Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call - AMC GLOBAL MEDIA INC

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the AMC Network's 3rd Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star-1-1 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 1-1 again. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Nicholas Siebert, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. Welcome to the AMC Global Media Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us on the call today, we have Kristen Dolan, Chief Executive Officer. Kim Kelleher, President and Chief Commercial Officer. Dan McDermott, Chief Content Officer and President of AMC Studios. and Josefa Locanduala, Chief Financial Officer. We'll begin with prepared remarks, and then we'll open the call for questions. Today's call may include certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any such forward-lookings statements are not guarantees of future performance or results and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. Please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of risks and uncertainty. The company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements made today. We will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Required definitions and reconciliations can be found in the press release we issued this afternoon, which is available on our website at amcglobalmedia.com. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Kristen. Thank you, Nick, and thanks, everyone, for joining us. we had another busy and productive quarter with meaningful progress across the key areas that drive our business. We saw consolidated revenue growth in the third quarter, led by our licensing and streaming businesses. We also saw sequential and year-over-year improvements in both domestic affiliate and advertising revenue trends. The third quarter included the settlement of nearly a decade of litigation related to The Walking Dead. We Also completed a transaction to sell our All Black streaming service to Macro, a company we know well and have been investors in for nearly a decade. Macro founder and CEO Charles King and his team are well positioned to develop and grow All Black for years to come. Josefa will cover both of these items in greater detail in his remarks. With this sale, we now have six targeted streaming services, all built for fans of specific types of content. Our strategy is based on offering rich and highly curated experiences complementary to larger and more expensive general entertainment streaming offerings. Operationally, our services run on a unified technology platform with predictable costs. Our programming investments are responsible and focused. This approach gives us significant flexibility in the way we price and package our services. We're further able to improve our already strong rates of customer retention with attractive annual subscriptions and bundled offers, both direct-to-consumer and with partners. Excluding All Black for comparability purposes, retention in the third quarter was consistent with the prior year, despite rate events in 2026 across each of our services. The entire media industry is focused on engagement for good reason, but there is a clear distinction between time spent and time well spent. In a world of so many options, our targeted strategy delivers the right content to the right audiences, resulting in time well spent for passionate and engaged fan communities. In the third quarter, we saw sequential and year-over-year growth in average viewership hours per active user and a double-digit increase sequentially in total hours watched across our portfolio of services, excluding all black. On our last call, we announced a global co-exclusive licensing deal with Netflix for the entire Walking Dead universe, making this franchise available to their large global audience. Importantly, this agreement lets us bring the original series to AMC Plus for the first time ever. So many successful TV franchises are finding new audiences and streaming, creating the next generation of fans and further enhancing the value of high quality IP. On January 7th, we will launch the ultimate expression of the Walking Dead universe on AMC+. Fans new and old will have access to every episode of every series, exclusive specials, behind-the-scenes collections, cast diaries, and more. We recently announced another major development in our expanding partnership with Netflix, an innovative agreement to develop and co-produce new AMC Studios series. Together, we will jointly fund and own these titles, and they'll be available on both of our platforms. The first show greenlit under this new construct is a spy drama called Bannerman. Jeff Daniels just joined the cast in a leading role, and we expect to be in production this January with a premiere later in the year. Turning to advertising, we saw continued improvement in our advertising revenue trends in the third quarter. We recently wrapped a successful upfront that underscored the strength of our programming and our ability to deliver impactful content integrations to our clients. We leveraged this competitive advantage to support premium pricing and secure firm investments across our networks. The ad market is evolving. We're seeing an increasing portion of digital budget shift outside of the traditional upfront window, creating a year-round buying environment. Our early investments in programmatic, audience targeting, and data capabilities have positioned us to capture these additional advertising dollars outside of the traditional forefront window. We're also seeing significant category strength