With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

<p>This company epitomizes Hollywood's fast-shifting corporate landscape. It was formed last August when Skydance, founded by David Ellison, merged with Paramount, owner of CBS and movie IP like the Mission: Impossible franchise. It will morph further this year as it completes the acquisition of rival Warner Bros. Discovery.</p>

Fortune 500

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

Industries included in the sector are entertainment and publishing.

Fortune Sector Leaders: Media

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The corporations on our annual list of the world’s largest companies delivered a record $41 trillion in aggregate revenues.

Fortune Global 500

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

Aggregate sales hit $37.8 trillion last year—an increase of 19%, the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

Total revenue for the world’s biggest companies fell 4.8% to $31.7 trillion this year—the first decline in half a decade.

ViacomCBS was formed in 2019 when CBS and Viacom merged—13 years after breaking apart. Today the mass media conglomerate operates more than 170 networks reaching 700 million subscribers worldwide. As of the first quarter of 2021, the company had some 36 million paid streaming subscribers for its Paramount+ and Showtime offerings.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-109-ViacomCBS

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $33.3 trillion in revenues and $2.1 trillion in profits.

G500-2020-457-ViacomCBS

The reunited CBS and Viacom completed their merger in December and had a strong year, with hits like The Late Show With Stephen Colbert helping to drive $28 billion in sales. But in a March SEC filing the company warned that coronavirus-related production delays may have a material impact on its 2020 results.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-111-Viacom-CBS

The reunited CBS and Viacom completed their merger in December and had a strong year, with hits like <em>The Late Show With Stephen Colbert</em> helping to drive $28 billion in sales. But in a March SEC filing the company warned that coronavirus-related production delays may have a material impact on its 2020 results.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2016 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

World's Most Admired Companies

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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Paramount Global organizes its vast media portfolio into three main divisions: TV media, direct-to-consumer (streaming), and filmed entertainment, which includes the iconic Paramount Pictures studio. Its television assets span CBS and cable networks like Comedy Central, MTV, Showtime, and BET. The company also operates and licenses its content internationally. In 2024, Skydance Media announced an $8 billion deal to acquire Paramount by first purchasing parent company National Amusements. The two-part transaction is expected to close in 2025, pending regulatory approval.

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Paramount Skydance (PSKY): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Paramount Skydance

paramount skydance

I would now like to turn the call over to Kevin Creighton, Paramount's EVP of Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. You may now begin your conference call.

Good afternoon and thank you for taking the time to join us for the Paramount Q1 2026 earnings call. I'm Kevin Creighton, EVP of Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. Joining me today is our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, David Ellison, our Chief Financial Officer, Dennis K. Cinelli, and our Chief Strategy and Operating Officer, Andy Gordon. As a reminder, we will be making forward-looking statements today that involve risks and uncertainties. Our remarks will also include non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures can be found in our earnings letter or in our trending schedules, which contain supplemental information. These can be found on our investor relations website. I'll now turn it over to David for a few brief remarks before we take analyst questions.

Thanks, Kevin, and good afternoon, everyone. As you've seen in our Q1 results and most recent shareholder letter, we're off to a strong start in our first full year at Sky. The progress we've made in just nine months is a testament to the amazing team we've assembled that has worked tirelessly and with great conviction to deliver on all areas of our business.

We are executing deliberately against our priorities and seeing tangible results, attracting top creative talent, nearly doubling our film slate, delivering shows audiences love, and green-lighting dozens of new and returning series while achieving our financial goals. At the same time, we are transforming how we operate, unifying platforms, data, and workflows, and embedding advanced technology to drive efficiency, better serve our partners, and elevate the overall consumer experience. Across the business, we are getting things done, and it's translating into real momentum.

As a storytelling company, our top priority is, and always will be, delivering great films and television series from the world's leading creators that resonate with broad global audiences. Recent highlights include Scream VII, which became the highest-grossing installment in the franchise's 30-year history, Landman, now the most-watched series in Paramount+ history, and the continued strength of CBS, which has 13 of the top 20 primetime series, including all four of the top new series, an achievement no broadcast network has matched since the early 1990s.

