There’s been a lot of talk of potential consolidation across the media industry since election results rolled in earlier this week, but AMC Networks CEO Kristin Dolan likes her company’s position in the marketplace.
“Even at a time of turbulence and uncertainty for many in our industry, we continue to find advantages in our size, independence and standing as one of the last pure play premium programmers,” Dolan said on the company’s 3Q24 earnings call Friday. “We are nimble, opportunistic and have reoriented our company for today’s new environment… I’m grateful to our people for breaking down the old ways of doing things and adopting a fast moving and free thinking mindset more typical of a startup than a legacy media company.”
Revenue for the quarter was $600 million, a decrease of 3% YOY. Domestic operations fell 2% to $530 million largely due to a 5% decline in subscription revenue and attributable to the drop in the linear subscriber universe.
Where the company saw immense upside is in its content licensing division where revenues skyrocketed 31% to $81 million due to deliveries related to AMC branded shows and the programmer’s content licensing agreement with Netflix. While ad revenue also dropped 10% to $133 million due to linear ratings declines and challenges in the ad market, AMCN is seeing bright spots when it comes to its ad-supported endeavors in streaming, counting 11.8 million streaming subscribers by the end of the quarter. AMC+ launched its ad-supported tier in September 2023, and Chief Commercial Officer Kim Kelleher said she’s very encouraged by the results so far.
“Obviously, we just launched late last year and we continue to see it play a pretty aggressive, fast growth aspect of introducing new customers to AMC+ in all the right ways,” she said. “That said, it is still a very targeted approach… we’re very aggressive with making our inventory more seamlessly transactable, more real time and more addressable, not only across the digital footprint, but also our linear footprint.”
AMCN plans to launch ad-supported versions of its other streaming services, starting with Shudder. AMCN has completed a deal with BBC Studios to acquire the remaining 50.1% of BBC America for $42 million in cash, giving the programmer complete control over the network. It will maintain a commercial relationship with BBC Studios to support the programming lineup and overall brand.
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