in political. We have two upcoming series that have generated strong interest from a wide variety of top-tier advertisers. Thunder Road, a multigenerational racing drama starring Dennis Quaid that is currently in production in partnership with NASCAR, and Point Break, a series we are co-producing with Alcon Entertainment and Studio Canal based on the cult classic action film. We've already closed more than a dozen sponsorships and integrations for these shows with more in the works. I'd like to close by highlighting the importance of our successful and growing AMC Studios business. We've spent the last two decades nurturing creative relationships and building out our production capabilities and expertise. The significance of strong talent relationships has been a topic of discussion in our industry lately. It is fundamental to who we are and what we've been able to achieve. Our studio operation adds valuable IP to our library every year. It drives our linear channels, targeted streaming services, fast channels, and high impact sales to third parties including apple netflix and other partners around the world we produce across the entire spectrum of rights including fully owned originals co-productions and productions for third parties silo which has gone on to become a huge hit for apple tv is just one example of our ability to develop and produce for other platforms more recently netflix bought the headlands house a new amc studio series in development starring coleman domingo we're having a very active fall with some other notable content highlights including kill jackie starring catherine zeta jones yaga starring carrie ann moss and heated rivalry star hudson williams which is already the biggest amc plus exclusive series launch ever the 30th anniversary of fearfest acorn tv's and autumn to die for another season of screams on shutter best christmas ever our biggest programming event of the year is right around the corner. The third season of Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches, which moves to Salem, Massachusetts, will premiere on December 30th. Rise of the Saints, produced with the NFL and Skydance Sports, arrives in February, along with a new unscripted series called Cursed Sports. And there's so much more to come in 2027. We appreciate your time and continued interest in AMC Global Media. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Josefa. Thank you, Kristen. Before I review our third quarter results, I'd like to briefly expand on a couple of recent developments that Kristen mentioned in her remarks. First, we entered into a settlement agreement related to The Walking Dead as disclosed on our Form 8K filed on September 8th. The $120 million settlement payment is comprised of two parts. First an $85 million payment that was paid in the third quarter. Second, a $35 million advance against future pay participations that will be paid in January. The settlement payment has no impact to adjusted operating income. In the third quarter, we sold our All Black streaming service to Macro, a company we have been an investor in for many years. The sale included a new multi-year content licensing agreement, which will continue to fuel the growth of All Back under Macro stewardship. All Black represented approximately 600,000 streaming subscribers at the time of sale. To accurately reflect the core business trends in our results going forward, we intend to provide comparable growth rates reflecting the divestiture of all black where relevant. On to our consolidated results. Consolidated revenue grew 1% in third quarter. Consolided AOI was $70 million, and free cash flow reflecting the impact of the $85 million litigation settlement was negative $52 million. Excluding this one-time payment, free cash flow for the third quarter would have been $33 million. Moving to our segment results. Domestic operations revenue grew 2% in the third quarterly. Subscription revenue decreased by 2%, which reflected streaming revenue growth of 4% and an 11% decrease in affiliate revenue. Excluding the revenue contribution from All Black, streaming revenue grew 7% on a comparable basis. Streaming revenue growth reflected price increases across all of our services. We saw a meaningful improvement in our affiliate revenue rate of decline in the third quarter as new agreements and contractual changes took effect. Domestic operations advertising revenue decreased 7% due to a softer advertising market partially offset by continued digital advertising growth. We are seeing continued healthy demand for our content. Third quarter content licensing revenue was $84 million and reflected the timing of content deliveries in the period. In the third quarter, we started the co-exclusive license for the streaming rights to Fear the Walking Dead in the U.S. As a reminder, for the full year, we anticipate domestic operations content licensing revenue in the range of $460 million to $485 million. The majority of that revenue will be recognized in the fourth quarter. Regarding adjusted operating income for the quarter, domestic operations AOI was $89 million with an 18% margin. The decrease in AOI Was primarily driven by increased technical and operating expenses. Moving to international. International revenue decreased by 5% to $73 million for the third quarter. Excluding the impact of foreign currency translation, international revenue decreased by 4%. International subscription revenue, excluding FX, decreased 3%, reflecting the impact of the previously disclosed wind-down of a joint venture that operated primarily in Poland and Africa. International advertising revenue, including FX, increased 6%, reflecting a softer UK advertising market partially offset by digital advertising growth. International AOI for the third quarter was $11 million, with a 14% margin. