CuriosityStream Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Deliberate Q1 Trade-Off Sets Stage for AI Licensing Growth

Stacy, Conference Operator: Good afternoon. My name is Stacy, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the CuriosityStream First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that today’s call is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent background noise. I will now turn the call over to Vanessa Gillen, CuriosityStream’s Senior Vice President of Operations. Thank you. You may begin.

Vanessa Gillen, Senior Vice President of Operations, CuriosityStream: Thank you. Welcome to CuriosityStream’s discussion of its first quarter 2026 financial results. Leading the discussion today are Clint Stinchcomb, CuriosityStream’s Chief Executive Officer, and Brady Hayden, CuriosityStream’s Chief Financial Officer. Following management’s prepared remarks, we will take questions from the analyst community. First, I’ll review the safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. Please be aware that any forward-looking statements reflect management’s current views only, and the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update these statements, nor to make additional forward-looking statements in the future.

For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our investor relations website, as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in today’s press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, when filed. In addition, reference will be made to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures can be found on our website at investors.curiositystream.com. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be against our results for the comparable 2025 period. Now, I’ll turn the call over to Clint.

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Thank you, Vanessa. Financially, we remain focused on building CuriosityStream into a company with $100 million or more of reliable, recurring, and increasingly predictable annualized revenue. We’ve done a substantial amount of foundational work to position the company for that objective. We believe that with continued execution, the path is becoming clearer. To optimize toward that milestone target, we made several deliberate choices in Q1 that affected near-term quarterly revenue. In our view, strengthened the company’s medium and long-term revenue opportunity. This is why we guided to the first half of the year as compared to the first quarter. First, we entered into pilot and framework agreements with certain large-scale partners covering broader and more valuable datasets. This meant prioritizing the structure, scope, and expansion potential of the relationship over maximizing upfront revenue recognition in the quarter. We believe that was the right trade-off.

These pilot structures give partners a path to test, validate, and scale across a deeper and wider range of Curie assets, which we believe will lead to larger, more durable licensing relationships over the next year and beyond. Second, we made some modest technology investments that will not require to operate our business in Q1, we believe will enable us to accelerate provisioning and expand and maximize the scope, scale, specificity, and profitability of upcoming partnerships. Third, we developed and organized more licensable IP at considerable scale, most of which is 100% owned. This is important strategically as diversity of data and full ownership of more IP in our corpus strengthens margins, broadens our addressable partner roster, increases revenue potential, reduces reliance on any single transaction, and makes the licensing business more predictable over time. For Q1, revenue was $15.2 million, up slightly year-over-year.

Subscription revenue was roughly equivalent to the prior quarter. AI licensing revenue, which we have previously said would be lumpy, was indeed lumpy, and this was in light of the pilot-oriented approach we adopted during the quarter. Importantly, while the near-term revenue impact may not be immediately obvious, we entered into agreements with a broader roster of partners than we had at this stage last year. We view that as a meaningful indicator of demand and market validation. The breadth of assets now being discussed and packaged for partners has expanded considerably and includes hundreds of millions of production-grade temporal ground truth tokens for frontier model training and tuning, HDR video, matched raw and finished video, multi-camera video, and egocentric video for physical AI training.

Licensing revenue does not always move in a straight line quarter to quarter, especially when we are dealing with larger partners, new partners, broader rights packages, and more complex data products. Further, our corpus is built on assets that are scarce, rights-aware, difficult to replicate, and increasingly valuable. We are not talking about a single opportunistic window. We are talking about a monetization model anchored in premium unscripted and scripted media, enriched, structured metadata, flexible rights, and growing demand from AI developers and traditional media companies. CuriosityStream has built a large differentiated content library of rights to over 3 million hours of premium factual content, plus sports, plus news, plus general entertainment, animation, and film. Finished in raw, egocentric, and multi-camera, supported by more than 200 content and data partners and flexible licensing rights. This is not commodity inventory.

It is a scaled, unscrapable, curated corpus that took years of capital, relationships, editorial focus, and dense work to assemble. We don’t believe it makes sense to discount it for temporary gain. Enduring revenue streams are almost always rooted in assets that are hard to replace and expensive to rebuild. Looking ahead, Q1 sequential revenue decline was anticipated and we believe temporary. We currently expect 2026 to represent a significant step-up in both revenue and cash flow compared to 2025, with subscription revenue increasing by single-digit % and with licensing becoming the larger growth engine as it surpasses subscriptions for the full year. Several factors support this outlook.

