Cineverse Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
July 1, 2024

Key Takeaways

  • Syniverse reduced its full‐year net loss by 58% to $3.4 million and generated a positive adjusted EBITDA of $4.4 million in FY2024, with Q4 nearly at breakeven on net income.
  • Direct operating margin jumped to 79% in Q4 (61% full‐year) as SG&A was cut by $8.9 million through streaming channel optimization and offshoring via Syniverse Services India.
  • The company recorded a noncash, nonrecurring goodwill impairment of $14 million after its market capitalization fell significantly below book value.
  • Syniverse initiated a stock repurchase program, buying back 184,000 shares post‐year‐end and extending authorization to March 1, 2025, citing perceived undervaluation.
  • Management highlighted key growth drivers, including the October 11 release of Terrifier 3 as a recurring cash cow, a >62% jump in podcast revenue, 16% subscriber growth, and strong AI training data demand for its Matchpoint platform.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Cineverse Q4 2024
00:00 / 00:00

There are 7 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good day, everyone. Welcome to Syniverse's 4th Quarter Fiscal Year 20 24 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Cameron, and I'll be your moderator for today. Currently, all participants are in a listen only mode. We will have a question and answer session following management's prepared remarks, at which time participants could press star followed by the number 1 to ask a question.

Operator

If anyone needs operator help, press star 0. Please note that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Gary Lufredo, Chief Legal Officer, Secretary and Senior Advisor for Syniverse. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the Syniverse 2024 Q4 and year end financial results conference call. The press release announcing Syniverse's results for the fiscal Q4 year end March 31, 2024 is available at the Investors section of the company's website at www.cineverse.com. A replay of this broadcast will also be made available at Cineverse's Web site after the conclusion of this call. Before we begin, I would like to point out that certain statements made on today's call contain forward looking statements.

Speaker 1

These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. The company's periodic reports that are filed with the SEC describe potential risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's business and financial results to differ materially from these forward looking statements. All the information discussed on this call is as of today, July 1, 2024, Inciniverse does not assume any obligation to update any of these forward looking statements except as required by law. In addition, certain financial information presented in this call represent non GAAP financial measures, and we encourage you to read our disclosures and the reconciliation tables to applicable GAAP measures in our earnings release carefully as you consider these metrics. I'm Gary Lufredo, Chief Legal Officer, Secretary and Senior Advisor at Syniverse.

Speaker 1

With me today are Chris McGurk, Chairman and CEO Eric Opeka, President and Chief Strategy Officer Mark Lindsay, Chief Financial Officer Mark Torres, Chief People Officer Yolanda Macias, Chief Content Officer, all of whom will be available for questions following the prepared remarks. On today's call, Chris will discuss our Q4 and full year fiscal year 2024 highlights, the latest operational developments, outlook and long term growth strategy. Mark will follow a review of our front results for the fiscal Q4 ended March 31, 2024. And Eric will provide some detail on our streaming business results and operating initiatives before we open the floor to questions. I will now turn the call over to Chris McGurk to begin.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Gary, and thanks everyone for joining us today on this call. As we have emphasized repeatedly, fiscal year 2024 was an important transition year for the company. Having finally moved beyond any material financial impacts from our legacy Digital Cinema Equipment business and also having established a recurring cash generating film franchise with Terrifier 2 in the prior fiscal year, we focused this year on a concerted drive towards sustained profitability to set a strong foundation for our future growth. Our full year and 4th quarter results both reflect the success of that effort. We generated vastly improved operating margins by dramatically streamlining our cost structure, optimizing our streaming channel portfolio and focusing on higher margin new revenue streams.

Speaker 2

This resulted in positive and growing adjusted EBITDA and an accelerating trend toward positive and sustainable annual net income. Excluding key non cash impacts and non operating factors, most significantly the goodwill impairment that was triggered by our market capitalization being significantly below our book value, we reduced our net loss by $4, 800, 000 or 58 percent to $3, 400, 000 for the full year. And we were virtually breakeven on net income in this last reported quarter. We generated full year adjusted EBITDA of $4, 400, 000 an increase of $4, 300, 000 over the prior year. And we accomplished all this despite losing very significant revenues from the runoff of our legacy digital cinema equipment business and lapping the success of the horror phenomenon in Terrifier 2, which also produced a very sizable upside last year.

