Good day ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Discovery's Second Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Slabin, Executive Vice President of Global Investor Strategy. Sir, you may begin.

Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us for Discovery's second quarter 2019 earnings call. Joining me today are David Zaslav, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Gunnar Wiedenfels, our Chief Financial Officer; and JB Perrette, President and CEO, Discovery Networks International.You should have received our earnings release, but if not feel free to access it on our website at corporate.discovery.com. On today's call, we will begin with some opening comments from David and Gunnar, and then we will open the call for David, Gunnar and JB to take questions.Before we start, I would like to remind you that comments today regarding the company's future business plans, prospects and financial performance are forward-looking statements that we make pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are made based on management's current knowledge and assumptions about future events, and may involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations.In providing projections and other forward-looking statements, the company disclaims any intent or obligation to update them. For additional information on important factors that could affect these expectations, please see our Annual Report for the year ended December 31, 2018 and our subsequent filings made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.And with that, I will turn the call over to David.

Good morning and welcome everyone to our Q2 earnings conference call.Discovery had a strong quarter, with healthy operating and financial results with the benefits of the Scripps acquisition flowing through all areas of our global business, while making significant strides across a number of our strategic initiatives around the world. We are on solid financial footing and remain extremely well-positioned, to continue our pivot towards the streaming and direct a consumer marketplace, where we see exciting opportunities to aggregate and super-serve global fan communities.For the quarter we met or exceeded all of our core guidance metrics, with accelerating revenue growth both domestically and internationally. This quarter, our numbers are 6, 5, 5 and 3. We achieved 6% domestic advertising growth, 5% domestic affiliate fee growth, 5% international advertising growth, and 3% international affiliate fee growth. It's one great set of numbers, the company is operating on all cylinders and I'm very proud of the team and this quarter's performance. And, we anticipate another quarter of healthy growth in Q3, which Gunnar will take you through in detail.We've got a nice tailwind at our back, and I believe we are performing at the top end of the television advertising business domestically and perhaps even globally. The television industry is far from dead, here or abroad. Contrary to what many believe, we are getting real meaningful growth from the core TV business around the world, and it feels sustainable.And our position with the industry has never been stronger. And I believe, poised to grow like no other. HDTV, Food, TLC, ID and OWN, the top networks in America for women. These networks have made us the number one media company for women twenty-five to fifty-four across all of television. The number one media company in America for women, broadcast on cable with…

Thank you, David, and thank you everyone for joining us today.I am extremely pleased with our very strong second quarter operational and financial performance, which demonstrated an acceleration across every one of our four core revenue metrics, as well as the progress we are making strategically as we continue to transform and pivot Discovery.We are performing at a high level and still at the very early stages of leaning in, to the many unique and differentiated growth opportunities we see in front of us. And as such, we are delivering top of industry performance and enjoying the benefits of our scale and presence in the U.S. complemented by our breadth of global distribution, which is uniquely supporting our efforts to build direct-to-consumer and streaming products that power people's passions.I'd like to share some financial highlights from our second quarter. As always, my comments will be in constant currency terms for our international business and for the total company, unless otherwise stated. And foreign exchange did have a material impact on some of our metrics this quarter. Please refer to our earnings release filed earlier this morning for a more comprehensive view, of all the drivers of our second quarter financial results.In the second quarter, Discovery again achieved very strong operating performance with 6% U.S. advertising growth, 5% US affiliate growth, 5% international ad growth, which included a one-month impact from the consolidation of the three networks acquired from U.K. TV, which added roughly one percentage point of growth and 3% international affiliate growth.We also grew total company adjusted OIBDA 7%, a function of our strong revenue growth and the benefit of an 8% decline in U.S. expenses modestly offset by an 8% increase in international costs, which we've previously noted would begin to increase as we invest in our growth…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jessica Reif Ehrlich with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open.

I have two questions. First for David, can we go back to the U.S. advertising market. I mean it's incredibly robust and besides price you seem to have some of the levers to benefit from the market. You talked about monetizing digital content, maybe a little bit of inventory. Could you give us some color on where you-- what you can pull? And what is the - what are the drivers of demand? I mean, it seems like there is a lot of growth in or will be even more growth in non-advertising platforms like Disney Plus. Is this driving advertisers back into more traditional media?And then I guess for Gunnar or JB, some of the spending, we saw international expenses go up a lot, which you've talked about, can you talk a little bit more about the benefits that you will derive over time, the tech platforms and anything else you’d want to call out?

