Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. (WBD) Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. (NASDAQ: WBD) Q2 2025 Earnings Call dated Aug. 07, 2025

Corporate Participants:

Andrew Slabin — Executive Vice President, Global Investor Strategy

David Zaslav — President and Chief Executive Officer

Gunnar Wiedenfels — Chief Financial Officer

JB Perrette — Chief Executive Officer and President, Global Streaming and Games

Analysts:

Robert Fishman — Analyst

Jessica Reif Ehrlich — Analyst

Michael Ng — Analyst

John Hodulik — Analyst

Richard Greenfield — Analyst

David Joyce — Analyst

Bryan Kraft — Analyst

Peter Supino — Analyst

Presentation:

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Warner Bros. Discovery Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Andrew Slabin, Executive Vice President, Global Investor Strategy. You may now begin.

Andrew Slabin — Executive Vice President, Global Investor Strategy

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Warner Bros. Discovery’s Q2 earnings call. Joining me today is David Zaslav, President and Chief Executive Officer; Gunnar Wiedenfels, Chief Financial Officer; and JB Perrette, CEO and President, Global Streaming and Games.

Today’s presentation will include forward-looking statements that we made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements may include comments regarding the Company’s future business plans, prospects, and financial performance and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. For additional information on factors that could affect these expectations, please see the Company’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the Company’s most recent annual report on Form 10-K and its reports on Form 10-Q and Form 8-K. In addition, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the closest can be found in our earnings release and in our trending schedules, which can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website.

And with that, I’m pleased to turn the call over to David.

David Zaslav — President and Chief Executive Officer

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us. Our top strategic objectives have always been clear: to be the premier home for the world’s most creative talent, both in front of and behind the camera to operate as the world’s largest, highest-quality maker and producer of film and television, and to distribute those stories to audiences worldwide through a globally scaled, profitable streaming service.

In the second quarter and in the early weeks of the third quarter, Warner Bros. led with strong momentum in delivering on all three of those objectives. We’re seeing that momentum at Motion Pictures, where Warner Bros. became the first studio ever to open five consecutive films with more than $45 million in domestic box office.

We’re seeing that at the Emmys, where Warner Bros. TV led all studios in nominations and HBO set a new record with 142 nominations. We’re seeing it in the strong critical and fan response to Superman, which begins an exciting new era for DC Studios, and we’re thrilled to share that James Gunn is already writing and preparing to direct the next installment within the Super family. And we’re seeing it at HBO Max, which again added more than 3.4 million subscribers in Q2 as it continues to launch in markets around the world. This pattern of creative success is the result of a three-plus-year attack plan aimed at enhancing every dimension of our creative culture and storytelling business.

From HBO to Warner Bros. Television to Warner Pictures and from animation to DC Studios, we’ve invested in our studio’s creative and operational capabilities. As a result, our Studios business is now on track to deliver at least $2.4 billion in adjusted EBITDA in 2025, with our sights set on our $3 billion goal. We have transformed HBO Max and have our streaming business on track to exceed $1.3 billion in adjusted EBITDA in 2025 and reach over 150 million subscribers by the end of 2026. And from CNN to TNT Sports, we are bringing innovation to news, sports, and unscripted programming as we work to optimize our global networks. All the while, we’ve dramatically delevered our balance sheet from over 5 times net leverage to 3.3 times now, the lowest since our merger closed.

As we continue to navigate generational disruption and move forward with splitting into two independent publicly-traded companies in 2026, our current momentum will help position both future organizations for long-term success.

With that, we look forward to your questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Robert Fishman with MoffettNathanson. Please go ahead.

Robert Fishman

Good morning. I have one question for each company in Warner Bros. and Discovery. Can you talk about your content licensing strategies? David, you shared in the letter that the $5 billion annual library revenues from Warner Bros. TV and film, and balancing that trade-off. So would you be more open to licensing the Warner Bros. and HBO content to third-party streamers now going forward?

And then for Gunnar, can you talk about your approach to overall content licensing, but especially with regards to your sports rights, especially in light of the potential of sub-licensing these rights to ESPN or other streamers? Thanks so much.

