have to do it." We haven't done it yet. You look around, you know. There was an announcement yesterday that some of the NBA games are gonna be on the streaming service. More and more you see a lot of the NFL games showing up. Yeah. Will the economic consequences to that long term? I don't know. On the one hand you would think that would be. There'd be some negative economic consequence to that, you know, in a conference room. On the other hand, the power of sport has gotten bigger. Whatever the whatever the buyer paid to have access to that sport, the actual power of that sport has gone up, you know. The importance of that sport has gone up. It's gonna be a balance of those two. You know, It's out of the gate. Right. You know, you know, it seemed novel before. Now the NFL games are being carried on the streaming service. You have a playoff game this winter. Now You know, so it's moving in that direction. It's moving in that direction 'cause there's a lot of people that are under 25 that don't have that aren't signing up for free to air and cable. That's where it's going. The economic consequence will be a balance. The argument will be, you should pay me on one hand. The rights owner will say, "You should pay me more because this content is so powerful now that even though I'm pushing some of it to my streaming service, it's even more potent." The other side is gonna say, "Wait a minute. I'm not getting something exclusive, so I'm getting something less." I don't know how that ends up. I'm curious, just to follow up on the advertising rain going on right now. You had your upfront presentation. Just wondering if you can talk about the recovery and just the general tone. You've clearly alluded to it on the earnings call too, but just any updates as part of the upfront presentations that you guys have had. You know, it's just starting, so it's hard to tell. We have seen sequential improvement. You know, all the numbers that we gave you in our earnings, we feel, you know, we feel good about in terms of where we are. It's hard to predict where the upfront will go. I think it'll end up being better for us, really for two reasons. We made a strategic decision last year. The average CPM in the broadcast market is $65-$68. The average CPM of the Warner Bros. Discovery assets was $30. You know, before The argument before was, "We don't have live sports. We don't have live news. Our reach isn't big enough. That's why we're gonna pay $68 for a game show, and we're only gonna give you $30, you know, for a show that gets a bigger rating. When we put the company together, we said, "We're bigger. We're, you know, we're bigger than everybody else, and we have news, sports." All the arguments about why the CPM should be lower actually have changed because we now have a product that's very attractive to advertisers and very attractive to consumers because we reach everybody. Historically, I've always believed that price is the way to grow. When we went into the upfront, we said, "Since there's such a big pricing differential, we'll take less, and we want more price." That's what we did. We got a lot more price, but we took a lot less in the upfront, which means in a good market, and for whatever, 10 years, there was a very good scatter market. Scatter was up 10%-20%. There was plenty of volume. We would've been winner-winner. The scatter market was weak, weaker than we'd ever seen. You saw in our numbers, others were down 9%, we were down 14%. Others were 10%, we were down, you know, 14%. Part of that is the fact that we made a strategic decision to drive price and be more exposed to scatter. Now as we go into this market, we have the ability to change our strategy, to take more in the market than take less. More importantly, we... Because of that, we ended up having to take a lot of very low... We had to take a lot of DR and very, you know, low filler inventory. I think as we go into this, I think we got some upside. We also, unfortunately, have pretty weak CAGRs when you come back and you do quarter-over-quarter. You know, we got hit by, you know, a pretty challenging storm. And the quality of our content is going up. We still produce a huge amount of original content for food, home, discovery, TLC, and we're getting a very good reception in the market, and we have sport that's very good, so we'll see. I think that we, I think that we have a very good hand. We're offering something this year that advertisers are very excited about. For the first time ever, you can buy spots inside of Max. That community effect that we talked about on The Last of Us or House of the Dragon or Succession. You know, Mercedes, I think it was Mercedes. Mercedes bought a big package to be the 30-second spot in front of Succession because it's a community experience, and there's uniform excitement that after 50 years, we could buy spots in HBO. We've taken Bleacher and House of Highlights, that young demo for in sport. CNN has the largest digital news business in the world. We have 150 million people that come to us. We go to the market with big on digital. Brand-new opportunity with HBO Max with a lot of excitement and a lot of fresh content and sport and news on our platform. I think the market will be the market, but I think that we should get back to outperforming. We underperformed this year. For all of my years at Discovery, we outperformed, and we're gonna fight really hard. I think we have the goods to outperform. Over the years at Discovery, you've always been a share gainer on ratings, and now some of the networks are pressured. Talk a bit about what you're seeing in terms of, you know, the ratings front, including CNN, and things that you think you can do to improve the ratings trajectory, the impression trajectory of linear networks. CNN is a little bit different. And the economic makeup of CNN is different. It's much more distribution fee driven than advertiser driven. And in fact, even when the ratings were good, the overall brand, the perception of the brand was left-lean. You know, if you looked We just, you know, this past week, there was a new survey that said the overall trust in America for CNN. What was the source? YouGov poll. YouGov poll YouGov poll was up 11 points. That's what we're going for. Our view is there's advocacy networks on either side that we have the best journalists in the world. We need to show both sides of every issue. If you went there after Roe v. Wade, you would turn to CNN, and there'd be someone to the left where this was the best day for them in 40 years. When you turn to the, you know, when the moderator turned to the right, it was the worst day in 40 years. We had both all the time. Licht is working really hard. We, all the leadership at CNN is working hard. Republicans are back on the air. The Republicans weren't on the air. You know, during the McCarthy hearings for those four days, we had 75 Republicans on the air. 41 went on us before they went on Fox News. The reason is, as I've said to a number of them, and Chris has said to them, they're not gonna get one more vote on Fox News. They already got that. CNN should be the place that people come for the best version of the truth and for journalism. That's what we're building. We announced yesterday our new nine o'clock. Chris is rebuilding the network. It's