Thanks, Jessica. Well, look the, so the upfront was very strong and leading up to it scatter was strong and it was accelerating. And I think a piece of it is that and I spent a lot of time talking to the agencies as we try and kind of lift ourselves up to where we see broadcast in the high '50s and low '60s and we are still getting CPMs that are much lower. The ability to really sell product, advertisers are finding that television is still one of the most - is the most effective platform to do that, and so I think there is a move back.In addition to that, there is a feeling of safety, what are you next to? What are you buying? Who is the talent that you're buying? What’s the environment that you are buying? You can do that on television and in digital, there is a fear of that.And the overall narrative for a lot of these digital companies has changed. And so I think that sets an overall environment that's more positive, but for us this is a big moment for our company. I said, I've said for a while that we have the top four channels in America for women and no one's ever done that before ID, TLC Food, and HG and the number one channel for African American women with OWN.And we've worked hard to do that, but when you put it all together. We are now the number one TV company in America, in terms of the women we reached, the time they spend with us, it's Discovery.And as a guy that started out in the cable business and looked to broadcast when I was in New Jersey looking over the river. This is really a big moment,…

Yes, good morning, Jessica. So listen, I could not be happier with the financial profile that you are seeing in this quarter. We're making a lot of progress and we're doing exactly what we said we were going to do.We continue to benefit from cost synergies. It was another quarter of margin increase, even though I had already spoken about sort of that coming to an end at some point and I had guided to $300 million to $400 million of negative impact from our startup investments in, in the digital space and we're seeing some of that kicking in.Peter Faricy is coming up on his first year, a lot of the initiatives are picking up speed and to your question on the International expenses. That's what's reflected in that expense number, Golf TV has started its global rollout. There’s obviously IP amortization coming through a digital in general, Dplay, we're pushing.You also had, you also had the consolidation of UK TV kicking in for one month, that's added on the like-for-like basis, a little bit of expenses. But bottom line is we're making these investments as initiatives start to accelerate and you're already seeing some impact on the revenue side as well.The very strong numbers in the second quarter, 5% in ad sales growth, 3% on the affiliate side, and maybe you just heard, we're guiding to an acceleration for both metrics. Obviously to some extent it is driven by the first, a contributions from those digital investments. So it's really-- it's really working very well for us.One last comment I want to make on segment expenses going forward. It's more, it's more insightful to look at the total company cost base because as we went through our transformation, we have shifted around a little bit in the cost base. So a lot of the expenses that JB is now carrying on the D&I segment are going to be leveraged as we roll out those products on a global basis. For 2019, the investments are somewhat D&I-heavy and that's going to, that's going to even out as we move forward. So again, could not be happier with where we are.

Our next question comes from Alexia Quadrani with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

I guess, first off, David, maybe a bigger picture question. You've done, such a fantastic job with the Scripps acquisition and continue to see the benefits clearly in this quarter and the outlook. I guess, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the scale, need for scale, longer term, do you have the portfolio to compete with some of these larger players, some of which you referenced in your opening comments or do you feel it would make sense to continue to kind of look for acquisitions or potentially a merger with someone else to be more competitive. Just I'd love to hear your updated thoughts on the current environment and Discovery is positioning.And then secondly, just a bit more specific.TLC has been really strong. Ratings are little softer Discovery, I guess any more color you can give there? Are you looking at Serengeti, a sort of a delta to maybe change the rating trends in that channel? And any other program and Discovery maybe Discovery Channel we should look forward to?