On streaming and sports, engagement remains strong, with more than 10 million households watching over 100 million hours of UFC programming on Paramount+, and CBS Sports delivering the most-watched final round of the Masters in over one decade. These are just a few examples of the progress and growth taking place company-wide.

As I mentioned, we are also making meaningful strides improving our products to deliver more dynamic, personalized experiences and superior monetization. New features, such as enhanced mobile experiences, short-form video, and more advanced recommendations, are helping us to better serve consumers. We're also leveraging AI-powered capabilities across the businesses, including our agentic data warehouse and Precision Plus, our targeted and optimization platform to move faster and operate with greater effectiveness in support of our advertising partners.

While there is still significant work ahead, we remain confident in our strategy and the trajectory we are on. Finally, we continue to make steady progress towards completing the Warner Bros. Discovery transaction, which we believe will accelerate our transformation, strengthen our competitive position, and enhance our ability to help shape the next era of entertainment.

To date, we have satisfied our U.S. HSR obligations, and there are no statutory impediments remaining, and we continue to advance through European and other international regulatory approvals, several of which have already been secured.

Earlier in April, we announced a broad syndication of the pipe equity commitments to strategic investors, underscoring continued investor confidence, secured $10 billion in permanent financing, and syndicated the remaining $49 billion of our bridge to a group of leading banks and institutional lenders. Additionally, on April 23rd, WBD shareholders voted to approve the transaction. We're pleased with the momentum and will continue to take the necessary steps to bring this deal to completion.

At every stage, we remain guided by our strong conviction that the combination of these two iconic companies and their extraordinary teams will create a leading global media and entertainment company, powered by storytelling and accelerated by technology, that strengthens competition, better serves the creative community, and delivers even more compelling stories to audiences worldwide. We're excited for all that's ahead and look forward to the opportunities it will create. With that, I'll turn it back over to Kevin for your questions.

Thanks, David. Just a quick note before we open the line. Given the pending transaction for WBD, we won't be taking questions on the deal today beyond what we wrote in the shareholder letter. With that, Krista, we'll go ahead and open up the line, please.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, again, press star one. We do ask that you limit yourself to one question. For any additional questions, please re-queue. Your first question comes from Sean Diffley with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks very much. I was hoping you could comment on business transformation early learnings as you converge your tech stacks between Paramount+ and Pluto TV and any things that you could apply to a larger asset base. Then broadly, how you see AI transforming the business. You mentioned on the ad tech front, but anything else that you think is notable to call out?

Yeah, sure. No, no, absolutely. What I would say in terms of early learnings is really our ability to execute and move quickly in regard to the transformation. We're on track, as we discussed previously, to really consolidate our three streaming services into one unified platform by really the middle of this year. Those learnings are going to be crucial as we get into basically the transaction with WBD.

I think if you look at our ability to execute on our cost saves and efficiencies, we've had great learnings there, and I think we've been delivering on what we said we were going to do regarding plan. I do believe that what we've been executing at Paramount will be a good kind of accelerant learning for everything we're doing at WBD.

Getting more specific into that, as Kevin said, we're going to kind of stay a little bit away from the transaction today, given we're obviously still in the middle of the process. I'll turn it over to Andy if there's anything you want to add to that.

Yeah. I would just say what we're learning also is, as we integrate BET+, Pluto and Paramount into one tech stack, it's going to accelerate our ability to do the same when we close WBD. In particular, when you see the consumer product that comes out this summer, I think you'll be pretty pleased about how they all function together and create a better experience both for the free consumers on the FAST channel business of Pluto, but also on the paid subscription businesses of Paramount+, both ad and ad-free. We're pretty excited about what we're doing.

Look, to dive into more specifics on in terms of what we're seeing on the platforms we're operating, as we said, we remain on track for convergence. That obviously has significant benefits across personalization and recommendations. You know, on the front end, we're modernizing the consumer-facing technology to create more dynamic, personalized experiences.