The impact of our new pricing and packaging, which is just beginning to roll through our P&L, a solid partner launch pipeline with dominant global distributors, accelerating AI licensing fulfillments, new partner additions, continued expansion of our corpus, and the ramp of advertising opportunities. Visual media licensing remains healthy and diversified, while AI demand continues to broaden across model refresh cycles, enterprise fine-tuning, multimodal applications, source code, physical AI, video understanding, and the need for premium rights-aware structured data. Q1 was a transition quarter in which we deliberately chose to build for larger, broader, and more durable licensing opportunities. We believe those choices position CuriosityStream to generate stronger revenue, higher cash flow, and greater shareholder value as we move through 2026 and beyond. In summary, we believe that we will continue double-digit growth in both revenue and cash flow, driven by subscriptions and licensing expansion.

We continue to reduce expenses through non-essential eliminations in the embrace of evolving AI-infused productivity tools. While we are raising our quarterly dividend one-half cent to $0.085, we intend to pay 2026 dividends from cash generated by operations as we did in 2024. Our balance sheet remains strong with over $23 million in liquidity and no debt, giving us substantial flexibility. I’ll now hand the call over to our CFO, Brady Hayden.

Brady Hayden, Chief Financial Officer, CuriosityStream: Thanks, Clint. Good afternoon, everyone. Our full results will be in the 10-Q that we’ll file within the next few hours. Let me hit some of our first quarter highlights. As Clint said, in the first quarter, we reported revenue of $15.2 million, a slight improvement compared to $15.1 million a year ago. Likewise, we reported what is now our fifth quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, which came in at $0.9 million. Adjusted free cash flow came in at $1.3 million, which represented our ninth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted free cash flow. We generated first quarter subscription revenue of $8.8 million, roughly equivalent to Q4 results. Licensing came in at $6 million, an increase of 11% from last year.

First quarter gross margin was 56%, improving from 53% last year. While distribution costs were lower during the quarter, we invested in certain technology products that led to an increase for the quarter, but from which we believe we will incur lower fees going forward. Combined costs for advertising and marketing plus G&A were higher by 27% compared to last year. This increase was driven by a non-cash charge for stock-based compensation of $2.2 million, or about $0.04 on a per share basis, and to a lesser extent, slightly higher advertising costs associated with new customer acquisition investments in the quarter. We reported a first quarter net loss of $1.3 million, or $0.02 a share. This compares to a $0.3 million net income in the first quarter of 2025.

While our revenue was up from last year, the net loss was driven primarily by the non-cash SBC. As we said earlier, adjusted free cash flow was $1.3 million in the quarter, representing our ninth consecutive quarter of positive results in this metric. We believe our balance sheet remains in great shape. In March, we paid our regular $4.9 million dividend while buying back $300,000 of our shares, and we ended the quarter with total cash and securities of $23.4 million and no outstanding debt. Based on our new quarterly dividend of $0.085 per share at yesterday’s closing price, CuriosityStream is generating a dividend yield of over 11%. Looking ahead, we anticipate consolidating our ownership of our German business, buying Spiegel and Autentic out of their stakes sometime in the next few months.

Purchase price will be approximately $1.9 million. We anticipate the transaction will be accretive to earnings. Regarding guidance in response to investor recommendations, we’re changing up and expanding our metrics going forward for 2026. For the first half of this year, we expect revenue in the range of $35 million-$41 million and full year 2026 revenue in the range of $75 million-$80 million. Likewise, we expect adjusted EBITDA for the first half of the year to be $5 million-$7 million and full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA in the range of $16 million-$20 million. With that, I’ll turn it back over to Vanessa to begin our Q&A.

Vanessa Gillen, Senior Vice President of Operations, CuriosityStream: Thank you, Brady. We will now turn to questions from the analyst community, including Patrick Sholl from Barrington Research, Jason Kreyer from Craig-Hallum, and Laura Martin from Needham & Company.Starting first with questions regarding our subscription business. From Patrick Sholl, "What subscriber trends are you seeing, and is it difficult to retain subscribers given your focus on AI licensing?" From Jason, "What has been the response to your price increase on the streaming service?" Clint?