Thanks Alexia. The Scripps transaction has really exceeded our expectations on all levels and you see that in our free cash flow, you see that in the fact that together their quality together with our quality on the leadership side, on the content side, that's what makes us the number one TV company in America for women and positions us to continue to grow in a meaningful way.When I think of scale I guess, I think of it two ways. One, we're the largest player in the international space. We're the - we're probably the only one, JB will give you a little bit more color making over $1 billion.But we’re - as the Disney and Comcast deals with Rupert show that the need to view the world as more than just the U.S. and be global. We have infrastructure in every country. We have content in every country. We have credibility and brands and IP in every country. And so scale, I think we have a leader outside the U.S. and we're also the leader in sport so and the quantity of sports that we have and et cetera. So on a scale side in terms of international and sport we are the bigger guy and there is a lot of players that are going to want to try and catch up to us.In terms of the genres we've chosen, we feel great about it right now - everybody going after script at movies. It's creating an environment that is creating more and more opportunity for us. I've said this before that I think where our share is going to accelerate, but there are so many choices for scripted series and scripted movies and you now have four or five offerings between $6 and $15. And then you have…

Our next question comes from Drew Borst with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Thank you for the additional detail on some of your streaming initiatives. I wanted to dig in on one of them if I could, which is the PGA streaming service, because I believe you're in the first year of your 12-year arrangement. I think you went live and potentially up to eight markets. So I wonder if you could just share some of the early learnings in this first year, and how that deal is progressing?

Sure, it's going very well. I'm going to be seeing Jay Monahan tomorrow morning over at Liberty. What led us to this is the fact that we had the Eurosport player and we were going direct to consumer for several years. We've learned a lot about that business and one of them is that you need a lot of content. The actual live sports IP, you need local and you need something that people can always read or learn about or transact with.And so after a lot of work JB and I - it came to this conclusion that if we could get Golf it's the best IP in the world because it's 52 weeks a year, it's four days a week of loads of IP and 50% of the PGA tours is local then we added in the European tour, the Asian tour, the Latin American tour. And then, we did Golf Digest where we, you can go in and read about any golf course figure out where to take about vacation.So we are, we're doing very well, some of our bigger markets are going to be coming up on the first of this year. Over the next, by three years from now we'll have everywhere in the world outside the U.S., but we're also attacking the U.S. now as well with Golf Digest and with Tiger. JB just thoughts on direct to consumer, because I think what led us to golf is a lot of what you're doing in the international space?

Well I think on the golf piece particularly Drew the great news there is also it’s a bit of a two-for-one. We have the great traction that Alex and the team has developed on the product itself in our direct consumer app. And as you said, its early days, but we're seeing great traction and pick up in the first 6 months of the year as the product is launched. And it's also helping us on our core traditional business which is, I know you've heard us talk about the fact that in markets like Japan and Spain where those markets were up earlier this year.Not only do we expand our relationship on the direct to consumer side, but we leveraged it for our entire portfolio to expand and strengthen with great revenue on our core. We have other key markets like Korea for example to come up next year. And that's a market that today in the Discovery legacy business is way under served. It's a very small market for us and we're using those conversations there to see if we can actually develop additional channel opportunities in our core business.And so you're seeing that 2 for 1 opportunity of great digital and direct to consumer traction that it will take - continue to take time and accelerate over time. But also more immediate impact of helping our core business through traditional affiliate relationships and broadcast relationships in those markets which are allowing us to launch and accelerate the growth in a couple of those markets.

And if I could get a follow-up in - probably for Gunnar I wanted to ask about U.S. networks margins. For the past few quarters it’s been hitting 60% of EBITDA margins here. Historically, this is a business that had more typically been caught the mid 50s maybe even low 50s in certain years. I understand your comments about Serengeti and some content, but as we look out over say, the next 12 to 24 months. Is this a business that you think or segment that you think could hover in that high 50s maybe even low 60% vicinity?

Yes, look I mean Drew a couple of points. Number one, we have been enjoying massive cost synergies from the integration with Scripps and obviously a lot of the U.S. footprint was sort of one-for-one overlap. So that's why you're seeing such a significant share of our cost out hit the U.S. Number 2 is, I made this comment a little earlier already, we got to look at this from a total company basis, because we've been. You see some increase in corporate expenses, which is sort of cost moving out of the U.S. segment.So, all in all, from a total company basis another 400 basis points of margin increase in the second quarter. And as I said, when we presented the first quarter results, we do not manage the company for margin. The reason why we're seeing that margin increase is just all that cost saving coming through, but it's not an objective for me to keep increasing margins over time it's much more important to make the right investments in the topline. And you're seeing some of that topline growth come through now, which I have guided to previously as well.That being said, if you look at the U.S. business, I see no reason for margins to decline in the core business there is none of that. However, as you know, we are working on a couple of investment initiatives. And as I said earlier, the first part is really hit D&I a little more in terms of incremental expense that may change next year when we start rolling out products like the BBC factual product some of those, - those are obviously also going to drive cost in the U.S. footprint, but again it's two very separate world, a highly efficient, highly cash generative core business that's in absolutely perfect shape. You've heard our guidance for both at an affiliate revenues gives us a lot of runway. And then the investments in future growth.

