Moderator (00:00):
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Warner Bros. Discovery first quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participant lines are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Additionally, please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded.
(00:19)
I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Peter Lee, senior vice president, Investor Relations. You may now begin.
Peter Lee (00:30):
Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for Q1 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me today from Warner Bros. Discovery's management is David Zaslav, president and chief executive officer, Gunnar Wiedenfels, our chief financial officer, and JB Perrette CEO and president, Global Streaming and Games.
(00:51)
This afternoon, we issued our earnings release, shareholder letter, and trending schedule. And these materials can be found on our website at ir. wbd.com. Today's presentation will include forward-looking statements that we make pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Security Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements about the benefits of the proposed transaction between WBD and Paramount Skydance, future financial and operating results, the combined company's plans, objectives, expectations, and intentions, and other statements that are not historical facts. Such statements are based upon the current beliefs and expectations of WBD's management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties outside of our control that could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations.
(01:50)
For additional information on factors that could affect these expectations, please see the company's filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, including, but not limited, to the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and its reports on Form 10-Q and Form 8-K.
(02:09)
WBD is not under any obligation and expressly disclaims any obligation to update, alter, or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by applicable law.
(02:32)
In addition, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the closest GAAP financial measure can be found in our earnings release and in our trending schedules, which can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website.
(02:50)
I will turn the call over to David for some brief remarks after which we will take your questions. Before doing so, I ask that you limit your questions to topics related to our Q1 results and related business and financial topics. As noted in our shareholder letter, management will not be taking questions regarding the proposed Paramount Skydance transaction. And with that, I'll turn it over to David.
David Zaslav (03:16):
I'd like to start by taking a moment to remark on the great life and extraordinary legacy of Ted Turner, who was sadly lost today. The words giant and visionary get tossed around loosely in our industry, but Ted Turner truly embodied both. Ted was a generational entrepreneur, someone who believed deeply in the power of ideas and in telling stories and building platforms that could inform, connect, and inspire people around the globe. His global vision for our industry was way before its time and presciently powerful.
(03:57)
And alongside Ted, through much of that journey was John Malone, whose partnership, strategic vision, and shared belief in the power of cable helped build and strengthen many of these iconic businesses over decades. In many ways, it was a full circle moment for John and me when Warner Bros. Discovery came together in 2022. And we had the opportunity to work with the great businesses and brands that Ted imagined and built. Ted was so happy. From CNN to TNT and TNT Sports to TVS, Cartoon Network, and Turner-classic movies, Ted built businesses that changed the world. Decades later, they remained vibrant and central to who Warner Bros. Discovery is today. His vision and spirit are very much alive in all the work we do.
(04:54)
Ted inspired a generation and inspired so many young hopefuls like me to believe in the dream and join the cable business. With Ted, everything was possible. And along the way, he gave us all courage. He gave us a great life and meaning. He changed the world. He was a great American, and I loved him. May his memory be a blessing.
(05:24)
Now, turning to the quarter. We're excited to share the results of another strong quarter for Warner Bros. Discovery, marked by excellent progress in delivering on each pillar of our strategy and propelling our ongoing transformation.
(05:42)
I'd like to start by highlighting how our team continues to translate the investments we've made over the last four plus years into entertainment people love and results shareholders expect. Beginning with streaming, in Q1, we introduced HBO Max to important new markets while also delivering high quality content that engaged the existing subscribers and attracted new ones. We successfully launched HBO Max in the UK, Germany, Italy, and Ireland. While our Sky licensing relationship has long made WBD content available in these significant European markets, for HBO Max to be a truly global and scaled streaming service, it was imperative that we build a direct relationship with these audiences. We prepared diligently and invested aggressively to ensure success, and we delivered.
(06:39)
Thanks to these successful launches, we've now meaningfully exceeded our guidance of over 140 million total subscribers by the end of Q1. We have strong and accelerating momentum and expect to finish the year with more than 150 million subscribers globally. And more importantly, we are seeing healthy acceleration in subscriber-related revenue growth, which we expect will pick up real pace in Q2 and through the rest of the year. We believe the key to strong subscriber and subscriber-related revenue growth is delivering content that audiences love. And boy, do they love what they're getting on HBO Max today.
