CuriosityStream NASDAQ: CURI reported a slight year-over-year increase in first-quarter revenue and reiterated that it is prioritizing larger licensing opportunities, particularly around artificial intelligence datasets, even as that approach contributed to uneven quarterly results.
On the company’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call, President and CEO Clint Stinchcomb said CuriosityStream remains focused on building toward “$100 million or more of reliable, recurring, and increasingly predictable annualized revenue.” He said the company made deliberate decisions in the quarter that affected near-term revenue but, in management’s view, improved its medium- and long-term revenue opportunity.
Revenue for the quarter was $15.2 million, compared with $15.1 million in the prior-year period. Chief Financial Officer Brady Hayden said subscription revenue was $8.8 million, roughly equivalent to the fourth quarter, while licensing revenue was $6 million, up 11% from a year earlier.
CuriosityStream reported adjusted EBITDA of $0.9 million, marking its fifth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted free cash flow was $1.3 million, the company’s ninth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted free cash flow.
Licensing Strategy Weighed on Timing, Management Says
Stinchcomb said the first quarter reflected a “pilot-oriented approach” to certain large-scale partner agreements. He said CuriosityStream entered into pilot and framework agreements with large partners involving “broader and more valuable datasets,” prioritizing the scope and expansion potential of those relationships over maximizing upfront revenue recognition.
“We believe that was the right trade-off,” Stinchcomb said, adding that these pilot structures give partners a way to test, validate and scale across a wider range of CuriosityStream assets.
He acknowledged that AI licensing revenue would remain uneven from quarter to quarter, describing it as “lumpy,” particularly when dealing with larger partners, broader rights packages and more complex data products. However, he said CuriosityStream entered agreements with a broader roster of partners than it had at the same point last year, which he called a meaningful indicator of demand and market validation.
Stinchcomb said the company’s licensing discussions now include assets such as production-grade temporal ground truth tokens for model training and tuning, HDR video, matched raw and finished video, multi-camera video and egocentric video for physical AI training.
He characterized CuriosityStream’s content base as a differentiated library with rights to more than 3 million hours of premium factual content, sports, news, general entertainment, animation and film, supported by more than 200 content and data partners. He said the company does not view its content as “commodity inventory” and does not believe it should be discounted for temporary gain.
Margins Improve, Net Loss Driven by Stock Compensation
Hayden said first-quarter gross margin improved to 56% from 53% a year earlier. He said distribution costs were lower, although CuriosityStream invested in certain technology products during the quarter that increased costs in the period but are expected to reduce fees going forward.
Combined advertising and marketing plus general and administrative expenses rose 27% from a year earlier. Hayden said the increase was driven by a $2.2 million non-cash stock-based compensation charge, or about $0.04 per share, as well as slightly higher advertising costs tied to new customer acquisition investments.
The company reported a first-quarter net loss of $1.3 million, or $0.02 per share, compared with net income of $0.3 million in the first quarter of 2025. Hayden said the net loss was primarily driven by the non-cash stock-based compensation charge.
Dividend Raised as Balance Sheet Remains Debt-Free
Stinchcomb said CuriosityStream is raising its quarterly dividend by $0.005 to $0.085 per share and intends to pay 2026 dividends from cash generated by operations, as it did in 2024.
Hayden said the company paid its regular $4.9 million dividend in March and repurchased $300,000 of its shares during the quarter. CuriosityStream ended the quarter with $23.4 million in total cash and securities and no outstanding debt.
Based on the new quarterly dividend and the prior day’s closing stock price, Hayden said the dividend yield was more than 11%.
Hayden also said CuriosityStream expects to consolidate ownership of its German business by buying Spiegel and Autentic out of their stakes sometime in the next few months. He said the purchase price would be approximately $1.9 million and that the company expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings.
Company Issues 2026 Revenue and EBITDA Outlook
CuriosityStream said it expects first-half 2026 revenue of $35 million to $41 million and full-year revenue of $75 million to $80 million. The company also expects adjusted EBITDA of $5 million to $7 million in the first half and $16 million to $20 million for the full year.
Stinchcomb said management expects 2026 to represent a significant step-up in both revenue and cash flow compared with 2025. He said subscription revenue is expected to increase by single-digit percentages, while licensing is expected to become the larger growth engine and surpass subscriptions for the full year.
He cited several factors supporting the outlook, including new pricing and packaging, a partner launch pipeline with global distributors, accelerating AI licensing fulfillments, new partner additions, continued corpus expansion and advertising opportunities.
Subscription Business Remains Part of Strategy
During the question-and-answer portion of the call, Stinchcomb said CuriosityStream’s licensing initiatives do not affect subscriber retention. He said both the licensing and subscription businesses require new content and are “synergistic.”
In response to analyst questions about the company’s streaming price increase, Stinchcomb said CuriosityStream is seeing a positive response, with minimal churn and an increase in lifetime value. He said the company remains “largely agnostic” about subscriber acquisition channels and optimizes for overall subscription revenue growth, noting that direct subscribers provide the highest average revenue per user, channel store subscribers offer lower customer acquisition costs and wholesale subscribers provide longer-term recurring revenue.
Asked about the rationale for remaining in the subscription business given the growth of AI licensing, Stinchcomb said subscriptions are reliable, recurring and predictable, and that the business is already built. He said the subscription operation does not detract from licensing and is important to CuriosityStream’s broader content library and partner relationships.
On AI licensing longevity, Stinchcomb said some of the company’s best customers are among its oldest customers because their orders are broadening. He said CuriosityStream was preparing its 10th delivery to one early partner and said demand for physical AI training content could bring additional companies into dataset licensing.
About CuriosityStream NASDAQ: CURI
CuriosityStream, Inc NASDAQ: CURI is a global streaming media company specializing in factual content across science, nature, history and technology. Founded in 2015 by John Hendricks, the founder of the Discovery Channel, CuriosityStream offers on-demand documentaries, series and short-form programming designed to inform and entertain viewers with high-quality educational content. The company's library features both original productions and licensed titles, covering topics such as space exploration, wildlife conservation, archaeology and cutting-edge scientific research.
Since its launch, CuriosityStream has expanded its reach to subscribers in more than 175 countries, delivering content in multiple languages and via a range of platforms.
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