Paramount Global (PARA) 2014 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the CBS Corporation second-quarter 2014 earnings release teleconference. Today's call is being recorded. At this time I would like to turn the call over to the Executive Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Adam Townsend. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our second-quarter 2014 earnings call. Joining us for today's discussion our Sumner Redstone, our executive Chairman; Leslie Moonves, President and CEO; and Joe Ianniello, Chief Operating Officer. Sumner will have opening remarks and we will turn the call over to Les and Joe, who will then discuss the strategic and financial results. We will then open the call to questions.

Please not that statements on this conference call related to matters which are not historical facts are forward statements which involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. Risks and uncertainties are disclosed in CBS Corporation's news releases and securities filings. A webcast of this call and the earnings release related to today's presentation can be found on the investor section of our website at CBSCorporation.com. Reconciliations for non-GAAP financial information related to this call can be found in our earnings release or on our website.

With that, it's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Sumner.

Thank you, Adam. Good afternoon, everyone. I am extremely fond of CBS's continuing success. Our content is performing extremely well. I am confident we will stay at the top of our game for many, many years to come. So it gives me great pleasure to turn the call over to my great friend and colleague, the man I rightfully call a super genius, Les Moonves.

Thank you, Sumner. And good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us. Needless to say, these are very exciting times in the media business. When you think about all that has gone on in these last three months and even, in fact, these last three days, it is truly astonishing. The good news is, through all the change and all the noise we continue to be extremely confident about CBS's growth prospects, and we remain fully focused on executing our compelling growth strategy. This includes second-quarter EPS that tied our record of $0.76 and adjusted EPS that came in at $0.78, up 4% from a year ago.

In the middle of all the success and excitement there were a number of key positive development here at CBS since the second quarter began. First, we successfully completed the separation of our Outdoor business. This accentuates that CBS is a content company and we are fully focused on what we do best. In addition, we are now much closer to a 50-50 split of advertising and non-advertising revenue. More importantly, thanks to this transaction we were able to retire more than $5 billion of our stock. And in a moment I'm going to talk about the significant amounts of additional capital that we will be returning to our shareholders per our announcement today.

The next key development was the landmark Supreme Court ruling against Aereo. This removes any distraction from our stated $2 billion of retrans and affiliate compensation revenue by 2020, a goal that we are well on our way to achieving. We are very pleased that the highest court in the land reaffirmed the legal rights of content owners. And as we learned subsequently what we suspected all along, Aereo only had about 75,000 subs nationwide. So a lot of attention for a service that virtually nobody was using.

We also had a very successful upfront during the quarter. Yes, there were winners and there were losers in the upfronts. And here at CBS we did very well and better than most people anticipated. We brought in more dollars and commanded higher pricing than anyone else with substantial CPM increases. Yes, volume was down slightly. But, given the strength of our fall schedule, we will be happy selling that extra inventory and scatter. And for the first time, C7 was a major part of our upfront negotiations including a number of breakthrough deals with key agencies. This will significantly drive our advertising revenue going forward since more of our viewers will be counted and monetized.

All of these developments will help our business. And all of them give us even more confidence in our future. It is because of this confidence in the continued strength of our operations that we have announced today a huge increase in the amount of capital we are returning to investors. This includes a significant expansion of our share buyback program. Our board has authorized an increase to $6 billion and we will significantly accelerate its pace. This authorization is in addition to $5 billion of stock we already retired this year that I just mentioned.

Taken together in a short period of time, this represents more than $11 billion of value and more than 30% of the shares of our Company. And today we also announced a 25% increase in our quarterly dividend once again reaffirming our commitment to return value and supporting our confidence in our business going forward. As we have shown, shareholder value is a core CBS commitment and that is something that will not change.

Meanwhile, you have heard recently about the challenges during Q2 in the advertising marketplace, which we saw as well. But we are now seeing pacing improve significantly here in Q3 both nationally and locally, and Q4 will be even better than Q3.

Looking ahead, there are a number of additional developments that make us very excited about the back half of 2014. For instance, after finishing first once again and, in fact, for the 11th time in 12 years, the CBS Television Network will have the biggest events on television this fall with Thursday Night Football. Never before in the history of network television has the NFL been on Thursday nights. National local NFL sales are already pacing up strong double digits on Sundays, and Thursdays are doing phenomenally well as well. This, together with upfront increases I told you about, means network advertising is accelerating nicely in the back half of the year.

In addition, since we now have Thursday Night Football, we have the advantage of moving The Big Bang Theory to Monday so we can strengthen that night as well. And of course, we are obviously pleased to have the cast back and The Big Bang Theory back into production as of this week. We are also very pleased we lead all broadcast networks with 47 Emmy nominations this year.