(07:25)
Thanks to the brilliance of the HBO team, Warner Bros. Pay 1 movies, Warner Bros. TV, one of the industry's best and strongest TV studios, and an industry-leading film and television library amassed over a century, HBO Max's content is thriving in a highly competitive market. Fresh off its Emmy and Golden Globe wins. The second season of The Pitt reinforced its place as a cultural phenomenon, averaging more than 20 million viewers an episode. And the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms proved one of the breakout TV hits of 2026, not just rewarding Game of Thrones fans, but bringing many viewers into that universe for the first time. With 36 million viewers per episode, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is among the most popular debut series in HBO History. In fact, HBO has never featured more active shows, averaging more than 20 million global viewers than it does right now, complimented by comedy hits like Rooster, limited series like DTF St. Louis, and an international local language series such as Like Water for Chocolate in Mexico and Maxima in Argentina. We've created an offering that is distinct, balanced, and earns a pricing premium through consistent excellence.
(08:55)
With Euphoria now back, a new season of House of the Dragon on the way, and the upcoming debuts of the television series, Lanterns, Stewart Fails to Save the Universe, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone on Christmas Day, we see nothing but strong growth ahead for HBO Max.
(09:16)
The second pillar of our strategy has been elevating our WB studios back to industry leadership. Since bringing WBD together, we've transformed WB Studios on nearly every level. Last year, those changes broke through creatively and financially. If there were any remaining questions about Warner Bros.' creative renaissance, they were answered unmistakably at this year's Academy Awards. Warner Bros. was recognized with 11 Oscars, including one battle after another, becoming Warner Bros.' first best picture winner in more than a decade, and the most Oscars in the studio's 103-year history. From the beginning, we committed to attracting and working with the world's best creative talent to tell culture-defining stories and to marketing and releasing those films in theaters. These Oscar wins and the string of Box Office successes in our Motion Picture Group validate our conviction. This year, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group will release 14 films, including Dune Part 2, Supergirl, Clay Face, Practical Magic 2, and Digger, starring Tom Cruise. We're slated to release up to 18 films in 2027, including Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum, Batman, and the Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow. And Warner Bros. Television continues to be one of Hollywood's most prolific independent TV suppliers with 80 plus active shows spanning more than 20 streamers from linear platforms.
David Zaslav (11:00):
As we are making strides in areas such as games and experiences where we believe we have meaningful unrealized opportunity ahead, we are well positioned to achieve our goal of at least 3 billion in annual WB Studios adjusted EBITDA. The work we've done to return our WB Studios to leadership has set the foundation for the company's next chapter. Finally, the third pillar of our strategy has been optimizing our global linear networks. Disruption in the linear television market has created well-known challenges. Faced with those challenges, our team has shown great resolve and ingenuity in keeping our network brands and content highly relevant. We're seeing the fruits of those efforts across sports, news, and general entertainment. We've significantly evolved our sports portfolio with a focus on breadth, value, and international exposure. During Q1, we increased linear viewership of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics by 50% compared to the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.
(12:07)
And more than double streaming hours and triple streaming viewers compared to Beijing in 2022. We had a record-breaking March Madness this year with the most watched men's national championship game ever broadcast on TNT sports. And we're off to a strong start with both the MLB regular season and the NHL playoffs. We're also seeing resilience in general entertainment networks. We continue to innovate and refine our content strategy. And in Q1, we saw a 16% sequential improvement in year-over-year general entertainment delivery trends versus Q4. Even excluding sports, networks like TLC and TBS grew primetime viewership by double-digit percentages versus the prior year. Increases were even more pronounced in news. The world has confronted a wave of recent disruption. As it has, CNN has proven again, it's where people go for news they trust, delivering 30% year-over-year growth in total minutes spent across platforms in Q1.
(13:19)
These strategic and operational successes all help set the stage for the next chapter in our transformation. In no event was more significant in Q1 than our reaching an agreement for Paramount Skydance to acquire WBD at a cash price of $31 per share. Our shareholders clearly agreed that this offer represents outstanding value. As two weeks ago, they voted to approve the sale to Paramount Skydance. We've said consistently that we're living through a period of historic disruption in media and entertainment. How content is made, how it's distributed, and how it's consumed is evolving with increasing velocity. When you look across Warner Brothers, Discovery today in studios, streaming, and global linear networks, each segment of our business is demonstrably more nimble and better positioned for future success than when Warner Brothers, Discovery was formed. That's a testament to the hard work and dedication of our talented team of 30,000 plus colleagues who have remained focused and relentless in pushing Warner Brothers, Discovery forward. With that, we'll now take your questions.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. Thank you. Your first question comes from Rich Greenfield with LightShed Partners. Your line is open.
