David Gandler
Analyst · Evercore ISI. Your line is open
Thank you, Alison and good morning everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. I am proud to report that Fubo’s global streaming business achieved record highs in the fourth quarter and full year 2022 across several KPIs. We delivered over $1 billion in total global annual revenue. We exceeded over $100 million in annual ad revenue in North America. And at the same time, we achieved positive gross profit in Q4. We also closed the year with 1,445,000 subscribers in North America, an increase of 29% year-over-year and 420,000 subscribers in our Rest of World streaming business, an increase of 117% year-over-year. 2022 was an inflection point for our business. Our goal is to continue on this trajectory by expanding unit economics and generating positive free cash flow in 2025. My confidence and enthusiasm are not just based on our results, but on the dynamics and trends across the media and consumer landscape at large. Friction and fragmentation continue to persist in streaming, frustrating customers and creating a challenging path to sustainability for media companies. As a result, we continue to see the aggregation model and bundling as a massive opportunity. Our service empowers consumers to seamlessly access all of their favorite content via a single app from anywhere in the house and on any device or operating system. Fubo plays an important role in the media ecosystem. Our customers already spend over 100 hours on our platform every month on average, reflecting the value we provide to media companies, content creators and advertisers. And as an aggregator and distributor of content, we will continue to work to advance on our vision and that is to give customers a gateway to all television, surprising and delighting them with a personalized and seamless user experience. U.S. consumers are already supporting our vision. We are extremely proud to rank number one in J.D. Power’s 2022 customer satisfaction survey among live TV streaming providers. We believe this proves that consumers understand the value of an aggregated multichannel streaming platform, and in particular, Fubo’s differentiated sports-first offering. On the content front, it’s becoming clear that we have more leverage than we expected due to the certain content drops that historically have had almost no impact on subscriber growth and retention. As we optimize our content portfolio through our first-party data, we plan to selectively carry content that will drive subscribers and leverage our increased scale. As a result, we expect to drive leverage on the subscriber-related expense line on a year-over-year basis going forward. Before John dives into our subscriber guidance, I wanted to give you added context. Fubo has always punched above its weight class. We have recently increased prices of our U.S. based plans by $5. Additionally, we priced up against the recently added Valley’s RSNs from $11 to $14 to be able to offer these in all RSNs in our base plan and to the widest number of consumers. In aggregate, this is a major price up of $16 to $19, our biggest increase and the first time we raised prices in Q1, which is typically lighter on sports content. The price up and its timing, coupled with the World Cup cohort and typical Q1 seasonality is why we are delivering a conservative sub guide. That being said, we are still very excited about our growth prospects in 2023 and beyond. Following these moves in Q1, we have been very pleased with our early retention metrics and are monitoring closely. Excluding the estimated impact of the 2022 World Cup, we believe we will maintain double-digit subscriber growth in 2023. We also remain committed to super serving sports fans, which is at the core of our brand DNA. Fubo is the home for local sports coverage as evidenced by our carriage of approximately 35 regional sports networks. Our RSN portfolio gives us leading coverage of baseball when notably a large virtual MVPD recently reduced their coverage significantly. Fubo now delivers at least one RSN to nearly every U.S. subscriber and is the lowest cost streaming option for local teams. FAST channels are a growing component of our margin expansion strategy as it relates to the leverage in our subscriber-related expenses. SaaS channels help us achieve two goals. They provide a wide range of content, creating more fungibility and negotiating leverage with content partners. They also provide us with significantly more ad inventory relative to our current cable network deals. As a reminder, we do not have any inventory with broadcast networks. The 80-plus FAST channels on our platform generated 5% of total ad revenue in 2022, significantly up from 1% in 2021. That’s why we are working to improve discovery of our SaaS channels to deliver even more ad inventory. In general, our advertising business continues to outperform, growing 30% in Q4 on a year-over-year basis, despite a very difficult quarter that impacted the entire industry. Our largest advertisers from 2021 increased total spend with us in 2022 by 85% and we added a record number of new brands. While we are excited about our success last year, we still have much to do. This includes improving our ad tech, integrating more data products and packaging up our inventory. On the product front, Fubo has historically been first to market among virtual MVPDs with new features and capabilities from 4K streams to multi-viewing. Our internally built tech stack has enabled us to be ahead of the innovation curve. We see AI and computer vision products as a natural evolution of our commitment to interactivity. In December 2021, we acquired a company called edison.ai, anticipating the power of artificial intelligence and computer vision to evolve the consumer experience and augment our advertising capabilities. With this technology, we can programmatically understand what happens in each frame of a live stream in real time. We are now focused on building product features that can allow Sports fans to lean forward and choose to engage on a per play basis, not just on a per game basis. Additionally, we can leverage this tech to reduce costs, maximize the value of our FAST channels, introduce new ad products and optimize subscriber growth. We currently have multiple patents pending with this technology. We are excited about the initial results of our new capabilities, and we’ll also continue to explore opportunities with certain cloud providers about implementation on a B2B basis. We look forward to sharing more on our progress in the quarters to come. And finally, the fourth quarter also marked the 1-year anniversary of our Molotov acquisition. The acquisition has been a success, delivering strong growth of our rest of world streaming business, more than doubling subscribers and achieving meaningful revenue growth, all with a modest marketing budget. Molotov’s freemium model has proven to be effective and efficient, something we continue to evaluate as we think about the future of our business. I could not be more excited for 2023. There are still more than 62 million traditional pay-TV consumers here in the United States and a disproportionate number of cable customers who are cutting the cord continue to choose Fubo over many of our competitors. In summary, we are very pleased with our record Q4 and full year 2022 results. We are continuing to prioritize profitable growth and remain confident of our mission to deliver a leading global live TV streaming platform differentiated by the greatest breadth of premium content and interactivity. I will now turn the call over to John Janedis, CFO, to discuss our financial results in greater detail. John?