Our next question comes from Doug Mitchelson with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.

Thanks so much. I guess a couple of questions, first, David you teased us at the end of your prepared remarks with comments on food and home being reshaped into distinct and direct relationships with fans around the world. So if you could talk about the opportunities you see in that regard, and I think for both you and Gunnar, look, when you start to roll forward to the end of the year, you'll be at the bottom of your leverage target range. I think you've talked about this sort of run rate are approaching $3 billion of free cash flow annually. When you look at the next year, that means $3 billion plus of excess capacity. Are you seeing strategic opportunities to invest that on an inorganic basis, you've certainly been looking for a while. So, any thoughts on that would be helpful? Thanks.

Okay, look, I think directionally in terms of the industry, this is another area where things are moving our way. You talked to Hans and he’s talking about 5G.You talk to Randall, he is driving 5G.What is 5G? 5G is not about being able to download a movie in six second in two seconds versus seven seconds, it's about providing real utility in value in the home.And the question is, okay, now that we got it. What do we do with it, and this is where the content that we have. If, whoever can own the kitchen is going to own the home and where the people spend money? They spend it in the home. They spend it on their home office, on their living room, on their kids room.And so we have these genres with food and cooking and with HG and now DIY will be relaunching as Magnolia with Chip and Jo. We have the greatest experts in both of these areas. We have credible - content needs to be curated, purchases need to be curated and if you, if you look at what everyone else is doing with scripted series and scripted movies, they're creating fantastic, robust, better than ever viewing experience is a script of movies and series and that's great.So you can watch Fleabag, which by the way is one of the - is one of the all three production companies, and one of the big hits on Amazon. So all you can do is view it. That's great. You can view it and laugh or cry but that's it. You just view it.Our content has a real ability to view and do or view and transact. So imagine a world where you've got a lot of people fighting for subscribers that people pay a…

Thanks. And on the M&A side.

Well, yes. Let me start I mean you made reference to a leverage in the free cash flow. So just before David answer the M&A question, continue to be super excited about our free cash flow development. You saw that we have $2.9 billion end of Q2. Still, after $200 million of cash restructuring, I've also spoken to the sort of key puts and takes for the rest of the year.A good part of that, the cash tax increase has already come through in the first half. Whereas some of the CapEx increase digital investments are going to kick in a little more in the second half of the year. But bottom line is feeling very good and we really only just started on free cash flow improvement.As you saw, our leverage has come down slightly 3.5 to now 3.3, also probably not a bad thing in the current environment, so we're happy with that progress as well. And regarding M&A and David will add more, but we're very happy with our hand. But obviously, continue to evaluate strategic opportunities but David is there anything else you want to add?

We're always looking opportunistically, but we don't see anything as significant at this point, Bruce Campbell and JB or we kick the tires on everything. We have the UKTV deal was quite good for us. I mean, maybe can you update on that and what you are looking at some of the things that you're, that you think could make sense.

We do see opportunities as you know, part of our strategy as we've bought the Scripps assets is to really try and take HG and food around the world and we see there is an opportunity there. We have selectively looked at, at bringing in either assets that help us rebrand UKTV's an example will bring in there to food and home channels into the portfolio on a consolidated basis, rebrand them HG and food network and then take those off and really try and drive that with the Scripps content as the bedrock of it.And then there is additional channel opportunities which we're looking at selectively to accelerate the core where we can buy a Channel positions or slots to get some of those channels launched in additional markets in addition to organic ways that we're doing it. So we do see opportunities on the sort of smaller mid-scale to tuck-in and rolling some things that we think can help accelerate our core business.

And there are some smaller players that are, that are coming to JB and saying much bigger. I have a lot of infrastructure and cost here. There are some things that we could do to get. And so in some cases you've created advertising country-by-country advertising groups and tucked-in some smaller players, what we've gotten the benefit of CPM. There all others that want us to do things for them. Who want to tuck-in with us because it's tough to be playing in this space in 200 countries when you have where you have to, where you don't have a lot of scale.