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $440 million of cash on hand and net debt of approximately $1.3 billion. In October, we completed our previously announced $30 million accelerated share repurchase plan, under which we repurchased 2.8 million shares. Now I'll briefly discuss our outlook for 2026. It is important to note that the scope of our outlook had previously contemplated a full year of all black and that we expect to achieve our guidance for the year despite no longer benefiting from the inclusion of All Blacks results going forward. As such, for the full year 2026, we anticipate consolidated revenue in the range of $2.4 billion to $2,45 billion and adjusted operating income in the reach of $410 million to $420 million. From where we sit today, we continue to anticipate free cash flow of approximately $150 million, including the after-tax impact of the one-time $85 million settlement payment I reviewed earlier in my remarks. As we get closer to the end of the year, it is worth mentioning that the variability in the timing of cash payments and receipts can cause free cash flow to shift from one quarter to another in any given period. Before I close, I would like to echo Kristen's remarks regarding the power and impact of our content and studio. We're building on decades of experience and momentum at AMC Studios to unlock new opportunities across the full spectrum of rights. Great content is at the core of this company. Whether that's fully owned IP and beloved franchises, an innovative new approach to co-productions, or how we are just beginning to capitalize on the growing opportunity to produce for others, AMC Global Media is taking advantage of the competitive edge we have as a studio owner. We remain focused on the broad distribution and monetization of the propelling high-quality content that fuels our business. We'll be prudent in balancing healthy free cash flow generation with the right programming investment levels to support the business. We'll Be thoughtful and opportunistic when it comes to capital allocation, maintaining our focus towards the longer-term strength of the balance sheet, and continuing to prioritize gross debt reduction over M&A and share repurchases. with that I'll now hand the call back to Nick and begin our Q&A thanks Josefa operator please open the line for Q& A certainly and our first question for today comes from the line of Stephen Calhoun from Wells Fargo your question please thank you Kristen thank you for the comments on advertising improving I was wondering if you could just unpack that a little more is the advertising improvement coming from the impressions you're delivering. You think some firmer. I know you've worked hard on combining sort of linear and dynamic advertising. So we just love to understand that bit of the portfolio better. And then on the AOA guidance for the year, I'm not certain about this, but I think All Black might have been losing a little bit of money. And I know you didn't change the AOI guidance for the year. At least I don't think you did. So just wanted to check in if anything changed in the underlying performance of the business. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Stephen. Yeah, you know, the early investments that we did have in programmatic, addressable, and data capabilities are definitely helping us really be positioned to catch the shift from traditional to digital demand, and so we're seeing that. But at the same time, you know, our ratings are continuing to be, you know, positive for particularly up on BBC America, IFC, and WeTV. So you have that and the digital growth. And then, you know, I'll flip it to Kim just to talk about the overall trend improvements in third quarter. Yeah, as Kristen was saying, Stephen, it's worth highlighting that we were really early and aggressive with our investments in programmatic audience targeting and our data capabilities. And that's really now positioning us to capture the growing digital demand. We did see some early impact from Q3 political advertising that was very much in the digital space. We were able to capitalize on that growth, which we'll see into Q4 in October timing, due to the fact that we've made most of our linear impressions addressable. So that flexibility, the digital flexibility that they were looking for, we were able to carry through to our linear inventory. And then on your all-black question, I would say when we started the service, we began with 60,000 subscribers. We grew that tenfold to 600,000 survivors. We were really quite diligent and careful in our investment expense on programming. But really what we were seeing as we got further into it was that the unscripted content that we were putting on from WeTV was really driving a lot of the viewership. And then we launched All Reality. And so with the macro team, they're very focused on this particular audience. We think they can take it to the next level with more scripted series because they have the machine that can drive the real attention of the black audience. But as far as the actual accounting of it, I'm going to ask Josefa. Thanks, Kristen. We haven't disclosed details on the transaction, but I'll say that All Black was profitable. And, you know, on sort of the underlying business, there's no change. Thank you. Thank you, and our next question comes from the line of David Karnofsky from J.P. Morgan. Your question, please. Maybe just following up on the advertising, Kristen, you kind of