As of April, you're able to see obviously short-form video clips, servicing trailers, sports highlights and library content in a curated, more personalized feed. We're working on, you know, enhanced personalization across discovery, including AI-driven artwork. We're also focusing on building other mobile-optimized experience like live stats for live sports. All of these are, you know, really designed to deepen engagement and, you know, across the platform.

For Pluto, basically this summer, Pluto is going to get the most significant update, really since the inception of the platform. Other areas you're really seeing us, you know, really utilize technology is across our tech and product org. Approximately 80% of our engineering organization is using code-assisted technology, which is driving meaningful production gains and really cutting approval times by more than in half.

Again, it's really accelerating how we work across the business. These investments all support our long-term D2C growth and are foundational to where we're taking the business. Again, these are all great learnings that will propel Paramount for the transaction at the end of the Q3.

Sean, the only thing I'd add around AI transformation is we're spinning up, you know, pods to go after AI-based workflows in the back office, so think finance, HR, operational functions. We're really, you know, enabling both on the Paramount side, and we think this sets us up for the combination, be able to go after, you know, AI-based workflows and efficiency in the back office, and we see that's going to be a real benefit. We're doing that today with, you know, the teams that David talked about, and that'll set us up well in the future as well.

Yeah. Just one more thing to add is on Oracle and Fusion, our ERP system, we made a major milestone in the Q1 with the remainder of that transformation to the Oracle Fusion system for Paramount standalone by early 2027. Again, that puts us in a much better spot as part of the closing of Warner Bros. Discovery as well. Great. Thanks, Sean. Appreciate the question. Krista, next question, please.

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

Thank you. With WBD, you will undoubtedly have some of the best industry assets and of course, library, or libraries plural. You really do need to integrate and execute. I guess any changes in how you're thinking about allocating capital or management attention as you integrate for the second time or are about to integrate for the second time in two years? One specific question.

You really do seem committed to having 30 films from once you combine. Just, you know, maybe to talk about, it just seems like such a daunting task given the marketing and distribution needs. Maybe I'm, like, the only person on this call that might remember this, in the early Disney days with Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, they tried this, and it was just too much.

I'm just wondering how you're thinking about 30 movies and why that many? What will it do to elevate Paramount, Skydance, and whatever the new company will be called?

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Jessica. Before we jump in, just want to be clear, we've had a couple of questions on WBD now. We want to focus most of the call on our results for the quarter and the outlook for the business. With that, I'll go ahead and kick it over to David.

Yeah. No, Jessica, I really appreciate the question. Look, zooming out to 30,000 feet, we really view our pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery as a powerful accelerant to our strategy, right? It expands reach and enhances our ability to create the world's most compelling stories and experiences; it positions us really well to build a next-generation media and technology company.

If you look at that across basically, you know, kind of, you know, three core pillars, you know, on the production side, we'll become, you know, the premier destination for the industry's leading creative voices. We are firmly committed to 30 theatrical films per year. If you look at the schedule, you know, we have 15 films on the calendar to release this year, up from eight last year. We've come close to basically doubling the output of our film studio at Paramount.

If you look at the great job that the team at WBD has done, you know, they have 15 films on the release calendar for this year. The two companies are actually making 30 films to date, which I think is important to note in accelerating.

You know, under those studios will be some of the most beloved franchises of all times, you know, including Harry Potter, Top Gun, Star Trek, Looney Tunes, Game of Thrones, Yellowstone. We really do think it's an incredibly exciting and powerful, you know, creative content engine.

By bringing these two businesses together, we really do build a scaled D2C competitor, and it accelerates our goals there. You know, it gives you over 200 million D2C subscribers across more than 100 countries, which really does basically position us well to compete with the leading streaming services in the space.

You know, across our linear businesses, you know, with a presence in over 200 countries, a portfolio of cable and free-to-air networks such as, you know, CBS, CNN, TBS, TNT, Food Network, all of which we think positions us really well across every single vertical in the business.