And this fall we are adding our extremely profitable wholly-owned NCIS franchise with a new spinoff that, through pre-negotiated licensing deals, is guaranteed to make a profit right from the start. Showtime is also poised for a terrific back half with the second season of Ray Donovan having a great summer and the return of Homeland set for October. There will also be a frenzy of political spending this fall, ramping up here in Q3 and increasing in Q4. And we will have more international and domestic licensing and streaming deals on the syndication front, such as the new recently completed extension with Netflix for our library of programming here in the US.

So, we feel very good about the quarters ahead and about our long-term growth prospects as a content company going forward. It all begins with the continued success of the CBS Television Network. In addition to winning this past season, CBS is the number one network this summer, and with Thursday Night Football on its way we are very confident we will remain number one for the entire 2014-2015 season as well. Looking beyond that you next summer, we feel very good about our prospects, having already announced our 2015 summer event series, Zoo. Just as we did with Amazon for Under the Dome and Extant, we presold SVOD rights for this series this time to Netflix, meaning that Zoo will also be immediately profitable for us.

In terms of advertising next season, we will be doing an increasing number of C7 deals simply because it is a more accurate measurement of all the people watching our shows. The C7 deal will shortly become the only measurement of any relevance. Marketers want to get a more precise count of all the impressions and overnight ratings and other daily ratings are totally antiquated. We now have VOD, SVOD, AVOD. It's a lot of letters but it adds up to bigger numbers and viewers and revenue. New technologies are supporting our programs and the winners are the content creators.

In fact, these new platforms and new measurements are helping our whole ecosystem. Many people look at a show like our drama, Elementary, and only see a live plus same day audience of 9 million viewers on CBS. We look at Elementary and see a big audience that grows to nearly 14 million when you add in seven-day viewing on DVR, VOD and online viewing plus a healthy demo boost as well. The audience across all these platforms has built an important program asset for our Company that led to huge syndication deals with Hulu and WGN.

There are many more examples. This summer Under the Dome averages about 8 million viewers on the day of air, but after seven days that number increases to 13 million. And Extant goes from 9 million viewers to 12 million. And that's just to domestic TV viewing. It does not include the significant viewers we get from streaming on Amazon and CBS.com. So clearly, we need to look at the world in a whole new way. What appears to be a moderate hit may actually be a big one. As these trends continue we will get paid for every viewer, bringing in hundreds of millions of new dollars.

In addition, one of the things that clearly has changed about our business is that the backend of a show's revenue is now as important, if not more important than the front end from advertising. Ownership of content is the key to our success. So, we are very pleased to have increased the number of shows that we own on our primetime schedule. We will have ownership in four out of five of our new series on CBS this fall and in more than 70% of our total lineup.

Also, in order to grow our portfolio of owned content franchises, CBS Studios is going well beyond the CBS Television Network. We are programming for Showtime, for the CW, for other cable networks and for other broadcast networks including a straight-to-series order for ABC. Going forward, we will be producing more and more shows for more and more outlets including major streaming companies and other emerging distributors.

Turning to cable, Showtime continues to succeed on the strength of its original programming. In 2010 Showtime had one series with 5 million weekly viewers. In the past 12 months we've had six of them. With Showtime's original content getting better and better, we have now launched nine successful shows in a row. Our two sophomore series, Ray Donovan and Masters of Sex, are performing very strongly for us this summer. And with every episode they are adding to our library of owned content. And as our collection of owned Showtime hits grows, so too will our syndication revenues, which is now becoming a very meaningful part of our cable segment. Looking ahead, Showtime will also have the highly anticipated return of Homeland in October and we are very pleased with the continued growth of our Showtime Anytime and Showtime On Demand platforms as well.

Turning to publishing, we had a very solid quarter on the strength of some very big titles. And in the coming months we're looking forward to some key releases including books by Stephen King and by Walter Isaacson, whose last work on Steve Jobs was one of the biggest sellers anybody has had in years. Plus, we continue to find new ways to monetize our content digitally. During the quarter we entered into two new deals that expand our e-book subscription business, and we continue to convert more and more titles to digital so that we can increase the ways we monetize them.

At our local businesses where looking forward to the third quarter, where pacing is increasing significantly and is even better in the fourth quarter. Our improvement is largely due to live events, the NFL and, once again, political advertising. We are set for a big midterm election season with gubernatorial elections in 14 of our markets including what figure to be hard-fought races in Florida, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well as a number of cantankerous House and Senate races and another wave of ballot measures and propositions in California and Colorado. In each case, both sides are willing to go to great lengths to get their messages out with increases in super PAC funds fueling their resolve. We are glad to be the beneficiary of this. In addition, our local digital business continued to show solid double-digit growth in revenue and profit, and nationally CBS Interactive had a terrific quarter, led by 93% growth in revenue at our CBS branded properties in entertainment, news, and sports.