talked to, I suppose this is in cable, more of the market. moving to scatter versus upfronts, just maybe you can unpack the drivers. What does that mean over the medium term as you kind of reposition to a full selling cycle throughout the year? And then second question, just when you look at your streaming services, just what opportunities do you see right now to expand distribution as maybe some other platforms look to wider than their channel offerings and then within that, their bundles? I'm sorry, can you say that again, David? We're having a little trouble hearing you. Just the second question on streaming. Sure. On streaming, it was just what opportunity you see to expand distribution of your services as potentially others look to open channel stores or drive more bundles. All right. I'll answer the second one, and then I'll let Kim speak to the advertising. So we're constantly looking for ways to expand our distribution. We're big believers, as you know, in the hard bundled model with partners like Charter and Philo. But we're also in the process of relaunching our services with a more consistent front end using the Delta trade capabilities that we augmented Shutter with last year. And now we're on the verge of relaunching AMC Plus with more advanced capabilities. So D2C becomes more interesting for us again because we have spent the last couple of years getting a unified platform and a consistent cost to serve across the streaming services. But then we are really in every major, you know, we're with every equipment manufacturer, all the big ones on every, you know, retail platform that most people go to. We're on things like Peloton. I mean, we'RE really constantly looking for any avenue, particularly because the targeted streaming services that we focus on versus the broad-based entertainment services really do have very specific audiences. So we can help look for ways that might be nontraditional to partner and distribute the streaming services to those very specific targeted audiences. So if there's anything you think we're missing as far as distribution partners, I'd love any inputs, but it's something we think about pretty much every day. So it's a good combination of wholesale, retail, and D2C as well as the bundles. and on the first part of your question um i do think we're seeing a scatter in a in a much more kind of robust way than we have for the last couple years to be honest david um a lot of it though is tied very specifically to the fact that we're we're in our super bowl period with fear fest and all our robust um horror kind of um programming right into best christmas ever in q4 so we're looking to continue that on. We're very pleased with the upfront results, but it's nice to see the robustness and the fill rates associated with the digital inventory continue on as strongly as they have. Thank you. Thank You. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question at this time, please press star 1 1 on your telephone. Our next question comes from the line of Sean from Morgan Stanley. Your question, please. Great. Thanks very much, too, if I may. First on the marketing plan for The Walking Dead coming to AMC Plus in January. Curious what your go-to market's going to be there. Obviously, people can still watch it on Netflix, but how do you plan to attack people that maybe aren't on Netflix? And then second on affiliate, I was wondering if you could give us any breakdown in terms of the subscriber declines versus pricing. Seems like pay TV ecosystem, sub declines, maybe getting a little less bad from others. I'm curious if you guys are seeing the same. Thanks very much. Great. I'll start with The Walking Dead. So obviously it's huge for us to have all 377 about episodes for the series, for all the different iterations. So, you know, we're definitely going to be pushing the tonnage equation. And we have a lot of tonnages just across a lot of the other, you knows, series and content that we have. But The Walking Dead in particular is very, as you know, closely associated with AMC and now with AMCPlus. And then we have a lot of extra content from all the, not just the regular spinoffs, but, you know behind the scenes and a bunch of different studio content that we've recorded over the years. So that'll be included. And then obviously we'll have the final season of Daryl Dixon coming up, you Know that we're going to put a lot atonish behind that as well. But I think, you Now there's, there's a lot with this series around, you multi-generational viewing around just the post-apocalyptic point of view that is still featured in a lot of shows. So we feel like having a destination and then looking at opportunities for special offers like we just did earlier this year, a $29.99 annual for AMC+, the combination of having this beloved franchise fully on air along with all of the other supplemental programming that we've done across the Anne Rice universe and other places make it a really, we're very excited about the first quarter this year. I'll say that. Dan, you want to add anything? The only thing I'd say is the Walking Dead universe is an evergreen franchise for us. The audience expands with every new generation that finds it. And we have lots of plans to keep a new series coming in this universe well into the future. Sorry, Sean, what was the second question? Just on the affiliate revenue trends, maybe just any breakdown on subscriber declines versus rate. I know you've had some renewals, but are you seeing any plateauing in the pay TV ecosystem? Fox, for example, has called out some improvement there. Curious if you're seeing that as well. I mean, the only