David Zaslav

Thanks, Robert. Well, look, one of the great building blocks of our studio business is we have the largest TV and motion picture library in the world. And that is like a long-cycle business that we can look at as a steady stream. Having said that, we’ve made a number of judgments, including this year, where we’ve opted to sell significantly less than we could into the streaming market as well as the traditional market, because we’re seeing such growth and we’re driving towards such growth for our studio business, which includes our streaming HBO Max. And so we think in order to differentiate HBO Max, it’s important that there are a wealth of properties — quality properties that reinforce you only get this at HBO Max. And that’s working for us in terms of driving growth. It’s working for us as people more and more seeing HBO Max as the premier quality service around the world and storytelling. And so it’s really a decision to fight for asset value and growth rather than near-term value. And we did walk away, and I expect that we will continue to because we’re seeing very good trends as we grow around the world.

Gunnar Wiedenfels

Yeah. And Robert, maybe just to add one point to what David said, and we tried to shed a little bit of light on this in our letter this quarter as well. It is important to understand that we have very significantly shifted the mix between external and internal content sales over the past three years, and that has sort of put pressure on our near-term financial results. But we have put a 10-digit figure of value in terms of intercompany profits parked on the balance sheet that’s going to come back into the P&L over the next few years as JB utilizes this content and Casey utilizes content on the HBO Max platform. So there’s — we have taken a short-term financial hit for some real value that’s going to flow through, and that’s a significant amount.

David Zaslav

One of the real, I think, advantages of running Warner as one company is HBO was the premier producer of quality storytelling, and Warner Bros. Television was the premier producer of TV series. But they didn’t work together very much. We now have Channing and Casey working together. So we innovated with the pit as a procedural that was very, very successful for us, and that will be coming back in January, nine months after 15 episodes came off. They’re working together with J. K. Rowling on Harry Potter, which is extremely promising and is already in production, and we’ll be doing 10 consecutive years. So this idea of aligning the best TV production — quality production company in the world and having some of that best work, not all of it, Ted Lasso shrinking, presumed innocent, we do a lot of content for others, but more coordination going to HBO Max for a net value and a net positive that will drive sustainable growth at HBO Max.

Gunnar Wiedenfels

All right. Great. And then, Robert, for Discovery Global, there were really two questions. One on general content licensing and then the sports question. Let me start with the entertainment content first. The one thing that has already happened is that I expect to become more of a factor going forward as a separate company is we are reimagining the U.S. networks portfolio really as a content engine around very strong unscripted brands and not so much as sort of just traditional linear networks. And as part of that, certainly all monetization forms will play a greater role, and content licensing is definitely one factor or one tool in the box here. So it is going to be a meaningful contribution going forward as we think about recovering our content investments.

I will say that for the current trends, 2024 was a year where we really started firing that up a little bit in 2024 also had some unusually high content licensing numbers. And that’s a factor that I also wanted to call out for the second-half year. We had $580 million of networks content sales in the second half of 2024, that’s above what a more normalized run-rate of roughly $200 million a quarter or so. So that’s definitely a factor as we think about the rest of the year and going forward.

On the sports side, again, never say never, but I will say the following. We love the sports portfolio that we have. Luis and the team have done great work restructuring this over the past two years, and we’ve got a very, very strong portfolio. You know all the key franchises. And it’s going to be even more important as we look at Discovery Global as a separate — standalone entity.

So we will continue with an important sports strategy. We will continue to be looking at investments with the same discipline that we have in the past. And with that, I think it’s unlikely that we will sub-license rights out. In fact, if you look at what we’ve done recently with the college football playoffs, the two games this year growing to five games next year, we have, if anything, taken on a little more. And then the final thing I’ll say is I don’t think there is a need to sublicense if that’s sort of the direction of your question. In fact, Luis and the team are working hard on developing the go-to-market approach to utilize our streaming rights going forward. And the broad strokes are, you know, it’s going to be a standalone product that we will be able to take direct to the consumer, but also bundle with HBO Max, with discovery+, potentially third parties, again, all in the spirit of making our content available to as many people as possible. So lots to work through and stay tuned.

Andrew Slabin

Great. Let’s go to the next question, please.

Operator

Your next question comes from Jessica Reif Ehrlich with Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich

Good morning. Thank you. I have two questions also. But David, look, you’ve been developing a lot and have a lot of franchises. You mentioned Harry Potter, now Superman. Can you talk about what else you see as future franchises and kind of like the halo effect that this success can have on the entire organization, from theatrical licensing, streaming, games, merchandise, et cetera?

And then Gunnar, like now that you’re becoming the CEO of Global Networks, it’s a segment that’s obviously been challenged from just the secular challenges. Can you talk about what you see as the like underappreciated opportunity for growth in this business?

