CuriosityStream Inc. (CURI) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good afternoon. My name is Stacy, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the CuriosityStream First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that today's call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Vanessa Gillon, CuriosityStream's Senior Vice President of Operations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, and welcome to CuriosityStream's discussion of its first quarter 2026 financial results. Leading the discussion today are Clint Stinchcomb, CuriosityStream's Chief Executive Officer; and Brady Hayden, CuriosityStream's Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will take questions from the analyst community. But first, I'll review the safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. Please be aware that any forward-looking statements reflect management's current views only, and the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update these statements nor to make additional forward-looking statements in the future. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our Investor Relations website as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in today's press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, when filed. In addition, reference will be made to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures can be found on our website at investors.curiositystream.com. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be against our results for the comparable 2025 period. Now I'll turn the call over to Clint.

Thank you, Vanessa. Financially, we remain focused on building CuriosityStream into a company with $100 million or more reliable, recurring and increasingly predictable annualized revenue. We've done a substantial amount of foundational work to position the company for that objective, and we believe that with continued execution, the path is becoming clearer. To optimize toward that milestone target, we made several deliberate choices in Q1 that affected near-term quarterly revenue, but in our view, strengthened the company's medium- and long-term revenue opportunity. This is why we guided to the first half of the year as compared to the first quarter. First, we entered into pilot and framework agreements with certain large-scale partners covering broader and more valuable data sets. This meant prioritizing the structure, scope and expansion potential of the relationship over maximizing upfront revenue recognition in the quarter. We believe that was the right trade-off. These pilot structures give partners a path to test, validate and scale across a deeper and wider range of CURI assets, which we believe will lead to larger, more durable licensing relationships over the next year and beyond. Second, we made some modest technology investments that while not required to operate our business in Q1, we believe will enable us to accelerate provisioning and expand and maximize the scope, scale, specificity and profitability of upcoming partnerships. Third, we developed and organized more licensable IP at considerable scale, most of which is 100% owned. This is important strategically as diversity of data and full ownership of more IP in our corpus strengthens margins, broadens our addressable partner roster, increases revenue potential, reduces reliance on any single transaction and makes the licensing business more predictable over time. For Q1, revenue was $15.2 million, up slightly year-over-year. Subscription revenue was roughly equivalent to the prior quarter. AI licensing revenue, which we have previously said would be lumpy, was indeed lumpy. And this was in light of the pilot-oriented approach we adopted during the quarter. Importantly, while the near-term revenue impact may not be immediately obvious, we entered into agreements with a broader roster of partners than we had at this stage last year. We view that as a meaningful indicator of demand and market validation. The breadth of assets now being discussed and packaged for partners has expanded considerably and includes hundreds of millions of production-grade temporal ground truth tokens for frontier model training and tuning, HDR video, matched raw and finished video, multi-camera video and ego-centric video for physical AI training. Licensing revenue does not always move in a straight line quarter-to-quarter, especially when we are dealing with larger partners, new partners, broader rights packages and more complex data products. Further, our corpus is built on assets that are scarce, rights-aware, difficult to replicate and increasingly valuable. We are not talking about a single opportunistic window. We are talking about a monetization model anchored in premium, unscripted and scripted media, enriched structured metadata, flexible rights and growing demand from AI developers and traditional media companies. CuriosityStream has built a large differentiated content library of rights to over 3 million hours of premium factual content plus sports, plus news, plus general entertainment, animation and film, finished in raw, ego-centric and multi-camera, supported by more than 200 content and data partners and flexible licensing rights. This is not commodity inventory. It is a scaled, unscrapable, curated corpus that took years of capital, relationships, editorial focus and dense work to assemble. We don't believe it makes sense to discount it for temporary gain. Enduring revenue streams are almost always rooted in assets that are hard to replace and expensive to rebuild. Looking ahead, Q1 sequential revenue decline was anticipated and we believe temporary. We currently expect 2026 to represent a significant step-up in both revenue and cash flow compared to 2025, with subscription revenue increasing by single-digit percentages and with licensing becoming the larger growth engine as it surpasses subscriptions for the full year. Several factors support this outlook, the impact of our new pricing and packaging, which is just beginning to roll through our P&L, a solid partner launch pipeline with dominant global distributors, accelerating AI licensing fulfillments, new partner additions, continued expansion of our corpus and the ramp of advertising opportunities. Traditional media licensing remains healthy and diversified, while AI demand continues to broaden across model refresh cycles, enterprise fine-tuning, multimodal applications, source code, physical AI, video understanding and the need for premium rights-aware structured data. Q1 was a transition quarter in which we deliberately chose to build for larger, broader and more durable licensing opportunities. We believe those choices position CuriosityStream to generate stronger revenue, higher cash flow and greater shareholder value as we move through 2026 and beyond. In summary, we believe that we will continue double-digit growth in both revenue and cash flow driven by subscriptions and licensing expansion. We continue to reduce expenses through nonessential eliminations in the embrace of evolving AI-infused productivity tools. While we are raising our quarterly dividend of $0.05 to $0.085, we intend to pay 2026 dividends from cash generated by operations as we did in 2024. Our balance sheet remains strong with over $23 million in liquidity and no debt, giving us substantial flexibility. I'll now hand the call over to our CFO, Brady Hayden.