Rich Greenfield (14:50):
Thanks for taking the question. JB, now that we've sort of finished the major European rollouts, and it feels like sort of your global rollouts are sort of now complete, I was just wondering, maybe get your observations HBO Max as a business and sort of where the product stands today. Anything you could sort of say about where you think the future of HBO Max is. And then just Disney and Josh D'Amaro this morning really highlighted the point that sports really has a growing importance of streaming platforms. It's why they want to keep ESPN inside of Disney. You all have a very different perspective on sports and streaming. It'd be helpful to understand what you see or your unique perspective.
JB (15:39):
Yeah. Thanks, Rich. It is an exciting moment. I think when we look at the four-year journey that we've been on, when we set out in 2022 and said, "We believed the world was going to go to the winners, were going to require a global footprint. You'd have a handful of big global streamers that could be successful. And we knew that we had to be one of those." And we worked tirelessly. We got obviously a world-class team together pulling from the best of the tech and the media world. We invested, and spent that first year redeveloping a whole new platform and product that was flexible and dynamic and allowed us to deliver high quality and consistent streams of all content types, including high concurrency things like the Olympics. We obviously went global. We were in about 40% of the TAM at the time. We're now more than double that.
(16:40)
And we kind of relentlessly, David, myself, Casey, and a group of us just iterated on the strategy and the positioning over sweating it every day, every week, every month. And ultimately, we made mistakes, plenty of mistakes along the way, but kept being led by both the customer feedback and the data, and transforming the service into this must watch service that people value because it does hit different and delivers on this better is better, not necessarily more is better premise. And then lastly, obviously, look, we're hugely beneficiaries of the incredible team that Casey and the entire WBD content creative leadership has put together with a content slate that has gotten better, broader, and more consistent 365 days a year throughout this journey. And so we sit here today, when we started this journey with sort of mid 90 million subs, we've added almost 50 million subs over that period. We were losing two billion.
(17:53)
We made a billion, four last year. You saw the results today growing increasingly double-digit on the bottom line. We're seeing the benefits of the operating leverage that we have start to really kick in as the growth on profits is really starting to accelerate as we look throughout the year. And so I think going forward, the great thing is we still have multiple different levers of growth, Rich, to your point. We're still nascent in some of these big markets. We have, as I said, stronger and stronger slates. Obviously going into 10 years of Potter is going to be a huge tailwind for us with I think the biggest streaming event certainly for us ever coming at the beginning of the year and over the next few years. So the content slate continues to strengthen. We're moving more and more wholesale subs into retail and the ARPU and the LTV of that is accretive and looks better.
(18:51)
Our ad sales business, particularly internationally, is still very nascent and growing. Our product, which we've talked about a lot, we've invested a lot to get it better, and it still has a lot of things that we're moving day-to-day to improve, and that will help engagement. And as you've often touted, the engagement and the churn metrics we're starting to see, particularly over the last couple of months, and as we look out for '26, are the best we've seen in the four years that we've been here. And so we're very excited about where we are. It's taken a lot of sweat, an incredible team effort to get us here, but we also see a great and promising future where the momentum's actually getting stronger as we look out across the year and into '20 and beyond '26. On sports, I would say it a little bit differently, Rich, is that we know the power of sports and we've been playing in that space, whether it be in Europe and the international markets for 15 plus years.
(19:47)
I think the thing is, we know the power of sports, but we are more wanting to prove out the ability to do sports profitably. And that's a much harder equation in the streaming space. We know it can be inquisitive. We know it can help engagement and there's indirect values to those. And so we're experimenting, I'd say, much more, trying to figure out what is that secret sauce that allows you to do sports and streaming are profitable. But we have various different experiments. We're obviously doing simulcasts here in the U.S. We're doing a standalone premium sports offering à la carte in the UK. We have sports bundled into the basic HBO Max tier in Brazil and Mexico. We have standalone sports in Chile and Argentina. So we see the power of it, but we are going to continue to be disciplined and experiment to try and figure out what's the model you need to use and exploit it in a streaming space that can deliver engagement and subs, but also profit.