David Zaslav

Thanks, Jessica. I’ve said all along that one of the assets that we have at this Company is that we have such — so much compelling storytelling IP that people know everywhere in the world, whether it’s Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Lord of the Rings, and then we’ll call those the big tentpoles, Harry Potter, and then smaller tentpoles like the Fugitive, Goonies, Gremlins that everybody knows. And a piece of our strategy is light up strategically those big tent poles so that we have two or three of those a year, which provide real stability.

We got a great script on Lord of the Rings with Peter Jackson that we’re already — that we’re moving forward on, and we’ll be giving you more detail on that. We’re working very hard on Wonder Woman. We all — we already have a big piece of the DC strategy laid out. But we effectively have four studios. So we have — so one is developing DC, we’ve talked about that. The second is Warner, and half of what Mike and Pam are doing is things like Lord of the Rings or Gremlins or Goonies or Practical Magic, going back to things people know, and the other half is new stories, like Sinners. And then we have New Line, which we — New Line is back to what they do better than anybody in the world, which is horror. And if you — for those of you that have a free moment this weekend, you know, go see Weapons and just hold-on to your seat because it’s an incredible ride. But they’re having — New Line is back in its lane and we expect to do a number of those a year together with some comedies, which is part of the great heritage of New Line, and then animation, with Cat in the Hat coming in January with Bill Hader. [Phonetic] And so we have a very balanced portfolio that’s much more focused on the economics of each of these and having that. And since our IP has been underused, no Superman in 14 years, no Lord of the Rings in 13 years, you know, that to go back and to be able to bring a lot of those franchises back to life and also tell new and original stories.

So we feel really good about where we are. And when we project this year for the Motion Picture Group, we’re conservative. We understand that the Motion Picture business, in the end, the audience will decide. We’ve had an extraordinary run. We were in last place, and we came — Mike and Pam and DC and New Line together went from last to first. You know, Disney is a little bit ahead right now, and we’re looking forward to it. We think what we think will be a good weekend, but we’re having — we’re really making the turn.

It’s been three years of investment, and you’re going to start to see these products roll out, and you’ll see them roll out strategically and with real focus on cost. And finally, we have a big advantage, I think, in the way that we’re marketing these films. We’ve spent years getting them ready, and we have a real global attack that you saw with Barbie, you saw with Wonka, you saw with Superman, you saw it with F1 when Apple came to us uniquely and wanted us to take it on. And so I think that we have real momentum there.

Gunnar Wiedenfels

Okay. And Jessica, on the global network side, look, it’s a legitimate question, of course, and the number-one question maybe. I have to tell you the thing that excites me the most about the future here is, I will have the privilege to work with maybe the greatest team I’ve ever seen in my career. I’ve known many of these people for years, and it’s a team that has a track record of fighting to win, and it’s a team that’s everywhere in the world. And I’ve spent a good part of my time over the past eight weeks traveling around and meeting a lot of the people across the Discovery Global footprint. And I can tell you the level of excitement, creativity, and energy that’s coming through in these meetings is off the charts. And one big factor here is that people understand that we’re building a group of assets here that is set up to thrive and continue to prosper on a standalone basis.

We’ve already talked about the changes we’re making to the perimeter, all of US sports coming with Discovery Global, discovery+ moving over. We have Bleacher Report, and we have an international free-to-air footprint with very different secular trends than what you’re seeing here in the US. So — and the ability to focus on these assets and nothing else is exciting me and is exciting the team everywhere, and with everybody I’ve spoken so far. And it won’t mean that we’re going to change the secular trends, but I do believe that there are very significant pockets of growth and opportunity, and we’ll work really hard over the next half year here to identify those and get in position to deliver what I think is going to be a much — a business with much more longevity than what the market sees right now.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich

Thanks.

Andrew Slabin

Great. Thanks, Jessica. Next question, please.

Operator

Your next question comes from Michael Ng with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Michael Ng

Hi. Good morning. Thank you for the question. I just have two. First on studio and live events. I was just wondering, given all the investments that you’re making in DC and the early success of the DC reboot. Are you revisiting what DC is doing in terms of theme parks and live events? I know there’s the licensing deal with Six Flags, but I guess the backdrop of something like the success of, you know, Harry Potter at Universal, just wondering if there was an opportunity to revisit what you’re doing with the DC franchises and parks? And then I have a quick follow-up.