gonna take some time, but advertisers are interested in CNN again. They don't wanna be part of an advocacy network. We've had meeting after meeting, and they say, "We're with you. America needs this, and our aim is true." Advertisers don't wanna be part of an advocacy network. Those are great businesses, but they do wanna be part of a news network. That's kind of in its own category, and we're making real progress on that. With our networks, we've got Kathleen Finch, and I think we, you know, we're focusing hard on how do we program food, home, discovery. You know, we got great brands that people love. We've got great affinity, and that's what we're gonna be pushing for. I agree with you that over a period of time, particularly in the U.S., you're seeing that the traditional business is in secular decline. It's less so outside the U.S., but it's still in decline. We're realists, so we built that all into our models. We have better command and control of our content costs because most of our content is not scripted, so they're 6 month-12 month cycle. We're still doing 600 hours of original content on a lot of our channels. If the market got a lot worse, we could reduce it. The level of sports content that we're committed to domestically around the world is a pretty small portion, and we haven't done any deals right now that have big step-ups. We have pretty good visibility and pretty good pliability. I want to switch gears a little bit in the time we have left. DC Comics, you mentioned it at the beginning, clearly a very important IP for the entire company. It's been a focus for the owners of the Warner Bros. assets over the years, to try to replicate the success of Marvel. Can you just maybe expand upon why you think this time is different given the moves that you've made so far? Well, what we try to do is get really great leadership. The philosophy of our company is we don't want people to go to meetings. We want the people to do the work. Mm-hmm. When I was meeting with James Gunn, and he was writing Superman, and he had written Guardians of the Galaxy, which is now a big hit for Marvel, which we're happy about 'cause Gunn wrote that movie and directed that movie. I'm looking at him and I'm thinking to myself, "Why isn't this guy running Marvel?" He grew up his whole life with DC. His whole life with these DC characters. Marvel. He knows every one of them. They're his family. He just wrote Superman, which I read. This is the guy we want. Everybody wants to work with him. We got a 10-year plan. Superman is written. We're early now in casting. He and Peter Safran are the real deal. We worked really hard on Flash and Black Adam. Flash is a fantastic movie. It's coming out in six weeks. We like the slate coming up now. We think we made the turn on the motion picture business. We'll see if we're right. It's a tough business. Now we have movies that we like. We have movies that when we test, they're testing really well, and we worked hard on them. I have great belief in DC. We've greenlit a number of projects, and I think it's one of the assets that was really underutilized and underdeveloped in the company. We also have this philosophy at the company of no content before its time. The Hogwarts game, that was set to launch 10 months before, but it wasn't ready. Let's get it right. Spend more money, get it right. We launched it, and we generated over $1.3 billion with the fastest growing game this year. We don't wanna put a movie out or a game out unless we think it's our best work. Even if we do that, half the time or 2/3 of the time, it's not gonna work. That's the new cultural philosophy of the company. We're a storytelling company. The best creatives fight to make our content the best it could be. Next question, in terms of level of content investment. There's a cycle now of peak investment for everyone now it's coming down. Do you worry, as you slow your content investment, that you have less shots on goal and therefore less hits at Warners and HBO? How do you think about the hit ratio with lower spend in general? Well, I wouldn't say it is lower spend. We would spend a lot more if we thought we can buy things that were gonna generate value for us. This is all we do. We're the, you know, we're the only media company that this is all that we do. We're not in the phone business. We're not in the broadband business. We're just in the storytelling business. Right now, Casey has never been stronger. You go back to the days of The Sopranos and The Wire, you know, with House of the Dragon and The White Lotus and Succession and The Last of Us and Euphoria, we've never been stronger. We got And Just Like That coming in six weeks. We got a great series that was written by the guy from Euphoria that's coming out. We're driving DC, we're driving The Lord of the Rings. We do believe we're gonna bring Harry Potter to HBO, but we also have a lot of original content. If you talk to our creative leaders, they would say they were over-served. There was this huge push, just green light more stuff. We need more and more and more and more. We're now under the philosophy. We're not gonna say no to anything that we think could be great. When we level set that, we're actually spending a lot less because we were over spun. Maybe just to wrap it up, bring it all together, any surprises that you think investors should be focused on for the upcoming year? Or as we think about the future of the company now that you have that one year under your belt, anything that you think investors are not currently focused on or need to give you more credit on? Look, I think that this is our year to perform. I do think that we got ourselves out of the storm, and we're on the deck. We're assuming that it's not gonna improve at all. We gotta make our numbers. I think the fact that if we could turn this, if Flash and Barbie and a couple of our movies start to work, I'll be sitting down with you and I'll be able to say, every business we have is making money. We're the most diversified media company in the world. I think our gaming business is one that you're gonna see more and more. Every other media company has licensed their IP to a gaming company. We own our IP. I think you're starting to see the benefit of that. The benefit will probably be a lot more in the next two to three years, because the secret to the Harry Potter game is that people are spending time inside of it. The old worlds was you do a movie or series, and then you do a game. What is a game? A game, you know, before was something you play, but a game is starting to be the place that you hang out. Where is gonna be the real value in that IP chain? Is it gonna be the Harry Potter series, or is it gonna be the game where you could spend all day be a character and hang out in the Harry Potter world or hang out in Batman's world or hang out in the Game of Thrones world? We own all of that. I think profitable businesses, profitable streaming service, mine our IP, and get the best storytellers in our company. Do what Warner has always done best, tell great stories. I think I'll be sitting here with you in the next few years, and our multiple's gonna be going up, and we're gonna look like a great company for the future. Thank you, David. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.