David Zaslav (20:48):
HBO Max as a global high growth asset, is really the linchpin of our ability to have our ambition to split the company. And now I think a piece of the business that you will see will be a huge benefit to Paramount when our deal closes together with their assets. But for JB and Casey, and then the whole creative leadership at Warner Brothers, Mike and Pam and James Gunn and Channing, to all come together and get behind this idea of a global HBO Max and to turn it from losing over $2 billion to effectively a $4 billion turnaround, but more importantly, a high growth asset that made our studio and streaming business a sustainable growth asset, which was the basis on which we executed the strategy of splitting the company, which ended up with the interest of multiple players and ultimately Paramount. So for JB and
David Zaslav (22:00):
Casey and the whole team and the creative renaissance that went behind it, that is the leading growth asset at Warner Bros. right now, and I think it'll continue to be. That's probably the most important asset. It pulls together all of our TV library. It pulls together all the great motion picture content that Warner Bros. and DC puts together. And having that kind of a leading growth asset, as JB says, as a global player is something we're excited about, particularly in light of it coming together with even more strength from Paramount.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Thank you, Rich. Operator, next question.
Operator (22:41):
Your next question comes from Robert Fishman with MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.
Robert Fishman (22:49):
Good afternoon, everyone. David, with the launch of YouTube TV sports and just overall cord cutting trends, curious what your latest thoughts are on how the pay TV landscape will evolve from here. Are we reaching a floor for sports fans and what do you think happens to the cable networks that aren't primarily sports? And then just maybe following up on your first comments, you've long discussed the advantages of bundling streaming services in the US while also thinking about the international DTC opportunity. So curious through all of your different conversations with Netflix and Paramount, any updated views you have on the power of a global scaled streaming service and how some of these smaller services can still best compete over the long run. Thank you.
David Zaslav (23:37):
Well, let me start with the second one. The idea of bundling or consolidation. When you put your TV set on and you see in any market around the world, 15 to 20 choices of apps that you come in and out of, and when you're talking about what you want to watch, you've got three people on a couch Googling where it is and how to get in and out of it. It's just not a good consumer experience. And for four years, we've been saying that the consumer experience is going to get restructured and that there'll be a lot of value creation in those that can be one of the emerging leaders. And more importantly, for consumers to have a better experience. And we saw with Disney that it was that bundling together, the churn went down, it was a better consumer experience. It was also a better economic experience. We've been working on bundling.
(24:37)
And the idea of Paramount coming together with Warner Bros. is in that same vein of creating a service, which David and the team will work to do, which will create an even more robust and compelling consumer experience. JB, you've been leading around the world this idea of bundling for us. And three years ago, you and I were talking about it in the last year and a half, loads of regional players have been working with you and with Casey on doing that.
JB (25:08):
Yeah. Robert, we're obviously big believers in it. We've seen the benefits of it from an LTV perspective. Our base, as David said, we had three years ago or so, no bundled subscribers from bundles with other programmers. And now, in addition to obviously the Disney bundle here, we launched in Germany with RTL+. We launched with Viu in Southeast Asia. We're part of bundles in LATAM and across, frankly, the global footprint. And the reality is we see meaningfully our highest LTV subscribers coming from some of those bundled subscribers. And so it's beneficial to marketing expense. It's obviously huge beneficial to churn, and ultimately it's a very healthy and growing part of the business that I think will be an increasingly important part of the entire ecosystem.
David Zaslav (26:04):
On the ecosystem for channels, we had a great quarter focusing on doing what we do, which is try and create content within sports, food, home, general entertainment. Our overall networks were up significantly. A real focus on the creative team of creating more content that nourishes our viewers. The sports also for us is doing very well. CNN, Mark's team, the ratings were up significantly. Your guess is as good as ours in terms of what happens to the overall universe. It's encouraging what Chris Winfrey's strategy has been at Charter. And if you look at their actual multichannel subscribers, they're almost flat and they're providing a very compelling experience where you can go from cable over and enjoy some of the best programming that you want on services like HBO Max or Disney. So I think we can't control that. We can help it by doing great programming, and that's what we're continuing to do, and the numbers reflect that.