As we've talked about in regard to operational efficiencies, we're pleased with the way we've been executing at Paramount and believe we'll be able to deliver on exactly what we said we're going to do at Warner Bros. Discovery. From a strategic standpoint, we could not be more excited about the transaction. We are also, you know, on track to, you know, get this done by September of this year. Those are all the reasons that we're excited and have a high degree of confidence around our ability to execute.

With that, in the most respectful way, we really have to kind of stay away at this point in time from stuff on WBD and really focus on the company that we're operating today.

Your next question comes from the line of Robert Fishman with MoffettNathanson. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. Is the current plan to allocate more of your overall company programming budget towards the higher quality content like NFL, UFC, obviously, and these blockbuster Paramount movies? Or do you prefer to spread your budget out to more of a volume-based approach going forward? On a related note, just following up on the first question.

After launching those short videos and clips in Paramount+, is the ultimate goal to better compete with YouTube and TikTok for those short-form ad dollars, or is it just to drive more engagement and extend the premium ad dollars that you're already getting from your networks? Thank you.

Yeah. Look, I'll take the H1 and then Andy and Dennis, if you guys want to, you know, obviously jump in on the back end around monetization. Look, I'll say kind of a core thematic for us has always been quality is the best business plan. You know, really making sure you aim high and you don't stop working until you get there.

In the competitive landscape that we find ourselves in today, we think that's essential from a creative standpoint. You know, and that's the philosophy that we're going to continue to deploy across our, you know, film and television studios as well as our streaming services. CBS across the sports side has really focused, we think quite well on big events that matter, delivering a record-setting, you know, NFL season.

You know, we just delivered one of the most successful, obviously, Masters finals. We do think that emphasis on quality and aiming high in terms of a storytelling standpoint is really critical. At the same point in time, we've also increased our investment in content this year. As we said, we've doubled the output, roughly of the film studio.

In the D2C space, you know, we've effectively come close to doubling the output in terms of our original series that we've obviously greenlit since we've been at the company. We do believe that we can maintain that quality bar while scaling, and we think that's essential towards accomplishing our growth goals. Dennis, anything you want to dive, you know, I turn it over to you around monetization.

I mean, you should think about the content portfolio across our segments, right? You know, in TV media, the CBS team has been executing, you know, with a balanced portfolio of both the NFL and other sports, as well as a really solid primetime lineup. You've seen them there with 13 of the top, 20 shows in primetime. Overall on D2C, we very much are building.

You know, we've talked about this. This is a multi-year journey to build a portfolio that drives growth and engagement. You're seeing that start to come through, you know, in Q1. Our Paramount+ revenue was up 17% through a combination of both, you know, delivery on price increase as well as our healthy underlying growth in the business from subscribers.

We added nearly two million subscribers in the quarter on an underlying basis. Then, you know, David talked about in the studio, right? We will continue to see, you know, the studio rebuild. In Q1, our overall studio revenue was up 11%, a combination of both the delivery on films like Scream, as well as continuing to build our third-party TV studio. We'll continue to monitor, you know, the content performance.

You know, we're spending a lot of time internally around, you know, building out appropriate content ROI analysis, making sure that every investment is underwritten with the appropriate level of rigor. You're going to continue to see us do that as we build a portfolio.

Robert, look, on clips, you know, we obviously know where people want to watch our content. Typically, it's on more than 1 screen. If it's not two, it's kind of three. The ability to have a vertical, short form product that we can then deepen engagement across our user base, keep people more involved, and want to spend more time with our content is critical to our future. This is just the beginning. I would view it as a beta test, but I would say right now we're seeing high engagement of people looking at clips and then coming into our various forms of content, whether it be news, sports, or entertainment. We're pretty excited about sort of what that means for the future.

The last thing I would say is you look at how fast the team has been able to roll out these level of innovations. There is incredible momentum building across the company as we basically take a test and learn fast iteration approach. We're really pleased with the early metrics. Again, it's early innings right now.