Thanks, Clint, and good afternoon, everyone. Our full results will be in the 10-Q that we'll file within the next few hours, but let me hit some of our first quarter highlights. As Clint said, in the first quarter, we reported revenue of $15.2 million, a slight improvement compared to $15.1 million a year ago. Likewise, we reported what is now our fifth quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, which came in at $0.9 million. Adjusted free cash flow came in at $1.3 million, which represented our 9th consecutive quarter of positive adjusted free cash flow. We generated first quarter subscription revenue of $8.8 million, roughly equivalent to Q4 results. Licensing came in at $6 million, an increase of 11% from last year. First quarter gross margin was 56%, improving from 53% last year. While distribution costs were lower during the quarter, we invested in certain technology products that led to an increase for the quarter, but from which we believe we will incur lower fees going forward. Combined costs for advertising and marketing plus G&A were higher by 27% compared to last year. This increase was driven by a noncash charge for stock-based compensation of $2.2 million or about $0.04 on a per share basis and to a lesser extent, slightly higher advertising costs associated with new customer acquisition investments in the quarter. We reported a first quarter net loss of $1.3 million or $0.02 a share. This compares to a $0.3 million net income in the first quarter of 2025. While our revenue was up from last year, the net loss was driven primarily by the noncash SBC. And as we said earlier, adjusted free cash flow was $1.3 million in the quarter, representing our ninth consecutive quarter of positive results in this metric. We believe our balance sheet remains in great shape. In March, we paid our regular $4.9 million dividend while buying back $300,000 of our shares, and we ended the quarter with total cash and securities of $23.4 million and no outstanding debt. Based on our new quarterly dividend of $0.085 per share at yesterday's closing price, CuriosityStream is generating a dividend yield of over 11%. Looking ahead, we anticipate consolidating our ownership of our German business, buying Spiegel and Authentic out of their stakes sometime in the next few months. Purchase price will be approximately $1.9 million, anticipate the transaction will be accretive to earnings. Regarding guidance, in response to investor recommendations, we're changing up and expanding our metrics going forward for 2026. For the first half of this year, we expect revenue in the range of $35 million to $41 million and full year 2026 revenue in the range of $75 million to $80 million. Likewise, we expect adjusted EBITDA for the first half of the year to be $5 million to $7 million and full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA in the range of $16 million to $20 million. With that, I'll turn it back over to Vanessa to begin our Q&A.