Gunnar (27:19):
David, if I can add one point that's important. We have long stopped viewing our linear networks as linear networks. We have creative teams that are creating fantastic content that works across platforms. And we are generating significant returns with every dollar we're spending in that business. And increasingly, we're seeing very significant revenue contributions growing from international, and in some cases, more than 50% of revenues coming out of streaming utilization of this content. So the demand for this content and the viewer engagement is still there and continues to be a great business for us.
Robert Fishman (28:03):
Thank you all.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Thanks, Robert.
Operator (28:06):
Your next question-
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Operator, next question.
Operator (28:09):
Thank you. Your next question comes from Steven Cahal with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Steven Cahal (28:16):
Thank you. As we think about studios, the guidance I think for adjusted EBITDA is relatively in line with 2025. So first was just looking to understand that a level deeper. You had a really strong slate in 2025. I know you've got a big slate this year too, but just trying to understand if there are drivers to that profitability in 2026 that maybe offset a slightly smaller slate expectation in 2025. And then some folks like Paramount account for internal licensing a little differently. I know that was a contributor in Q1 as well, but is there any good way for us to just think about the revenue or the EBITDA of the studio business excluding that? I know at the consolidated level it comes out, but just kind of thinking about the studio level. And then on networks, I think EBITDA was down roughly about the same as revenue, which was a big improvement on the back half of last year.
(29:12)
Any way that you kind of think about the revenue plus EBITDA trajectory longer term of networks, do you think you can continue to hold EBITDA at or better than the pace of the top line? Thank you.
Gunnar (29:26):
Steven, this is going on. Let me start with the internal licensing question. It really doesn't make sense to exclude internal content sales from the studio performance. That's why we have chosen to go with this internal fair market value model, because whatever we sell internally, we could also sell externally. And the only thing that would change is we would probably, in many cases, generate a little less profit over the ultimate period for that content. And we would generate that profit a little earlier because it takes JB's team a little more time to generate the profits by utilizing content internally.
(30:07)
So that's why these things have to go hand in hand. We have a lot of disclosure around what gets eliminated. And what I've said in earlier calls is that over the past few years, as we have pretty dramatically shifted from a heavily externally focused content licensing to a more internal utilization model, we have essentially created value in our company profits that are eliminated and sitting on the balance sheet and that are beginning to bleed back in a much more material way into our consolidated profits as we're getting the benefit from utilizing the content, which took a little longer to hit the P&L, but is going to be a very helpful driver for us. On the studio side, look, you mentioned this, 2025 has been a fantastic year for the studio and an absolutely outstanding year for the motion picture group.
(31:04)
So maintaining that profit level I think is healthy and is certainly an ambition for the team. We also have that quarter over quarter fluctuation for our content sales. As you know, the timing of the renewal of certain deals is always slightly different and leads to bumps in the individual quarters. And then if you think about sort of longer term growth opportunities, one thing that we have also talked about multiple times and that is flowing through our numbers increasingly is our opportunity that we see in experiences in consumer products, an area that historically hadn't received a lot of attention. And you know that we have opened a Potter tour in Tokyo. We're working on another one in Shanghai. We have smaller experiences, activations. And so these things are increasingly going to contribute to our profits and that will be the case this year as well. And then on the linear network side, look, I want to stay away from giving very specific guidance as to where we see the revenue trajectory and our ability to maintain EBITDA levels. What you did see this quarter is some very encouraging signals, much better delivery and share gains in many of our key international markets for the business. As I said earlier, increasingly we're seeing the monetization shift, still generating fantastic returns with a different mix and incremental value coming from international markets streaming utilization, et cetera.
Gunnar (33:00):
... And then as we have said before, we are continuing to be very, very focused on efficiency management, not to the extent anymore as in the early years after creating Warner Brothers Discovery where we were able to offset very significant percentages of the revenue declines, but we do still see opportunities. And clearly AI I think is at a stage where this is going to become a more meaningful contributor to efficiencies and greater volume more easily created in certain areas than in our workflow. So I do think there's a lot to be optimistic about. Again, wouldn't be the right time, I think, at this point to create sort of new longer term guidance for that business.
JB (33:52):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
And your last question will come from Canan van Katiswa with Barclays. Your line is open.