Your next question comes from the line of Rich Greenfield with LightShed Partners. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for taking the question. David, you've got, you know, very large D2C ambitions if I go back to your original manifesto letter that you wrote when the transaction closed. I'm curious, as you think about your engagement goals for Paramount+ in 2026 and 2027, given sort of the size of the investments you've made since taking control, I guess how should we think about how fast you think you can move the goalpost on engagement?

How does the tech or UI tech stack rebuild this summer play into that engagement change or the step function you're hoping in engagement? Then just quickly on sort of the same topic, but Paramount+ has used channel stores pretty aggressively since its launch, even going back to the CBS All Access days.

What is your view on channel stores, and should you be using them or should you not long term?

Rich, great question. To kind of. Look, to summarize basically the first part, it's a combination of increased content investments and increased tech investments when you look at it, right? Like, it really is to achieve our goals that we're working towards in streaming, we need to invest in obviously more content on platform.

You know, I think if you take a look at what's obviously coming in, you know, in 2026, you know, we have new seasons of The Agency, Star Trek, Lioness, MobLand, Tulsa King. We have Dutton Ranch obviously coming this, you know, obviously this summer. You know, Frisco King from Taylor Sheridan. On sports, you're seeing us, you know, obviously continue to invest. You know, UFC is obviously year-round.

We have the NFL, March Madness, UEFA Champions League, you know, a new partnership with the WNBA. We've also greenlit a significant amount of new series from third-party studios, you know, such as Discretion, you know, with Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning, 9/12 with Jeremy Strong, and Fear Not with Anne Hathaway. We do need to invest obviously more in content, which you're seeing us doing across the platform. We also have to invest significantly in terms of the tech piece of our product. What I would say is we are on track to basically accomplish convergence by the middle of this year.

You will see significant improvements on the platform once we roll that out, but that really is, in our view, getting to the starting line of all the work that we need to get done to really reach to be what we would define as best in class, and we are hiring against that goal. When you look at the resources that we're putting into engineering talent and AI talent to really put us in a position to compete with the leaders in the industry, and it's that combination of art and technology working hand in hand together that drive growth, that drive engagement, you know, and all of the key metrics that are required, you know, to building a truly scaled business. The pending transaction serves as an accelerant towards that goal.

You know, I think if you then go to the, you know, channels question, that really is on a case-by-case basis. You know, we evaluate all partnerships really looking for win-wins across the board, and that's really going to be the philosophy that we continue going forward. There's nothing further we can comment on that at this time other than we will continue to look for what we think positions us and our partners to be able to win side by side along one another.

The only thing I'd say, Rich, you know, it's a good question on engagement, you're going to see us just focus on making sure it's like high quality, high calorie engagement. You know, if you look at the UFC viewers, they're averaging 15 years younger, right? They're staying on the platform longer. What we're doing on Pluto, we're, you know, we're switching to VOD. These are, you know, VOD's up 60% per user. These are higher quality engagement metrics. This helps us as we think about monetization, right? As we think through the year, as we continue to invest in our ads monetization. You know, fill rates were up in Paramount+ and in Pluto.

you know, your point is valid on engagement, but we're also sort of taking it a step further, making sure it's high quality, high calorie engagement.

Your next question comes from the line of Steven Cahall with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Couple questions on DTC. Paramount+ I think grew around 17% in the quarter. Strong for sure. I know it slowed just a little bit the last couple of quarters, even with the addition of UFC. I don't think the hard bundles had a big impact on that, but maybe it did. I think your guidance has revenue growth kind of H2 weighted.

Just wondering if there's a good way for us to think about the underlying drivers of growth at Paramount+ and how we think about it may be accelerating towards the back half of the year. Then, just to follow up on DTC EBITDA, I think there was a content expense benefit in the quarter on programming amortization, maybe a change in accounting from Skydance.

Can you just help us understand how that impacts the business going forward in terms of adjusted EBITDA and if there's any comparability we need to be aware of for the segment? Thank you.