Speaker 2

We increased our operating margin substantially to 61% from 47% in the prior year. We even hit a 79% margin in the 4th quarter. This was primarily driven by our streaming channel optimization efforts, where we call lower margin channels and also from SG and A savings generated by our Syniverse Services India operation. Syniverse Services is a unique competitive advantage for the company where we can offshore not outsource domestic positions to a trusted battle tested division of the company, generating very significant cost savings along with improved efficiencies and workflows. At this point, more than half of our total workforce is now located in India and we intend to continue to leverage this operation by moving even more positions there from our own domestic business and also providing services for other companies.

Speaker 2

The long term goal is to make Cinevers Services India a new profit center for the company, not just our own unique cost saving advantage. In total, we've reduced our SG and A by $8, 900, 000 this year and we'll continue to identify opportunities to further streamline across all of our businesses. Importantly and fully cognizant of what we believe is a vastly undervalued stock equity price, 1 that triggered our goodwill impairment since it is well below book value, we began to implement our previously announced stock repurchase program subsequent to year end. We believe that by repurchasing our significantly undervalued shares that we are taking advantage of a key value creation opportunity for the company that will prove itself as we execute our strategic growth and profitability plan. We repurchased 184, 000 shares through June 30 and fully intend to continue to utilize the repurchase program to support our stock price on a go forward basis during non blackout periods.

Speaker 2

In just a minute, Mark will discuss our financial performance in more detail and then Eric will review our operational performance and new developments and initiatives to drive revenue and margin growth in advertising, technology, AI and podcasts. However, before I turn it over to them, I would like to briefly touch on an initiative that our entire company is very excited about and working to maximize. And that's the upcoming release of the next installment of our horror franchise phenomenon, Terra Fire 3. Terra Fire 2 caught the film community totally by surprise when we released it theatrically in October 2022. Produced for just $250, 000 it ended up doing over $15, 000, 000 at the worldwide box office, generating buzz in the New York Times, People Magazine and on the Howard Stern Show among many others.

Speaker 2

It was 1 of the best reviewed horror movies of that year and generated substantial ancillary revenues in DVD, VOD and our ScreamBox core streaming service. Our bloody disgusting horror division led the charge in marketing the movie across social media and through editorial content and other promotions in an incredibly cost effective way, fully leveraging our over 80, 000, 000 monthly streaming viewers and all of the other assets of the company. We intend to use that very same playbook to mobilize the entire company to do the exact same thing in marketing and distributing Terrifier 3, which will be released on October 11 this year as a wide release this time on over 2, 000 screens. The difference this time is that we now really know what we have in terms of an art and fan base and market anticipation. USA TODAY has already named Terrifier 3 as 1 of the most highly anticipated horror films in 2024 and we prepared a high impact marketing campaign to take advantage of all that built up anticipation, leveraging all of our unique advantages as a streaming and tech based content company.

Speaker 2

The movie business is always highly unpredictable. However, from what we've seen of Terrifier 3 so far, we are very hopeful that if we mobilize the company like we did on Terrifier 2, we can continue to benefit from a recurring movie franchise that has an incredibly favorable risk reward profile. We believe this franchise phenomenon can potentially provide significant and ongoing upside, not just for our horror and streaming business, but also as a recurring cash cow for the company that will support our investments in content, channels and technology.

Speaker 1

And with

Speaker 2

that, I'll now turn things over to Mark. Mark?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Chris. For the fiscal Q4 ended March 31, 2024, Syniverse reported total revenues of $9, 900, 000 compared to $12, 500, 000 in the prior year period and for fiscal year 2024, total revenues were $49, 100, 000 compared to $68, 000, 000 in the prior year. As a reminder, fiscal year 2023 included material non recurring revenue of approximately $4, 000, 000 related to Terrifier 2 and $12, 000, 000 related to our legacy Digital Cinema business, which were not present in fiscal year 2024. When excluding the impact of Terrifier 2 and Digital Cinema, the decrease in revenue was primarily due to the impact of our advertising revenue from the intentional elimination of certain lower margin channels via portfolio optimization and reallocating those resources to higher performing and higher margin streaming properties, which is important to our goal of achieving sustainable profitability in the near term. We are cautiously optimistic for double digit revenue growth fiscal year 2025 as the economy improves, interest rates decline and with the expected improvement in the advertising market in a political year.