Our next question comes from Ben Swinburne with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

David or JB, when you look at your D2C portfolio. I think you've got four services in the market and I think you've listed out seven in your prepared remarks. I was just curious how you think about the longer-term strategy. Are you looking to sort of build specific verticals and kind of tie those verticals back to your linear brands or were you also thinking about potentially pulling some of these together, for example, the sort of Magnolia food and cooking factual stuff into a single app.And I'm just wondering how you think about how the universe evolves, given the sort of explosion of these kind of streaming services around the world and also how you think about putting these to the U.S. or if you view the U.S. market is sort of fundamentally different, just given the maturity of the pay-TV model here.And then just on the same topic, maybe for Gunnar on the numbers. Can you help us at all to think about that $300 million to $400 million as we roll into next year? I don't know if you have line of sight there yet or want to talk about it but do you expect to start scaling that cost base or do you expect investments to ramp and lean in more any color at this point would be helpful. Thanks guys.

Well, look, I have talked a lot about us aggregating IP and being the leading global IP company. We now have a company that's growing mid-single in its core business even against us investing significantly and holding on as Gunnar says. As you see the BBC Natural History Library, all of the, most of the PGA, most of the PGA and the European Tour, and most of the golf in the world.And so most of the cycle, a lot of the cycling in the world so we've been adding up all this IP because we believe being above the globe is going to give us a huge opportunity to create significant value. And if some of it works in ways that we think we could create real businesses that you guys give a huge multiple to. In order to do that and we've been trying it for a while. We've learned a lot. And what we are doing different than anybody else is we have core New Media and Digital people running these businesses now.We have had our existing - great TV, cable strategic business executives that we're doing all these things. A few years ago and we were in the trenches fighting, talking to consumers, dealing with platforms and in the end we said, we got to bring in the pros. And so, we brought in Peter Faricy who built marketplace and worked at Amazon for more than a decade. We brought - the best product people from Amazon over here. We brought two people from DIRECTV.One that built DIRECTV from 12 million subscribers to 20 that all about SAC and subscriber acquisition and Karen Leever and Alex Kaplan who built SUNDAY TICKET. And so, we brought people that do this for a living. And I saw this when I was on the Board of Sirius. It's a different business subscriber acquisition, so we have a whole new team and we've hired, we have well over 100 engineers. We have a whole team that we're building in Redmond.And so, we see that as a real separate company that is going to disrupt our industry, but we're not going to disrupt ourselves by getting somebody who ran Eurosport to now built the Eurosport player and build our golf business. We're hiring the people that - were disrupting us. And so, I think that gives us - one advantage but JB a little bit of color on your side.

Yeah, I think Ben, to your question and to the early question also about how we see scale. The reality is we don't look at - in the traditional lens we look at our competitors is the normal lot that we talk about the Disney’s and NBC the CBS. In the direct-to-consumer world, all of them are trying to build out these supermarkets a video and it's very expensive and so far very cash flow negative. Our strategy and that space is frankly less about them as competitors and more about building out what we sort of look at as much more specialty stores.And in those specialty stores unlike them, we're building out services that are only watch, we are watch, play, learn buy and that's how we see ourselves is very different. And we do see ourselves of having a portfolio of these some may be over time 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, 40 million, 50 million subs some maybe single-digit million subs. But that portfolio in aggregate, we think has huge potential when you roll it out globally.

Go ahead.

And then - Ben on your second question regarding scaling digital expenses it's obviously a little bit too early to talk about guidance for next year. But a couple of points I want to make that we have spoken about in the past as well. We will be flexible here and we're not afraid to get behind what's working if we won’t something. But just the same way, we've also pulled back on some other products where we didn't see the progress that we needed to get comfortable with additional investments.And so, expect us to be aggressive if we're onto something and very careful where we're not seeing the progress that we need. And again, if you look at it from a top down perspective spending somewhere between 5% and 10% of our underlying a, little bit up or for future growth it doesn't sound crazy. It's not betting the farm, but on the other hand it's enough to potentially make a difference - sooner rather than later.

Yes, makes sense. Thanks for the color everybody.