Yes, Steven, let me, this is Dennis K. Cinelli. Let me sort of work through this. Maybe it's helpful overall context for the quarter on EBITDA. You know, for the quarter on EBITDA, we came in at the high end on revenue, you know, beat on adjusted EBITDA. You know, in general, expenses were a bit lighter than we had planned for. This is primarily around slower pacing and hiring. To your point, some of the shift in timing of content. We generally view, you know, overall expenses for the year will be on track with our expectations. This including D2C. You know, we're just going to balance some of the content timing.

What you'll see on D2C in terms of EBITDA, you know, we will see some margin hit in D2C just based on when the slate launches in Q3 and Q4. We should plan for that. As we think about overall Paramount+, we feel really good about the trajectory. You know, as we talked about, Paramount+ was up 17% year-on-year, driven by 14% increase in ARPU.

That was a mix of both, you know, the price increase in January, as well as our continued improvement in the underlying subscriber base and the mix there. On the quarter, you know, we were up 700K subscribers. Underneath that, we added 2 million underlying subscribers, and we exited a little over 1 million of international hard bundles.

I think for context for everybody, those hard bundles, the average ARPU is less than $1. These are really uneconomic, you know, uneconomic subscribers. What will continue to drive the business throughout the rest of the year is we'll continue to see healthy growth on underlying subscribers, especially as our content slate fills in throughout the year. We will continue to see our improvement in ad monetization.

Great. Then, content benefit. You want to just quickly.

Yeah, we had just on the content expense benefit, I think we talked through the timing, so for some of the phasing for the quarter. We do have some benefit from the Skydance transaction that flows through this year. It steps down next year. We won't get into any specifics, but there is some benefit and we recast the financials, so you kind of see that. You'll see that in the recast. We'll call out if there's any material, you know, if there's anything material each quarter.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Ng with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Michael, your line is open.

Yes. Your next question comes from the line of Peter Supino with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. I wondered if you could talk about the programming cost environment generally. You and others in the industry seem very focused on investing, you know, targeted but increasingly aggressive ways, and I'm wondering if you're seeing that in the unit cost of programming. Then a question on ad sales. You all have, you know, rethought so many aspects of the business, I wonder now, having owned the assets for almost a year, if you have any fresh ideas about the way in which Paramount's selling advertising, especially in the DTC space. Thank you.

Yeah. How about I'll jump in real quick, Peter, on programming costs, and then David, why don't you take, you know, how we're thinking about transforming ad sales?

Peter, on programming, generally we find we're able to, you know, work through the greenlight process and be competitive. I think what I would say you can see it flow through. You know, number one, you know, what the team is doing in TV media, especially in CBS, you know, they're managing the linear declines and doing that through, you know, right sizing our programming, at the same time hitting creatively with the performance of the slate. We feel we see that team executing really well. Across the studio, you know, we're not seeing any impact on budgets, you know, or overall, you know, creative costs. Nothing generally, we're seeing in terms of trends that we would call out.

Yeah. Then, when you're talking about advertising and particularly ad tech, we talked about this on our previous earnings call where, you know, the advertising business is a big focus for us and a big area of opportunity that we identified early on. We're actively working to obviously improve our ads business. You know, we're retooling our go-to-market. You know, we're consolidating our national sales organizations into a single client-centric structure under unified leadership.

We've brought in, you know, new talent from, I would say, digital leading platforms like Amazon, Google, Hulu, Roku, et cetera. You know, we're making platform investments and working through Curious investment. On the ad tech side, we have Precision+, which is our AI-powered ad product that combines first-party and third-party data.

You know, that's generating, you know, positive early market feedback and driving performance efficiency aids above benchmarks. You know, you're also seeing us, basically obviously on the... You know, we have a format innovation pod that's driving new ad experiences, including streaming fixed units, sports D-I, D-I and scaling for UFC. You know, we're also using AI-driven QA, which has also been really impactful.