Speaker 3

Subscription based revenues increased 3 percent to $3, 400, 000 for the quarter and 25 percent to $13, 500, 000 for the fiscal year, driven by the continued success of our enthusiast streaming services. Advertising base revenues declined 10% to $2, 900, 000 for the quarter and 34% to $12, 500, 000 for the full year, primarily due to our channel optimization efforts and the continued impact of the current economic environment on advertising spend. During the Q4, we hired a new SVP of advertising and we are already seeing a material improvement in our direct ad sales results. Eric will provide additional details on the operational drivers behind those financial results. As Chris mentioned, our direct operating margin for the quarter was 79%, an increase sorry, an increase from 48% in the prior year quarter, which is in excess of our previously reported guidance of 45% to 50% for fiscal year 2024.

Speaker 3

Our improved direct operating margin is a direct result of our cost optimization initiatives referred to earlier in addition to a 1 time benefit in our estimated royalty related accruals during the Q4. We expect our direct operating margin in future quarters to return to our previously stated targeted margins of 45% to 50%. SG and A expenses decreased $1, 000, 000 or 13% for the quarter compared to the prior year quarter and $8, 900, 000 or 24% for the year compared to the prior year. Again, this improvement is a direct result of the cost optimization initiatives discussed previously. We expect our SG and A expenses to remain relatively flat in the fiscal year 2025 even with expected revenue growth as we continue to leverage offshoring efforts in Syniverse Services India.

Speaker 3

As Chris mentioned, the company recorded a $14, 000, 000 non cash non recurring impairment to goodwill. The goodwill impairment was required by U. S. GAAP as a result of our market capitalization being significantly below our book value. This triggered a required impairment assessment under U.

Speaker 3

S. GAAP. Again, this is non cash non recurring. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $1, 600, 000 compared to negative $900, 000 for the same quarter last year and $4, 400, 000 for the full year 2024 compared to $100, 000 for the prior year reflecting the continued impact or as our of our cost savings initiatives even in a down revenue year. We had $5, 200, 000 in cash and cash equivalents on our balance sheet as of March 31 and $6, 300, 000 outstanding on our working capital facility.

Speaker 3

Subsequent to year end, we extended the maturity date of our working capital facility with East West Bank to September 2025. As you recall last quarter, we also expanded the size of our facility from $5, 000, 000 to 7, 500, 000 dollars We appreciate our relationship with East West Bank and the confidence they are showing by extending maturity date and expanding the size of our facility, which increases our financial flexibility and liquidity and is a testament to our improving financial position and creditworthiness. During the year, our cash flow used in operations was $10, 600, 000 of which $7, 800, 000 was related to investments in our content portfolio via advanced and or minimum guarantee payments, the largest being for TerraFire III. For the Q4, our cash flow used in operations was $881, 000 when excluding our content portfolio spend, showing just how close we are to being sustainably cash flow positive. We expect to be operating cash flow positive for the full fiscal year 2025.

Speaker 3

I also want to remind everyone that during the Q4, our Board of Directors approved 1 year extension of our stock repurchase program. Our stock repurchase program was approved to purchase 500, 000 shares and now expires in March 1, 2025. Subsequent to year end, we repurchased 184, 000 shares under this program. With a book value of $32, 000, 000 and a market cap of around $11, 000, 000 we continue to believe our stock is significantly undervalued and we'll continue to repurchase shares under our program during open trading windows and as cash availability permits. With that, I'll turn the floor over to Eric to discuss the market environment and our growth initiatives.