Thank you, Brady. We will now turn to questions from the analyst community, including Patrick Sholl from Barrington Research, Jason Kreyer from Craig-Hallum and Laura Martin from Needham & Company. Starting first with questions regarding our subscription business. From Pat Sholl, what subscriber trends are you seeing? And is it difficult to retain subscribers given your focus on AI licensing? And then from Jason, what has been the response to your price increase on the streaming service? Clint?

Thank you, Vanessa. Our licensing initiatives have no impact on our subscriber retention. Both licensing and subscription businesses require new content typically. So in that sense, they are synergistic. But we're able to attend to both businesses, both revenue streams with the resources at hand. Our robust licensing business with the hundreds of partners who are part of our corpus only helps our retention efforts as it enables us to deploy much more video on our traditional platforms. Seeing positive response to the price increase, minimal churn and an increase in lifetime value.

Okay. Next question also from Pat. Any update on subscriber acquisition focus between bundled versus direct?

I appreciate that question. We optimize for overall subscription revenue growth and are largely agnostic as to the source. Pure direct subscribers offer the highest ARPU, channel store subscribers offer a lower CPA and wholesale subscribers, while lower ARPU provide a longer-term recurring revenue stream. We value subscribers in whatever channel we reach them.

Okay. Now on to licensing. Also from Pat, can you provide any further information on how content that is licensed is being valued in more recent renewals?

Thank you, Pat, for that question. As we know, overall CapEx for the 5 largest technology companies will be north of $1 trillion in 2027. About 2% to 5% of that will go to data set training. But in regard to pricing, certain content is valued at a higher unit rate. Content like scripted entertainment, sports, HDR, selective clip natural history and deeply processed content all command higher unit rates than, for example, unprocessed raw content delivered in bulk. What we notice about value is that orders have become increasingly bespoke, increasingly specific. The comment I would bring attention to here is that CURI has it all, content across the waterfront of genres, meaning we have documentary video content, of course, but we have scripted television and movies in many languages. We have sports across the board. We have audio, we have egocentric, we have HDR. We have it all for licensing to train models. The harder to find the content, the higher the price tag.

Thank you. And from Jason Kreyer, Craig-Hallum. Can you talk about the breadth of AI licensing, how you view the size of the market, how content is being valued and how the AI pipeline is tracking?

Yes. I appreciate that question, Jason. The breadth of assets now being discussed and packaged for partners has expanded considerably and now includes hundreds of millions of production-grade temporal ground truth tokens for frontier model training and, HDR video, match rod finish video, multi-camera video and egocentric video for physical AI training. A broad set of video and data and a broader set of partners smooth things out over time. But as I mentioned, licensing revenue does not always move in a straight line quarter-to-quarter, especially when we are dealing with larger partners, broader rights packages and more complex data products.

Okay. A couple of final questions on AI, both from Laura Martin, Needham. Clint, can you speak to the longevity of the AI licensing business? What are you seeing in existing relationships? Also, in light of the revenue and your leadership position in AI licensing, what is your rationale for staying in the subscription business?

Thank you for that, Laura. Some of our best customers are some of our oldest customers, in part because their orders are broadening. They're broadening out to include the additional data sets I just described. We are fulfilling our 10th delivery next week with one of our early partners. The need for content for fiscal AI training, largely egocentric and egocentric-adjacent offers a set of another 50 companies who will or are engaging in data set licensing. In regard to our subscription business, it is key to our overall strength because it's reliable, recurring and predictable. It's already built. The barriers to entry are considerable, meaning others would need to spend substantially in order to achieve what we have in hand. And our overall subscription revenue is growing modestly to mid-single digits this year. Our subscription business takes nothing from our licensing business and is, in fact, critical to the amassing of our 3 million-plus hour war chest and synergistic insofar as our relationships, both with content partners and the buyers cover all of our businesses, subscription, licensing and advertising.

Clint, Brady, thank you both. This concludes our Q&A, and I will now hand it back to the operator.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.