David Zaslav

Thanks, Michael. We think there’s a tremendous amount of untapped value. First, generically, we have a lot of upside. We make about — when we took over three years ago, about $0.22 for every dollar that Disney makes in circulating their IP through the system, we’re up to about $0.30 now. Harry Potter is different. We’re extremely effective in monetizing that through gaming and through a very mutually beneficial deal with Universal and the Harry Potter parks that we have. And that was kind of a framework for us to go on the attack.

Bruce Campbell is running that business. We announced he will be the COO of our new business. And we think that’s a real growth opportunity for us. We’ve gotten back some of our rights that we’ve given to Six Flags and freed up DC in a way that we think can be very compelling. A lot of those rights weren’t tied up at all outside the US, and there we’re in different stages of deploying those assets.

We’re not going to build theme parks ourselves, but there are some like Harry Potter, those are — it’s not a theme park, but it’s — that’s — if you look at [Indecipherable] we went into Japan. Japan is — both of those are sold out for over a year. We’re looking at expanding that. And some of it will be either a little bit of ownership or licensing. We’re already doing something like that in Saudi Arabia, which is quite lucrative.

So the answer is yes. And there’s more than just DC and Harry Potter. And you saw it with Superman, the way Bruce and the team deployed Superman across all the merchandising elements, and it was quite effective, and we ended up with a lot more economic value.

Michael Ng

Great. Thank you, David. That’s very helpful. And then for Gunnar, I was just wondering if you could talk about the comments in the letter related to the HBO Max U.S. distribution deal restructuring. What was the nature of that, and what drives the reacceleration after the first half of ’26? Thank you.

Gunnar Wiedenfels

Yeah. Michael, it’s essentially as we laid out in the letter, we had a legacy deal with a former affiliated party and it’s not unusual once those come up for renewal that priorities shift and we’ve taken a bit of an adjustment of the rates and that’s what we wanted to call it out because it’s going to have a meaningful impact on our revenue growth for a 12-month period until we lap this deal. But it’s also important to note that we expect a reacceleration not only once we lap this deal, but also from the various market launches that we have in the pipeline beginning Q1 of 2026.

I don’t know, JB, anything… yeah.

David Zaslav

[Speech Overlap] want to add to that one quick thing. It’s not Saudi Arabia. It’s Abu Dhabi, so sorry about that. But go ahead, JB.

JB Perrette

Yeah. I think in terms of the HBO Max’s streaming profile, as Gunnar said, it will certainly dampen the growth rates for the second half of ’25. The reacceleration drivers are going to be starting in the first half of ’25, obviously, big new international launches coming from Europe. So on a global basis, we’ll start to see revenue reaccelerate in the first half and really in the first quarter of ’26, and then the U.S. growth will reaccelerate starting in the second half of ’26 as we lap that reset.

Michael Ng

Great. Thank you very much.

Andrew Slabin

Next question, please. Thanks, Michael.

Operator

Your next question comes from John Hodulik with UBS. Please go ahead.

John Hodulik

Thanks. Two, if I could. First, can you talk a little bit about some of the underlying drivers of ARPU? You’ve seen some more dilution as we move through the year here? And David, just your thoughts around the pricing power of the Max product?

And then maybe secondly, for Gunnar. Just — with the NBA law coming up in the fourth quarter, you called out the impact there. Just any other sort of color you can give us from either a revenue or overall profitability standpoint as you lap that contract? Thanks.

David Zaslav

So let me just start. The number-one objective was to establish HBO Max as the premier highest-quality storytelling platform and haven’t been the place that people go. And Casey and the team, HBO, Max, or HBO itself has never been stronger, has never had more hits. And so we’re really — they’re having a great run. And when we talked about it’s not how much, it’s how good. We’ve really delivered on that, and consumers are seeing it, and it’s translating into real demand and growth. But our strategy hasn’t been to try and raise a lot of price. We want the market to accept the product, to recognize it as high-quality, and then, first, to start to narrow down the ability for multiple users to be using the product. But yes, that when you have the highest-quality product in the market with big branded stories that people want to come back to, that they feel very passionate about, that gives us what we think is a very big upside over time to raise price on the highest-quality service.

But JB, why don’t you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in the market and how that will lay out?