You know, what I would say is that is overall an area that we identified as a real opportunity for us. We are making all the adjustments, and we're really pleased with the, I'd say, early results that we're seeing. We also just completed, you know, our first upfront. Feedback has been incredibly positive. I'd say, you know, underlying momentum is really good.

There's work to do, but we're excited about how fast the teams are accelerating. I could just add in terms of the results. You know, as David said, we feel pretty good about the building momentum on terms of ad performance. You know, Q1 overall ads declined 3%, but improved versus Q4. We saw the D2C business, the ads business part of D2C return to growth.

As we think about the rest of the year, you know, our expectation is the overall ad business in total for the company will return to growth the back half of this year. This will be driven by D2C accelerating and more than offsetting the declines in TV media.

We have time for one more question, and that question comes from Michael Morris with Guggenheim Securities. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Two things. One, I'm hoping you could share a little bit more detail on UFC and how that's been performing in the first, you know, several months now that I think you've had about 10 events there. Curious how it's performing and also, you know, how it benefits the business more broadly, whether there is more sort of things to come over the course of the year as you use that property.

Second, in the letter, you note at the studio several titles that you have in production that will be released on Netflix and on Prime Video. I'd love to hear, again, maybe why it's important for the studio to be selling content to services that are also competitors for both engagement and subscriptions. Thank you.

Yeah, of course. Look, I'll start with the UFC piece. We could not be more pleased with our seven-year UFC partnership. It really has exceeded our early expectations across the board. A couple of key performance metrics. You know, more than 10 million households have watched UFC programming on Paramount+, with over 100 million hours of UFC content viewed.

To contextualize, average UFC viewership across our platform is more than 15 times the average pay-per-view event over the past two years. In addition to that, new UFC subscribers are on average 15 years younger than the average P+ viewer, and these subscribers are coming in for UFC and then engaging, you know, with our broader offering around with series like South Park.

We're really seeing, you know, that subscriber engage with other content on the platform. They're spending more time. I think it's also important to kind of note the highlight of the some of the events that we obviously housed on CBS. When you look at, you know, the main fight cards across UFC 326, 327, those averaged 2.8 million viewers.

For context, that viewership is nearly 50% higher than ABC's NBA prime time game on the same night. The UFC content really is performing for us. We've also seen advertising demand exceed expectations, and that was a meaningful contributor to us in terms of our Q1 advertising. We're really excited about the way the UFC partnership is performing.

Again, we're just, you know, we're under a seven-year journey. We are very excited about how it is driving the business. I believe, just I want to make sure I fully clarify, the second part of the question is you're asking around why we're obviously continuing to sell to third parties. Look, I'll break that up into a couple of places. One, when it comes to content licensing, we do not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to that. We actually think that is an incredibly meaningful part of our business and intend for that to continue.

You know, there are certain series and shows that you'll want to keep exclusively on your own and operated platform, but there are other series that absolutely make sense to sell to third parties. I think one of the things that is surprising is some of those series when they actually come back to your owned and operated platforms will actually increase in viewership. You really can't take a one size fits all approach to this problem. It really has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. I think also when you look into original series on the studio side, we're in the business of being the number one home for the most talented artists in the world.

When it comes to, take a showrunner, for example, it's really critical to be in a position to where you are offering that particular piece of talent that you're working with the most opportunities to get their show made. We think it is powerful from a platform perspective to say we can sell into our owned and operated, but if for any reason it doesn't make sense for owned and operated, we can also sell into third parties. We own those shows.

They generate revenue for us. It also makes you a much more desirable place from a talent perspective. Again, we really do evaluate all of these things on a case-by-case basis and do not take a one size fits all approach. That served us really well. We plan on that to continue for the foreseeable future.

Thank you. I will now turn the call back over to Kevin for closing comments.

All right. Thanks, Krista. Thank you to everyone for taking the time to join today. We appreciate the questions. Please reach out if you have any follow-ups. Thanks, all.

Paramount Skydance (PSKY) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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