Speaker 4

Thank you, Mark. Last quarter, I discussed our progress with MatchPoint, our proprietary streaming technology platform. We continue to see strong demand for Matchpoint's capabilities, particularly in enabling streaming companies to effectively manage and monetize their content libraries at scale on a SaaS basis. Since last quarter, additional opportunities have arisen where Matchpoint grants us a clear competitive advantage. In a very short time, we're now making significant strides in leveraging Matchpoint to meet the growing need for high quality training material and rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Speaker 4

These large language models or LLMs that are powering major AI company products require exceedingly large volumes of video to teach them everything about the world around us. These LLMs need to be trained on everything from how a horse runs through the woods to a flow of pedestrians crossing a busy street intersection or the movement and sounds of how an ocean wave crashes on a sandy beach and so on. The most effective way of doing so requires movie and television content, which by its own nature encompasses the full human experience in extremely high quality and consistency. By combining our vast independent film library, proprietary content distribution technology and extensive experience as a content aggregator, we find ourselves uniquely positioned to provide these leading AI developers with the most expansive and high quality video training datasets available without the legal encumbrances hindering the major Hollywood studios. Industry research projects that the market for AI training data could reach $5, 000, 000, 000 by 2, 030 with video data playing a major crucial role.

Speaker 4

We believe this presents an enormous opportunity for Syniverse and we are actively engaged with leading LLM developers today and our extensive roster of content licensers to serve as a key supplier within the AI training data space. Over the past quarter, we significantly expanded our Matchpoint sales team, bringing on Brandon Topping as our new Head of Matchpoint Sales. Brandon is an industry veteran with over 20 years of experience rapidly growing SaaS businesses and has an impressive network of key relationships that will be invaluable as we focus on scaling Matchpoint. Our sales efforts have centered around Dispatch, our powerful content orchestration solution with an emphasis on enabling customers to maximize their advertising revenue. We have built a robust pipeline of promising leads and anticipate closing our first key sales from these initiatives in the very near future.

Speaker 4

I also want to provide a quick update on CineSearch, our AI powered video search and discovery platform that I previewed last quarter. CineSearch is currently in limited beta release as we fine tune the underlying models and algorithms deliver the highest quality user experience. We've also kicked off a series of Phase 2 development sprints, which are focused on adding voice in, voice out support, enabling the service to be integrated into televisions and integrating additional metadata partners for more nuanced content recommendations. In addition, we're implementing additional integrations that will further enhance Synapse Search personalization capabilities by importing a user's viewing history from key streaming services to aid the built in machine learning capabilities. We've taken user feedback to help refine the product interface and added additional functionality that we'll be unveiling this summer.

Speaker 4

Looking ahead, we're laying the groundwork to make Synasearch available through various cloud marketplaces later this year, which will provide another avenue to drive product adoption and revenue. We're also exploring the possibility of offering the entire suite of Match Point products through these marketplaces and are currently in the evaluation process. Now let me provide you an update on our streaming performance and new initiatives from the past quarter. Our digital and streaming business reached $9, 100, 000 during the quarter, up 24.7% over the prior year quarter. This was driven by growth in our subscription, podcasting and digital distribution revenues from monetizing our 80, 000 plus title library.

Speaker 4

Subscription revenues saw an increase to 3, 400, 000 up 3% over last year. Our overall subscriber count has reached approximately 1, 440, 000 subs, a growth of over 16% over the prior year quarter. This was predominantly due to growth in subscribers during the quarter on Dove, Midnight Pulp and the retrocrush streaming services. We expect to see a significant increase in subscribers through the launch of Terrifier 3 in the back half of the year as well as additional contribution from the launch of our Cineverse branded service on Amazon channels in the coming months. Terrifier 2 added approximately several 100, 000 subscribers upon launch and we anticipate exceeding that number with the highly anticipated 3rd installment of the franchise due to improvements in our release strategy during this release.

Speaker 4

Ad based revenues experienced a dip to $2, 900, 000 a decrease of 10% over the prior year. This decline reflects the impact from channel portfolio optimization as discussed earlier as well as the macro impact on programmatic due to a large amount of inventory released in the beginning of the year that have hurt CPMs and fill rate. This however was offset by a 62% increase in podcasting related revenues, which reached 765 ks during the quarter. Given we have just started our efforts to scale monetization in that business on top of a very large user base of more than 12, 000, 000 listeners per month, we believe this vertical will not only offset some of the short term programmatic CTV softness, but it will also be the fastest growing part of our ad business in the second half of this year. Additionally, we continue to shift our ad revenue mix away from open market programmatic, the programmatic guaranteed, private marketplace and direct advertising deals.