JB Perrette

Yeah. I think the — to add on to it, I think the exciting thing for us is that obviously, post both COVID and then the strikes, I mean, look, we’ve all taken a little while to get our sea legs back and more consistent. And the combination of those being through and a refined and much more rigorous content strategy that’s based on 52 weeks a year of programming with a constantly iterating and better data sets to look at what’s working and what’s not working. We feel as we look ahead at the next 24 months of our slate, ’25, as we said, I think on previous calls, the slate was stronger than ’24 — ’26 looks stronger than ’25. And as we look at ’27 — the early parts of ’27, the engine just keeps getting better. And so, a lot of that, to David’s point.

We want to be smart around still making the product. We think there’s still a lot of upside in terms of the scale and penetration of the product. So we want to keep it affordable and grow penetration in these markets. But at the same time, with the quality of the slates, the return obviously to HBO Max as a brand and what that stands for from a premium standpoint, we do think there is obviously meaningful growth also coming from price acceleration over the next couple of years.

David Zaslav

Right. And then on the NBA deal, look, as a reminder, obviously, for many of these sports rides, the main monetization engine is the affiliate revenue. So if you look at just in advertising and content cost as a differential, those deals are loss-making from that perspective, right? So there is going to be a benefit from the NBA coming out of our financials.

If you think about how the season plays typically over the quarters, it’s important to note that Q2 with the playoffs is by far the biggest chunk, both of content cost and revenue generation on the ad sales side, followed by Q1, and then the smallest quarter is Q4.

So with that in mind and the fact that we have reinvested some of the savings into other sports rights, we mentioned a college football playoffs already, Big 12 in the fourth quarter. Now, what you can expect is roughly a $100 million sports cost-benefit in the fourth quarter, and then as we turn to 2026, there will be a net benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars from the rights costs coming out and some offsetting revenue losses from an EBITDA perspective. So, a very significant improvement.

Andrew Slabin

Thanks, John. Let’s move on.

Operator

Your next question comes from Richard Greenfield with LightShed Partners. Please go ahead.

Richard Greenfield

Thanks for taking the question. You know, I wanted to ask JB. As we look at the streaming landscape, there’s been a clear push towards wholesaling to MVPDs. I’m curious, how does the engagement look for those ad-supported subs that you’re bringing on versus those that sign up for HBO Max directly? And are you thinking about how you market to those subscribers who may not even realize they have Max, because it seems like there’s a substantial advertising opportunity if you can engage those wholesale subs in the service and certainly in the app.

And then just for David. One of your oldest pieces of IP that probably doesn’t generate a lot of revenue is going to be getting a pretty big makeover in a few weeks. I’m curious whether you’ve seen Wizard of Oz in the sphere, and any thoughts would be great.

David Zaslav

Sure. Let me just start with Wizard of Oz. Jimmy Dolan, in the spirit of the great Chuck Dolan, as an entrepreneur. I’ve been to the sphere many times. I’ve seen in the smaller sphere, The Wizard of Oz. We work together with them. They really get the credit. It’s a credit to Warner Bros. and the library that we have. We’re also looking at our own project around Wizard of Oz that we’ll talk about at some point. But it feels really great, it’s very exciting, it’s very innovative, and it premieres at the Sphere on the 28th. So very exciting.

JB?

JB Perrette

Yeah, Rich, as it relates to the wholesale partnerships, I guess a couple of thoughts. Number one is, when we look at any of those deals, we always look at it as on an LTV basis and sort of a net ARPU basis when you expect the natural SAC we would use to try and actually acquire those retail subscribers. And so every deal starts with a very healthy LTV profile of a wholesale sum versus what we think we get and what we have to spend to get on a retail basis. So that’s kind of the underlying. Then we do work to your point, increasingly on partnering with the different MVPDs and non-MVPD partners on activation, and we spend more and more time with them, with their customer service teams, with their UX and experienced teams on activation of the product. And we have seen great strides and improvements on activation across the board. And frankly, in all of some of our biggest, most recent partnerships, both in the U.S. and outside the U.S., we are trending above what we expected in terms of activation.

Obviously, then once we’re activated, the engagement is subject to both in-app marketing and merchandising as well as continued partnership marketing through the different partners. And then the other thing that we’ve seen that has been very healthy and also leads to better ARPU is in most — all those deals, we have upsell capabilities. And so we go from an ad-light product to an ability to actually upsell the customer, where we take the majority of the economics on the upsell to an ad-free, which also has an ability to drive more ARPU for us, particularly outside the U.S., where ad sales obviously is still a growth business, but it’s starting off a lower base.