commentary I would give you there without getting into stuff that we don't disclose is that the 3Q rate of decline improved due to new agreements and contractual changes that we commented on. And then, you know, we expect the full year rate of declines we talked about to look similar to 2025. And I would actually just add to that that our weighted agreement term length has not gone down. So we're still averaging about four years term in our renewals. thank you very much thank you and our next question comes from the line of Charles Wilber from Guggenheim securities your question please hi yes I just was hoping you could expand upon the economics of the new co-production agreements that you announced an outline there with Netflix and Alcon and a studio canal just kind of how you see those co-productions going forward and what changes from an economic sense versus your existing production? Thank you. Well, there's lots of value we get out of partnering with various platforms and other studios around. I would say, just answering the Netflix question, we have a very attractive partner model with a great partner in Netflix that allows us to reduce our programming cash investment and support our core business while still allowing for that shared long-term upside. So, you know, the near-term monetization is across our own platforms, and the long- term licensing opportunity comes after both parties' initial license period ends. And then revenue flows through a waterfall, costs are recouped, and profits are shared. So that's very appealing to us. And then on the international co-production, like with Alcon and Studio Canal, again, you know, the value of an international co pro is that we share in the cost of creation of the asset and then we monetize it in our respective territories and jointly own the asset in perpetuity. So, you know it's a significantly greater upside for us than if we just fully finance the show and then work to sell it off internationally piecemeal. So you know what we're seeing is multiple partners around the world want to join up with us and, you know, and others. You know, it's just an attractive business model that I think there's a lot of people that are engaging in, and we're doing it more and more. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of David Joyce from Seaport Research partners. Your question, please. Thank you. In thinking about your international business, what are the pros and cons of maintaining network infrastructure versus moving more to a licensing model? And just wanted to see where you are on that and how things could be evolving, given you've got these new streaming-related injections, strategies, and what have you. so i'll give it a shot david you know the countries that we're we are very heavily focused on are predominantly iberia so we're in spain and portugal there we have the 15 linear channels there we are usually um we're the top top few um as far as most viewed within the country and and spain in portugal are slightly um they're a little bit different than the u.s in the sense that everybody overbuilds everybody, and Netflix is there, and a few other streaming services are there, but it's not nearly as prevalent as it is in the U.S., so the traditional business model still performs quite well for us, particularly because we have some of the most highly viewed channels in both of those countries. Then when you move to Central and Northern Europe, we're predominantly sports services there, so Sport 1 and Sport 2 in the countries where we operate are the most popular and most viewed linear sports channels in those countries. There's very little streaming in Central and Northern Europe. So between our local channels in cooking and lifestyle on top of the sports that we do there, we feel confident that, again, it's probably 15 or 20 years different than what it was in the U.S. when it comes to those markets. The broadband is strong and the capabilities are strong, but the government it subsidizes a lot of the content. So you get a full cable bundle in those countries for 20 bucks a month. So there's really not a lot to push to drive incremental content because you can get so much for your dollar. The UK, I think everybody knows is a little bit of a hybrid. There's a variety of things going on over there, but we like being on the ground and partnering, you know, with Sky and with ITV and some of the other folks in the UK. And we're going to continue to do that. And then LATAM is, you Know, that's sort of the wild blood list, I Think, for a lot of the companies in that it's a very high growth marketplace. There's a lot of eyeballs, a lot of advertising dollars to be made, but the theft situation in a lot of the larger countries like Brazil is still challenging. So it makes it a hard business model more because we can't guarantee that we're going to get paid for everything that we're doing because there's just a lot of theft in those marketplaces. So we focus on the traditional business where it makes the most sense in these areas. And then luckily, we have all the opportunistic things we've been doing in the U.S. for the past five, eight years. So we're able to learn from that and imbue our learnings from what's going on in the US to our strategies and use those to inform our go-forward plans in the other countries. All right. Thanks for the update. Thank you. This does conclude the question and answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to Nicholas Sieber for any further remarks. Thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in AMC Global Media. Have a nice day. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.