Speaker 4

We now have strong sales leadership in place and a national sales team with a robust pipeline, and we expect to see the fruits of these efforts drive revenue growth over the next several quarters. During the quarter, we continue to focus on achieving sustainable profitability in streaming, and we continue to exceed our gross margin targets reaching 59% in our streaming business. We expect to further improve those margins as we further optimize our content spend and also make changes to our vendor and operating relationships. We still think there's another $1, 200, 000 to $1, 500, 000 in additional operating expense we can make over the next few quarters. Both of these changes we believe will keep operating margins firmly at or above our target range of the mid-50s for the streaming business.

Speaker 4

At those levels, we expect to maintain positive operating income in the fruits as the fruits of our sales focus initiatives bear out. On the distribution front, we made considerable progress expanding the reach of both our audio and video content during the quarter. We secured carriage agreements for the dog whisperer channel with nearly all major hardware manufacturers and fast streaming services in North America and expect to achieve 100% coverage within the next quarter. The channel has outperformed our top channels by up to 40% on key platforms and we expect it will quickly become 1 if not our highest revenue fast channel. We plan to fully localize and distribute this channel globally as various territorial rights revert to us in the coming quarters.

Speaker 4

We also achieved initial contractual placements for the Sid and Marty Croft channel and GoPro and given the strong market demand for both retro content and sports programming, we expect significant distribution expansion by the end of the year. Additionally, our kids vertical has seen tremendous success with nearly 45, 000, 000 streamed in its 1st month. We anticipate further growth in this business on developing new advertising products focused on monetizing kids and family content. On the direct sales front, as noted, we tripled the size of our direct advertising sales force with experienced executives and in the quarter closed major campaigns with Focus Features, Amazon Prime Video, SimpliSafe, Home Security, 20th Century Fox, Master Class, 824 Studios and many more. We expect to see a significant percentage of our inventory shift to higher margin direct sales over the next few quarters, particularly in Q2 and Q3.

Speaker 4

Additionally, we're expanding our sales team to help handle the rapidly growing footprint of our podcast network, which currently ranks number 7 in North America in terms of download volume at 12, 000, 000 monthly downloads. We believe there is significant revenue upside in this business that we'll be able to realize as we focus on increasing monetization over the next several quarters. In summary, we continue to make exciting progress across our technology, streaming and content initiatives with the growing demand for AI training data, the expansion of our Matchpoint sales team, the ongoing development of Synapsearch, successful launch and distribution of new channels and verticals, and our focus on direct sales and podcast monetization, we are well positioned to drive significant growth and value creation. We look forward to sharing further updates on these fronts in the coming quarters. With that, operator, let's open it up for Q and A.

Operator

Perfect. We will now begin the question and answer session. And the first question is from the line of Dan Kurnos with The Benchmark Company. You may proceed.

Speaker 5

Great. Thank you. Good afternoon. And appreciate all the color on the call, guys. Chris, I just want to go back to your comments your opening comments around TerraFire III and then some areas where you might lean in.

Speaker 5

Obviously, it's early to kind of size that. You've given us some yardsticks both as it relates to Terrifier 2 and obviously the expanded screens. But if there's any way for us to think about either quantitatively how much bigger and or better this might be? And then subsequently, as you mentioned, given that this is sort of a long tailed franchise and you've got a lot of these growth initiatives coming up, how much of that might you reinvest and what would be sort of your key priorities this year? Thanks.

Speaker 2

That was a very long question, Dan. Thank you. So Terrifier, as I said, we think we know what we have this time. And so we've reacted accordingly in terms of developing a marketing and distribution plan that we hope is going to provide bigger returns, not just in theatrical, but also across the whole spectrum. Eric mentioned ScreamBox, VOD, DVD, on and on and on.

Speaker 2

So I think it's important to note, even though this 1 was more expensive for us than the last 1, we break we have a breakeven on this given our plan that's well below the box office we generated in the last 1. And we fully expect to generate at least as much box office revenue as the last 1 and hopefully significant more. Of course, there's a multiplier effect on that when you perform that well at the box office with the ancillaries. I'm not going to give you specific financial information, return information. We never do that at any particular property.