So we have a full attack plan. We have a team actually, that we put around the world globally to go after trade marketing and partnerships to try and drive activation and engagement. And we’re seeing nice pickup in growth and acceleration of those as we do those deals around the world.

David Zaslav

The only thing I would add is that it’s different in different markets. For instance, in the U.K., a huge — a majority of programming outside of sports on Sky that was loved was HBO programming. So there’s some markets where people have been watching The Last of Us, Euphoria, White Lotus, House of the Dragon, and it was on a different platform, and now it’s going to move to HBO Max. And so you’d expect, in that case, when you have a huge engaged population that has been watching through, that group will be spending a lot more time watching. We’re seeing that in Australia. And then when it’s available on a platform as HBO Max, the retail picks up significantly because it’s like a marketing vehicle to say, oh, HBO Max is here. And so JB has been seeing that in Australia, and we’re getting very powerful pull-through in terms of consumer demand in the U.K., Germany, and Italy. And we’re in a lot of discussions in Italy and Germany, as well as we’re non-exclusive in the U.K. So you’ll be seeing those markets as quite powerful coming into next year because it has that unusual dynamic of an embedded audience.

JB, I don’t know if you want to add what — a little more to that on Australia, what we’re seeing practically.

JB Perrette

No, that’s right. I mean, in Australia, the launch was essentially a dual-track launch where we went obviously retail as well as through our partnership with Foxtel, which was, as David mentioned, our long-standing licensing partner. And so we love that double track of fishing in a pond that’s already stocked with our wholesale partners with good economics, and at the same time going direct in a smart way to expand the reach of the product. And Australia has been a great success story for us in these early months, and we exceeded our expectations.

So it makes us even more bullish of what we expect to see in the beginning of next year as we launch in these big European markets.

Richard Greenfield

Thank you.

Andrew Slabin

Thanks, Rich. Let’s go to the next question, please.

Operator

Your next question comes from David Joyce with Seaport Research Partners. Please go ahead.

David Joyce

Thank you. As you went through your upfront advertising negotiations, Gunnar, you still have the combined company for the next year, but how are you contemplating addressing marketers’ desire to advertise across platforms? Do you have something — some structure in place to sell the advertising on streaming and your global networks?

Gunnar Wiedenfels

Yes, David, it’s a great point, and that’s one of the areas that we looked at really hard as we contemplated the separation. And we concluded, and we’ve said publicly, we’re going to continue to go to the market as business-as-usual. We will have a structure in place. This is one of the areas where there is significant synergy.

When we announced the separation, we made clear that after all that hard work went into generating the synergy, we’re going to continue to work as hard to maintain a synergy opportunity where it is present. Ad sales is definitely one of those areas. So nothing is going to change from an advertiser perspective, and we’re working through the process to set that up internally.

And with the upfront in general, since you mentioned it, we obviously had some concerns going into the year with the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment. And the fact of the matter is the market has held up very well. We’ve seen prices up across all categories and more so in sports than in general entertainment. On the digital side, there is some price pressure, but we’ve maintained a very strong price premium for the quality of inventory that we’re delivering. So net-net, I’m very happy with the outcome.

Andrew Slabin

Great. Thanks, David. Next question, please.

Operator

Your next question comes from Bryan Kraft with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Bryan Kraft

Hi. Good morning. JB, I was wondering if you would comment on where the business is and bring churn down to what you view as a healthy, sustainable level, and also how you’re going about driving that churn down? And then, I guess somewhat related, I was hoping you could provide an update on where you are in the effort to convert unauthorized account shares into paying customers. What inning would you say you’re in there, and how meaningful do you see that opportunity as you go forward? Thank you.

JB Perrette

Yeah. I’ll start with the second, which is on the sort of account sharing. I’d say we’re just in the first inning. The reality is we’ve done — we spent a lot of the last several months making sure that our data sets on figuring out who is a legitimate user and who may not be a legitimate user and making sure that we test it sufficiently so that when we turn-on the more aggressive languaging around what needs to happen that we were actually putting the net in the right place so to speak. And we feel great about where we are.

Starting in September, you’ll actually start to see the messaging, which right now has been a fairly soft — cancelable messaging start to get more fixed and such that people have to take action, as opposed to right now sort of having it be a voluntary process. And so the real benefits will start probably in the fourth quarter and then kick in 2026 as we tighten the messaging and drive that in a much more aggressive fashion starting in the fourth quarter this year.