So, across CBS, we are focused on moving forward as a great content company with a growing number of ways to monetize that content starting right here in the third and fourth quarter. Our Outdoor transaction, Aereo victory, strong upfront, number one network, launch of Thursday Night Football, better measurement, C7 deals, impending political dollars, growing success at Showtime, Netflix expansion, increasing ownership of content and on and on and on, all give us great confidence in the back half of 2014 and in our future beyond that as well.

In addition, all of these factors contribute to why we are able to announce today that we have increased our share buyback program to $6 billion, accelerating its pace and also increase our dividend by 25%. Going forward, we will continue to make returning value to shareholders a top priority and we will continue to run CBS in a way that achieves maximum shareholder returns on the strength of our content. And with that, I will turn the call over to Joe.

Thanks, Les. Good afternoon, everyone. In just a bit I will be giving you some more details about our second-quarter results. I'm also going to talk about what's coming up in the back half of 2014. But first I want to take a moment to update you on the completion of our Outdoor transaction and provide more details on our capital return plan.

Last month we split off the remaining 81% that we owned in CBS Outdoor. This entire initiative was a success from start to finish, beginning with the sale of our European operations last fall to the debt we raised at very attractive rates in the first quarter to the launch of our IPO this spring to obtaining a favorable REIT ruling from the IRS and, finally, to completing the exchange offer in July on an accelerated schedule. Please note that since we continued to own CBS Outdoor through the second quarter, its results are presented as discontinued operations in our financial statements today. And because the exchange offer closed after June 30 we will record a gain on the disposition in Q3.

Now that the Outdoor separation is complete, we are now focused more than ever on managing our content-centric businesses to drive shareholder returns. Our mix of revenue has become a more favorable blend of advertising, content licensing, and subscription fees including a growing base of contractually committed retransmission revenue as well as higher payments from our station affiliates. As a result, we will benefit even more from recurring and predictable revenue streams going forward, which will, in turn, increase our visibility on profits and free cash flow.

Clearly, CBS's transformation provides greater financial flexibility and an improved capacity to return value to our shareholders, which will always remain a top priority for us going forward. Just to give you an indication of how the separation of Outdoor and our transformation overall are leading to higher shareholder returns, we spent $2.4 billion to retire 38.5 million shares of our stock in the first six months of 2014. Then in July we retired an additional 44.7 million shares through our Outdoor exchange offer. So the last seven months we have retired more than 83 million shares of our stock, which is approximately 15% of our total shares outstanding. Plus, as you have now heard, we are increasing our share repurchase program to $6 billion, which represents an additional 20% of our market cap at our current stock price.

We also plan to significantly increase the pace of our share repurchases and we intend to be aggressive and opportunistic about it. As part of our overall capital return plan, we are comfortable raising our target leverage ratio to 2.5 times gross debt to OIBDA and we will continuously revisit this ratio as we execute on our revenue diversification efforts, which we believe will provide further capacity over time.

In addition to all of that, as you have also heard, we are raising our quarterly dividend by 25% starting with the next payment date on October 1 of this year. And with respect to all the talk about M&A, let me be clear. We obviously look at every opportunity that arises within our industry. But here at CBS we will continue to be very disciplined in our approach to M&A, and we do not see anything out there that would change the capital return plan we just laid out.

Lastly, I would like to add we continue to look for ways to optimize our debt portfolio by taking advantage of favorable capital markets to lower our interest expense and extend our maturities.

Looking at the second quarter, there were two significant items that affected comparability with 2013. First, we had large international syndication sales of both CBS and Showtime-owned content in Q2 of 2013. And second, last year CBS broadcast the semifinals of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, which were on Turner this year. Because of this impact of these two items, our quarterly revenue came in at $3.2 billion compared with $3.4 billion in 2013 and why OIBDA was $801 million versus $848 million a year ago.

Even with that, our OIBDA margin was steady at a healthy 25% because of our disciplined cost management efforts. And as Les said, our adjusted EPS, which excludes Outdoor, was up 4% to $0.78. Including Outdoor in our results, second-quarter EPS was $0.76. And on a year-to-date basis adjusted EPS was $1.61, up 7% from 2013.

Turning to our operating segments, the two items I just outlined obviously affected certain business units more than others including entertainment, where revenue came in at $1.8 billion and OIBDA came in at $376 million. Specifically, we had a large international sale last year that included 684 episodes of all three CSI's, which boosted entertainment revenue significantly. And in local broadcasting the lack of the Final Four games this year as well as the loss of a major sports contract led to revenue of $665 million and OIBDA of $238 million. Our local broadcasting OIBDA margin still came in at a solid 36%.

In cable, second-quarter revenue of $516 million was in line with last year, when we had several international syndication deals for Dexter. As we continue to own more and more of our Showtime content and license it around the world, we will recognize the revenue as we make those shows available. So looking at revenue on a year-to-date basis will be more meaningful.