The last point is the cost of driving these. I've talked about this before, but we have all these channels. We have free to air channels with - equivalent of NBC and CBS in a number of markets in Europe. We have 10 to 12 cable channels everywhere. So people are watching us in these affinity groups already and we have scale. And so the ability to, we don't have to go out and buy and to tell people to sign up for a particular product.We can be promoting it from the ground up, which I think is a, as a real helper. And finally, in a really confusing environment, the real question for the future is curation. What the hell do I do? I got a choice of everything and so, you have - all the media saying come to me I got great movies in great scripted, let me tell you about this next great scripted series I have and spending a ton of money in order to tell people hey, come to Amazon. I got Fleabag. The Crown is back - re-subscribe or don't churn. And for us we have existing infrastructure so, and that's one of the reasons that the PGA came to us.For a fan company you have to have existing infrastructure and we have personalities. When people don't know how to curate they go to personalities’ that's been true for long as time. And so, you want to know what's going on in golf, Tiger Woods I talked to the PGA players.If you want to know what's going on in the home talk to Chip and Joanna Gaines they'll curate it for you. You want to think about how to make your life better come talk to Oprah and she will make a lot of recommendations for you about what you can do and what she loves. And so, we're a company of those - we think those personalities are going to be real bridges to curation, the Property Brothers.

Our next question comes from Michael Nathanson with MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.

I have a couple for David, JB first one is, you guys called out the growth in international viewing share. And I wonder how much of that share can you attribute to the Scripps integration I know that was one of the assumptions you had the Scripps would help. So anything you should share about what you've seen with Scripps is content internationally. And then could you quantify for international, how big is that, is the benefit from those international players that you've developed. So is that becoming a meaningful driver of the growth that you're now talking about?

So for the international share and audience growth is really driven by 2 or 3 factors. Number one is, our core organic content, we've been working hard to try and improve the performance of it local commissioning, better investment reviews on a content commissioning and re-commissioning. And so, we're seeing stronger performance of our organic particularly local content in some of our biggest markets.The second is, we've obviously been a year into making the Scripps content work hard largely initially on our own networks to try and strengthen and see how we can actually introduce audiences, because I think part of this that people forget is a lot of these content types in some markets where the content was not yet seen you need to introduce it.We've seen this in Latin America, where we had the Scripps content actually licensed in on our networks for several years and it took almost 18 to 24 months initially in those markets several years ago to get the audiences' introduced to it - accustomed to it and then liking it.And what's great is we track now month to month the performance since we started hearing this content in sort of third and the second quarter, third quarter last year. Ad we've seen continuous improvements in the performance of the content on our existing networks. So that's the second sort of key driver.The third is, we are obviously now seeing opportunities to launch whole channels, which you've seen us do in Germany. We're obviously rebranding in the UK with the UK TV assets. We've launched a series of channels, we have commitments for more launches in Latin America for HG and food to get those channels, almost 50% plus distributed across the market. And so we're seeing a big opportunity there.The monetization is coming I'd say we've only seen the beginning of it, because at the end of the day we've seen the beginning of it from a licensee perspective in the markets where we launched those channels as pay. And the audience improvements where we put the content on our existing networks. But what we haven't seen yet, which Dave talked to which the team here in the U.S. do so well is really the strength of these assets is the endemic categories that they own and the ability from an advertising perspective, sell sponsorship and high CPM packages to these endemic categories.And that's the piece that we're continuing to rework and we see great upside over the next several quarters as we get better and better internationally at selling that endemic category uniquely now that we have the channels of the product, working better over time. So we see continued growth on the distribution side and we see an accelerating growth from the beginning to be able to monetize those audience as much better in this endemic categories.

Can I add one point Michael, I mean if you remember back when we close the deal. We talked about this international Scripps opportunity as sort of three layers. The first layer being the cost savings that we got very quickly then utilizing the content on our existing platforms and then, we said that launching the networks was going to take some time. And we're now at the point where we're actually seeing some of that happening and contributing to our numbers.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Rich Greenfield with TBD. Your line is open.

Just two quick one. One, on David, you were talking before about the importance of bringing in Peter Faricy because things like churn and subscriber acquisition are new. I guess as you look back over the last year, what are you learning like how do you keep a subscriber for the full year. And how are you, how do you start thinking about what the charge for a service relative to the lifetime value given churn at all the things that go on in a direct-to-consumer subscription business and then I've got a quick follow-up.