Canan van Katiswa (34:04):
Thank you. So David, you scaled discovery over the years by orders of magnitude. There are obviously some areas where scale benefits, so things like maybe the tech stack or marketing, but is there an asset though that you start to hit as you get larger? Do the benefits of scale basically increase proportionately with size? And the main reason I'm asking this is we are starting to see some engagement stagnation across premium services, especially the larger services, Netflix engagement being an example. And then also on the legacy TV side, I mean, it took a little bit of time for you to integrate the Warner assets with Discovery. And so it would be good to get your context on, as you scaled the business, where did you start hitting the hurdles and beyond a certain point, does scale become a disadvantage? And then, Gunnar, from your perspective, the spin that was being planned, are there costs right now in the P&L that would not have existed if the spin was not being planned? I mean, is there some of these efficiencies potentially in the future? Thanks.
David Zaslav (35:20):
Thanks so much. On scale, having more scale of great content and storytelling on your menu is clearly valuable. What we learned is aggregating it all together in one place isn't always the best way to create the most value. So as Gunnar was saying, there's a lot of our content on our channels domestically and around the world that JB and Casey have found is really helpful in engagement and attraction on HBO Max. There's some that we get significant incremental value by reselling it on ABOD to niche users that have a great love for our affinities. And so same thing was the idea of putting sports together with all of our content in every market. In some cases, putting that scale all in one place, we were better. Like for instance, in the UK, we have TNT sport, we put all of our entertainment content in one basket, and then we put all of our sports content in another, and we think we can nourish different audiences in different ways and get more value.
(36:38)
But having more premium, high quality content that when people could watch anything they want is what you really need in order to be successful together with a global footprint. I mean, the biggest issue on scale is global. When you're competing regionally, if you're a US only business, or if you're German speaking only, or if you're Mexico only or Brazil only, those used to be very compelling businesses. But as TikTok and Instagram and Facebook together with Amazon and Netflix and HBO Max and Disney start to become more global and have the ability to amortize content above the globe in that way and see what works and then restructure that content in different ways to create more value, it becomes harder and harder to be a regional player. JB, you've been in this fight.
JB (37:36):
Yeah. I mean, I think the short answer to your question is we don't see that moment coming anytime soon. And I understand the question of some of the leaders in the space who've been at this for 15 to 20 years, maybe seeing some maturation that is a very different situation for us that we've been at this for five or six. And so we're in the early innings, whereas they may be in more mature innings. And the levers that I described earlier are the same levers that from certainly an operating leverage standpoint financially, we're seeing great opportunities to drop more and more dollars from the top line growth to the bottom line, given a lot of obviously the investments we've made on tech platform and some of the core infrastructure. And those are still a long way to go in terms of penetration in some markets, including very nascent markets that obviously we've just recently launched in, that we're still in the very early days of that growth trajectory.
(38:44)
And at the end of the day, as we said, oftentimes the content, our product is the content and the slate and the data that we've used to try and deliver clear and clear views of the types of content that will better nurture and satisfy or bring in more customers, we're getting smarter and smarter at it, and the slate that you keep seeing delivered by Casey and the team, which already is a sort of best in the business in terms of batting average, we keep doing better and better and getting better and better slates that are delivering more and more for our customers. And so between that and then also the ad sales benefits and continue to improve the product, which is also where we are in the early innings versus others who are much more sophisticated because they've been at it longer. All those ingredients would lend you to believe that we still got years to go in terms of getting more and more high operating leverage from this business as we continue to sort of grow across those different ledgers. Gunnar?
Gunnar (39:57):
Yeah. Canan, your question on separation related expenses in the P&L, there are still some separation related expenses flowing through, but I just want to explain the geography a little bit. Those are costs that you will find below the line. So they will have a very marginal impact only on EBITDA. There is a lot going on below the line. If you look at our restructuring expenses, you see the Netflix break fee that we didn't even pay flow through our P&L, et cetera, and that is going to continue. It's not only the separation related work, but also expenses related to our sale process and the depending PSKY sale.
(40:43)
The interesting point here I think is for free cash flow. You did see that we had pretty meaningful negative cash impacts last year. We may not get quite to that level, but pretty close. In 2026 as well we flowed a hundred million roughly in negative cash impact through the first quarter. And again, there will be more coming through a combination of advisory fees, but also incremental interest from the bridge, tax leakage, et cetera, et cetera. So that's going to continue to be a factor and we'll keep pointing it out over the course of the year.
JB (41:22):
Thank you, Canan.
Canan van Katiswa (41:22):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. We thank you for joining and you may now disconnect.