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Thank you, Vanessa. Our licensing initiatives have no impact on our subscriber retention. Both licensing and subscription businesses require new content typically, so in that sense, they are synergistic. We’re able to attend to both businesses, both revenue streams, with the resources at hand. Our robust licensing business with the hundreds of partners who are part of our corpus only helps our retention efforts as it enables us to deploy much more video on our traditional platforms. Seeing positive response to the price increase, minimal churn, and an increase in lifetime value.

Vanessa Gillen, Senior Vice President of Operations, CuriosityStream: Okay. Next question, also from Pat. "Any update on subscriber acquisition focus between bundled versus direct?

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: I appreciate that question. We optimize for overall subscription revenue growth and are largely agnostic as to the source. Pure direct subscribers offer the highest ARPU, channel store subscribers offer a lower CPA, and wholesale subscribers, while lower ARPU, provide a longer-term recurring revenue stream. We value subscribers in whatever channel we reach them.

Vanessa Gillen, Senior Vice President of Operations, CuriosityStream: Now on to licensing, also from Pat. Can you provide any further information on how content that is licensed is being valued in more recent renewals?

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Yeah. Thank you, Pat, for that question. As we know, overall CapEx for the five largest technology companies will be north of $1 trillion in 2027. About 2%-5% of that will go to dataset training. In regard to pricing, certain content is valued at a higher unit rate. Content like scripted entertainment, sports, HDR, selective clip natural history, and deeply processed content all command higher unit rates than, for example, unprocessed raw content delivered in bulk. What we notice about value is that orders have become increasingly bespoke, increasingly specific. The comment I would bring attention to here is that CuriosityStream has it all. Content across the waterfront of genres, meaning we have documentary video content, of course, but we have scripted television and movies in many languages. We have sports across the board. We have audio, we have egocentric, we have HDR.

We have it all for licensing to train models. The harder to find the content, the higher the price tag.

Vanessa Gillen, Senior Vice President of Operations, CuriosityStream: Thank you. From Jason Kreyer, Craig-Hallum, "Can you talk about the breadth of AI licensing, how you view the size of the market, how content is being valued, and how the AI pipeline is tracking?

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Yeah, appreciate that question, Jason. The breadth of assets now being discussed and packaged for partners has expanded considerably and now includes hundreds of millions of production-grade temporal ground truth tokens for frontier model training and tuning, HDR video, matched raw and finished video, multi-camera video, and egocentric video for Physical AI training. A broad set of video and data and a broader set of partners smooth things out over time. As I mentioned, licensing revenue does not always move in a straight line quarter-to-quarter, especially when we are dealing with larger partners, broader rights packages, and more complex data products.

Vanessa Gillen, Senior Vice President of Operations, CuriosityStream: Okay, a couple of final questions on AI, both from Laura Martin, Needham & Company. "Clint, can you speak to the longevity of the AI licensing business? What are you seeing in existing relationships? In light of the revenue and your leadership position in AI licensing, what is your rationale for staying in the subscription business?

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Thank you for that, Laura. Some of our best customers are some of our oldest customers, in part because their orders are broadening. They’re broadening out to include the additional datasets I just described. We are fulfilling our 10th delivery next week with one of our early partners. The need for content for Physical AI training, largely egocentric and egocentric adjacent, offers a set of another 50 companies who will or are engaging in dataset licensing. In regard to our subscription business, it is key to our overall strength because it’s reliable, recurring, and predictable. It’s already built. The barriers to entry are considerable, meaning others would need to spend substantially in order to achieve what we have at hand. Our overall subscription revenue is growing modestly, in mid-single digits this year.

Our subscription business takes nothing from our licensing business and is, in fact, critical to the amassing of our 3 million-plus hour war chest and synergistic insofar as our relationships, both with content partners and the buyers, cover all of our businesses, subscription, licensing, and advertising.

Vanessa Gillen, Senior Vice President of Operations, CuriosityStream: Clint, Brady, thank you both. This concludes our Q&A, and I will now hand it back to the operator.

Stacy, Conference Operator: This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.