We learned a lot, the way people consume content on a small screen is very different. You don't go to a TV and rub your finger on it and expect it to get an update. And when you get up in the morning and you're paying for something you expect to see something. So one of the things that we learned very early on is that you need, you need IP, it needs to be updated regularly and we also began to understand that the definition of IP is different than what we thought. We thought it's just professional content, it's Planet Earth, then it's frozen Planet or it's live content on the PGA or the U.S. Open.That is maybe one of the reasons that they're buying it. But one of the other reasons is that they are passionate about the particular area. They're in. So the reason we bought Golf Digest, and the reason that we did the deal with Tiger and the reason that we have a lot of the PGA players working with us is the short-form content that they create every day. What they're eating for breakfast. What they're working on, what they hate about their game or content that their teddy takes of them on the hitting practice shots or trick shots. That's all IP.What they're worried about in writing is IP and so one of the - what Peter had to build and what we're building, we brought one of the best technical people over from Amazon, is our Chief Technology Officer, is this idea of one global platform that we can use for natural history, for Golf, for science and it's, we're investing up but it's a lifetime global value that we can put on that.And so we learn that you need to…

Then just a quick, just. Okay, go ahead guys.

Yes, I guess the only thing I'd add to David's point is I think a lot of also with Peter is brought in over the last year, which is maybe the less sexy and seemingly less but is absolutely critical look, we've been a great content company for three, over three decades and inherently in that great stories rely on great creative instinct and got the product side of the world, as you know well is much more of a databased environment and Peter has driven a discipline and a cadence now with all of our teams, which starts with the data, starts with everything we see with the data and trying to collect it in a way we can actually use it and using that to drive better UX better distribution, looking at stream quality, buffering rates, customer service response times all the kind of blocking and tackling elements of great product experiences that are still a little bit sort of for and to traditionally content media companies.He's brought a lot of that discipline and infused it or direct-to-consumer organization and frankly infused it across the entire leadership team and I think that's a lot of also what you're seeing in the biggest proof point of that is, I think you've heard us maybe talk about in deep play in the Nordics, part of our problem a year plus ago was we had a two star rated app that was not well distributed and over the course of the last six to nine months, we now, all of sudden have a four plus store rated app that is getting strong customer reviews, our customer response times have gotten better on feedback and responses to the consumer.And so part of the product piece of this is also been a huge improvement. We still got a long way to go, but it's a big step forward for us.

Just a quick follow-up for Gunnar, I think you're the only media company that’s going to report Q2 with subscriber trends improving driven by vMVPD carriage deals you've signed over the last 12 months. Bunch of your peers have certainly been talking about the challenges facing the vMVPD that they raise price. I'm just curious as you look at Q2, 2019 versus Q1, 2019, if you add up all the major vMVPD, is the vMVPD universe net growing flat or actually shrinking due to the price increases, how should we think about that universal of subscribers.

Well, it's certainly growing, again I don't want to go into and do a lot of detail, but it's certainly growing. And clearly, we have gone from some people calling out to have not, not even a year ago to best distribution in the entire affiliate landscape both traditional and virtual and you see that reflected in not only subscriber numbers, but also our revenue growth rate.

And look the marketplace here in the U.S., it's yearning for sports and retrans slammed down, prices going up every year, extenuating you will - you pay for the sports network then you pay for the regional sports network and a sport and then every broadcaster also has their own sports network and then they use sports to drive retransmission and the ratings on every one of them is going down.And so there is, there is a reckoning, there’s a slam down, that's going to come and when that slammed down comes, the consumers in the U.S. are going to get the content that they want, and the content that they spend time with, and then we're going to be like every other country in the world where we will have a $20 or $25 service.I don't have the services that people want and will have, will have a huge piece of that because we have the quality of content that people like that they're spending time with and they are not being forced to carry us. They're coming to - every one of those platforms came to us, because we were the top choices of the consumers, but every one of them is being forced to carry retrans being forced to carry regional sports and forced to carry those sports networks.And there is a reckoning coming because the consumers don't like it and, all of those MVPD's that are stuck with those fees are pissed and it's going to come a moment when it's enough and that's what you're seeing now you're saying it's enough, I'm looking at the numbers and it's enough.

Thank you. This concludes the question-and-answer session. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining and everyone have a wonderful day.