As it relates to churn, look, we continue to drive churn. I think one of the things in terms of the levers of how we go after it, there’s a number of different ways. First thing, obviously, you’ve heard David and all of us talk about the importance of bundles. We’ve been very successful, obviously, and you’ll see this more over the next few months. And as we prepare to roll out in Europe, obviously, we’ve had a very successful relationship with Disney here in the U.S. We’re in active conversations with a number of other leading streamers in international markets around bundles, and the profiles of those users see, in some cases, churn cut in half, if not greater, and LTV is double or more. And so bundles is one way we’ve seen great expansion of LTV and reduction in churn.

On engagement, obviously, being the number-one thing and the engagement driver that obviously matters most is around content. And as I mentioned earlier, as we look at the content slate and more the consistency of our content slate, we have had a couple of years where we’ve had great content, but bigger pockets of time throughout the year with more gaps. We’re now getting to a rhythm where, between Casey Slate, the theatrical slate, some third-party acquisitions, we have a much more consistent 52-week-a-year schedule where we’re doing a much better job of handing off consumers and subscribers from one set of content to other sets of content.

And so we’re doing a much more aggressive job on managing the programming and the scheduling throughout the year to reduce that, and then there’s enormous amount of work still to go on the product itself and the personalization of the product, which as I’ve said on previous calls, we went from not good to good, but we still have a ways to go in terms of the feature set and we’re developing and launching small and new features and AD testing a bunch of features every month-to try and get the product from good to great. And we know we still have progress there, which is both obviously a challenge, but also an opportunity that will help us drive that engagement.

And so it’s a — on the overall churn, we feel like we are — and we actually saw in the early the sort of May — the March, April, May, June timeframe, some really positive improvements on the churn side, but we’re not satisfied with where we are and we’re continuing to attack it aggressively across product, content, marketing — all the marketing levers that we have.

Andrew Slabin

Thank you. Next question, please.

Operator

Your final question comes from Peter Supino with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Peter Supino

Good morning, everybody. I wanted to ask you, David, please, about your Better Together view for DTC. At this point, it seems like it was present as the industry has continued to expand bundling. So, could you discuss the contribution to gross ads and maybe to churn of your wholesale or third-party strategy, and contrast that to your retail strategy, and maybe comment on how the partnership with Disney has tracked versus your expectations? Thank you.

David Zaslav

Thanks, Peter. Look, I think one of the things that really drives better together is common sense, a more robust slate that appeals to more consumers, but most importantly, the consumer experience. You put the TV set on and or you put on your device, and there’s 18 apps and you’re Googling to find out where your show is, where your sport is, or where the movie you want to watch is. And in all the research we do, it’s — people have adapted to it, but it’s a very clumsy consumer experience. And one of the reasons we have fought so hard over the last three years to be a truly global player. And there’s really only four or five global players right now, truly global players, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, YouTube, and us. And YouTube is in a different business now, but they do have a very powerful global attack. And being global really allows us to take things like Harry Potter to billions of people around the world. And as more and more of these regional players are looking at the cost of building a platform, the engineers, the marketing, and also how differentiated in many cases, we are from them, and how much stronger we are together, that it’s a much better consumer experience if we’re together in Latin America with global. [Phonetic]

We have local content in Brazil, we have local sports, but they have a huge amount of local content, and we have tremendous quality with content that’s loved down there. And that’s true as you go across Europe. And so I think a big piece of this will be cleaning up the consumer experience. We really expect, or I at least expect, that we’ll look at this business four or five years from now and it won’t be 18. [Phonetic] And I think the companies that are most successful will be global. Maybe there are some regionals that could eke out some profits, and there’ll be a lot of those smaller players that want to become part of the global players. And that’s what we’re seeing, you know, and we’re seeing it on an accelerated basis.

It may start with bundling, and that’s very effective. We’re doing much better with Disney than we thought. And I think then that it’s not just the churn, it’s consumer satisfaction, consumer experience. They’re going after — they have demos that we don’t have. We have demos that they don’t have. So it’s just better together. Some of it will be a result of consolidation in some markets, and some will be a white flag. I don’t want to lose money anymore, and I want to get back to what a lot of companies want to get back to what they do, which is just produce content and leave the direct-to-consumer fight, you know, to that global fight to others. So great.

Andrew Slabin

Thanks, David. Thanks, Peter. Operator?

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]