Speaker 2

But I think ultimately going forward each tariff hire that we release and hopefully there'll be more beyond the next 1 can generate enough cash for us that's comparable to 1 or 2 of the equity raises that we've done historically. And the bulk of that money will be spent back against the key initiatives we've been talking about, second part of your question, podcast business, developing new technology and AI tools and new content and channel investments. We talked about calling channels, but we really sort of established ourselves in the marketplace as the leading independent streaming and technology company that exists out there right now. People are looking at how well the dog risk is performing. And we have conversations going on right now with some very, very high quality entertainment people who have ideas about bigger channels platforms above and beyond just a single channel approach.

Speaker 2

So hopefully we can get 1 or 2 of those over the line as well. So we're going to we'll take the money from our cash cow and hopefully it all works out. Again, as I said, the movie business is unpredictable, but we think with a risk reward profile on Terrifier and the upside is far greater than the downside. And we'll reinvest that money back on content and streaming channels, technology, making sure we have the best sales team in place as well as people. And so those really are our priorities going forward.

Speaker 5

That's super helpful. Can you just dig a little bit deeper into kind of podcast? I mean, the financials this quarter suggests that and what you put in your in the press release show that you guys are accelerating pretty substantially and then you gave us some more metrics around how big it is relative to the market size. But this is growing very fast. It's been a tough area to monetize, but just help us think through your ambitions there.

Speaker 2

Well, it has been a tough area for us to monetize because again, the risk of work profile of the podcast that we're doing, since we're not paying Joe Roganter, anybody, talent is very, very strong and that's why we've invested in the business and we've built it so quickly. But I'll let Eric respond to the podcast question because that's an area that he manages and is particularly focused on. Eric?

Speaker 4

Sure. So I think you're right. Historically, the podcast business had been relatively slow to mature. I think 1 of the things that is different about our approach is most of the networks out there are large networks that are comparably sized to us, right? So just to give context, as in the number 7 range in our download range, we're kind of sandwiched in the monthly download range between Disney and NBC in terms of monthly downloads.

Speaker 4

Monetization wise, we're newbies in terms of being at the scale where we could start to command the CPMs and premiums that the big players are. But I think our strategy is pretty simple. We're getting really good. We have a really good and experienced team. You heard from you heard in our prepared remarks, we've been leaning into the entertainment sector, advertising entertainment around targeted entertainment verticals is a really good strategy.

Speaker 4

And 1 of the things that we're finding is bundling podcast with CTV and display, plus activations like live events and other things, live streams. Those kinds of things are very appealing to advertisers, and it's a much easier sell than just selling CTV or just selling podcasts. And so the other thing is our shows have very deep devoted listener bases. We particularly focus on our biggest shows are either non fiction or very high quality producer driven weekly shows. These shows, I think, are very different from a lot of the kind of talking head, kind of talk radio style podcasts that are out there.

Speaker 4

These are engaged. We're doing with a network of 40 something shows, as many as more than our peers that have hundreds of shows in terms of download volume. So we think that the steady state revenue out of this base is quite substantial and we're monetizing a very small percentage of it. So this year, it's really leveraging our direct sales team, ramping up our programmatic and host read efforts pretty aggressively and really just doing more of what we've been doing just at a bigger scale.

Speaker 5

Got it. Yes, cross screen is all the rage, Eric, for sure. Last 1 for me and then I'll step aside. I'll stick with you, Eric. You did give us some sizing or color around sort of the match point initiatives before.

Speaker 5

I really appreciate the update today. And it sounds like you're nearing maybe the start of the next phase. It feels a little earlier than we would have anticipated. Just kind of curious if that's the right way to think about it and how quickly, if at all, things have changed from a scaling perspective?

Speaker 4

Yes. So I think 1 of the big market impetuses is pulling a lot of business forward pretty rapidly. That impetus is a market need for 1 of our core products, dispatch. To give you the very high level view, Dispatch is our orchestration platform that moves large volumes of content and does a lot of processing around that content to make it ready for monetization, whether you're enriching it with metadata for targeting or dynamic advertising placement, other things that we're doing to it ranging from that to even the most advanced stuff we're doing in AI. There's a huge amount of demand for this as most of the OEM platforms that started out in fast are rapidly with all of the inventory coming on board from Amazon and Netflix.

Speaker 4

They're rapidly looking to scale up their competing AVOD offerings. So there's a huge market demand to push tens of thousands of pieces of content for all of these major services and none of them have an automated platform to do this. So we think there's a huge opportunity to pull that business forward. And so we have the right sales team, there's a huge market demand and the right product, we think that's going to accelerate things just given the there's a ticking clock to get everything done for the end of the year. So we think that should be very advantageous to us.

Speaker 5

Got it, Eric. I appreciate it. Thank you and thank you, Chris. Sounds like some good momentum on a much better cost basis.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Dan.

Operator

The next question is from the line of Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners. You may proceed.

Speaker 6

Hi, this is Kevin in for Brian. Thanks for taking our questions. First, can you talk about the adoption by streaming platforms for your newest channels such as the Dog Whisper, MeatEater and Sid and Marie growth? And then in addition to adoption, what about viewership?

Speaker 2

Do you want to take that, Eric?

Speaker 4

Yes, sure. I'll take that. So for our newest channels, I gave a little bit of a preview. I'll give you a little more color on that. So Dog Whisperer, really we've always had the business we've had, we've always had the Bob Ross has sort of been the penultimate benchmark and flagship channel.

Speaker 4

So with Dog and that's really because of its evergreen nature, people watch multiple episodes or they leave it on in the background as a companion. And so 1 of the things that we've been looking for is what's the next service that we have that fits that bill. And we believe we have that with the Dog Whisperer. It is performing at or exceeding both Bob Ross and a lot and all of our other channels everywhere where we've placed it so far. And we think it's the right mix of content that is just bingeable and evergreen and kind of perfect as a fast play.

Speaker 4

So, I can't disclose the total streaming minutes on that or any individual property, but I can say that it is we believe that is our new number 1 property if it continues to perform this way. So that's that channel. Basically, we expect 100% carriage on that channel in this we think it will be in this quarter, which is pretty fast for carriage distribution. Sid and Marty Croft, we are continuing to we launched the first foray in the on demand space. So we've had a couple of announcements there as well as packaging some of the very popular shows into 3rd party channels.

Speaker 4

So the distribution is just really getting started on that 1. It's the content there, while popular, is appeals to sort of an older nostalgia audience. So we're really focusing on the platforms where that fits and matches the demo. So we're starting we would expect to see more traction over the next couple of quarters leading into the fall and winter. In terms of GoPro, we really just started distribution on that channel most recently.

Speaker 4

And for that channel, we've seen as all of the major platforms really have increased their demand for sports, sports related and adjacent content. That's really what GoPro is. It's really outdoor sports. So we're seeing an incredible amount of demand for that from when we expect to have pretty considerable distribution by year end. MeatEater, same situation, kind of fits that same bill, fits a cross section that's kind of fast growing and appealing.

Speaker 4

The performance has been very strong on the platforms that we've placed it. So we'll see we'll continue to see the ongoing distribution of that throughout the rest of the year.

Speaker 6

Great, thanks. Last quarter, you mentioned these new channels have the potential to add more than $10, 000, 000 of annual revenue. Do you think do you have more confidence you can achieve this with the new channel set, less confidence? Or is your view unchanged and why?

Speaker 4

I would say on an annualized run rate, I don't think we're going to give guidance around the portfolio in terms of a dollar amount. I think we're getting too discrete on that. I would say that given the strength of Dog Whisperer and GoPro, I feel very strongly that these will be pretty big drivers in improving and continuing to improve our top line gross margin. I would say that $10, 000, 000 annualized number is probably a little further out than in this fiscal year. But I think given the mix of channels we have and new channels that we're going to be adding, I think that kind of an overall top line number is in terms of new business.

Speaker 4

In the near term, it's potentially possible when you take all the new business in totality into effect.

Speaker 6

Great. Thank you very much.

Operator

There are no further questions remaining. So I'll pass the conference back over to the management team for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thanks. Thanks, operator. This is Chris. Thank you all for joining us today. Please feel free to reach out to Julie Milstead if you have any additional questions.

Speaker 2

We look forward to speaking to you all again on our next quarterly call. Thank you.

Operator

That concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.

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