Year-to-date cable revenue was up 6%. Cable OIBDA for the quarter was also up 6% to $219 million, driven by growth in our high-margin affiliate revenue. And our cable OIBDA margin grew 200 basis points to 42%. In publishing, higher print sales led to double-digit growth in both revenue and OIBDA. Revenue of $211 million was up 12% and OIBDA of $24 million was up 14%, driven by a broad list of strong titles.

Turning to cash flow and our balance sheet, our quarterly free cash flow was affected by the timing of payments for our new nine-year Sunday NFL contract as well as our Thursday Night Football deal. We expect fourth-quarter free cash flow to be the beneficiary of this timing. In addition, we exited the quarter with $261 million of cash on hand and our leverage ratio was 1.9 times.

Now let me give you a few observations about the back half of 2014 in each of our revenue categories. In advertising, we see national trends accelerating, meaning we see third quarter better than the second and fourth quarter better than the third. This is driven by more original summer programming, the addition of Thursday Night Football, and higher rates from this year's upfront. At the local level in Q3 TV stations are pacing to be up double digits while radio is pacing to be up low-single digits, led by political spending on midterm elections.

Content licensing and distribution will get a lift in the second half of the year from the syndication sale of Hawaii Five-0 and Blue Bloods as well as the new domestic Netflix library agreement that Les mentioned. And in affiliate and subscription fees we will continue to show steady increases in retrans and payments from our station affiliates as well as in premium cable fees. As mentioned, we are well on our way to achieving $2 billion in revenue from retrans and our station affiliates in 2020.

In summary, we said all along that upon the completion of our Outdoor transaction we would increase our capital return policy. Today's announcements reaffirmed that commitment and demonstrate once again that returning value to our shareholders is our number one priority. We are also confident that our continued success will come from the significant organic growth we see ahead from our existing assets, including the strategic steps we are taking to own more of our content and monetize it across emerging platforms. Taken together, our commitment to aggressively return value to shareholders and to fully capitalize on the strength of our content positions CBS to drive EPS well into the future.

And with that, Tom, let's open the line for questions.

(Operator Instructions) David Bank with RBC Capital Markets.

Two quick ones -- the first, Joe, just to follow up on your commentary on the target leverage ratio, if you are currently at 1.9 and you are comfortable going up to 2.5 times, would the full exercise of the newly expanded program to $6 billion by year end fiscal 2015 -- would that get you to the 2.5 times range or is there more room? And what would you do with the dry powder, is the first question.

The second one is, more directed at Les -- I don't know if you guys listened to the Time Warner call yesterday. But Jeff Bewkes commented on the fact that the original programming is getting higher ratings. It's something like 20% of the schedule right now on the Turner [net's] original, moving toward 40%. So my question is -- but -- and at the same time you are seeing new players come in like GN America, buying some of your higher-end quality off-net syndication. So I was curious, is your view, net-net, is that demand for traditional off-net syndication -- is it going up? Is it staying the same or is it declining as you look at the way the cable nets are programming?

Let me do the second one first. It's a little ironic that Jeff would say that when the highest-rated show on Turner is The Big Bang Theory, which is off net. And they are running the sprockets off it. By the way, Time Warner also owns that show. So that is an odd statement. I know people are doing more original programming, but the big hits are still selling very well in off net and there are so many other places to do it now with SVOD. So, we have little concern about that. When you judge by what we've done with some of our other deals with Blue Bloods and Elementary and Good Wife, we have been able to syndicate them across the board and multiplatform to the maximum usage.

And David, on your first part, as far as the target leverage ratio, what I would say is, look, we're going to get there in short order. But obviously, as we go EBITDA we are creating additional capacity. Again, at the stock price levels, again we set every dollar of excess free cash flow is going back to buy back our stock. So you should expect that.

Okay, thank you.

Ben Swinburne with Morgan Stanley.

Joe, I'm sure you won't mind if we take another stab at that, since it is a big announcement on the buyback. I guess maybe a pointed question, which is when do you look to reach that gross leverage target, because, as you mentioned, you are 1.9 and obviously you got a big back half? So, at least our numbers, you will be 1.7, 1.75 by the end of the year. When do you plan to raise that additional capacity to reach 2.5 gross?

Look, we said $6 billion. Just to give you a timeframe of the $6 billion, we think that's, again, Ben, somewhere between 12 and 24 months. And, again, we are going to look at the EBITDA and the additional capacity we grow over time. So we will continue to revisit the 2.5. I think the 2.5 we are comfortable with, given our mix of assets now. And so, I think, again, just saying if you are looking at $6 billion over 12 to 24 months compared to an underlying what we were doing historically of $1.2 billion, you get a sense of the massive increase that is.

That is very clear, thank you. And Les, there is certainly some concern out there around the licensing business growing over time. It's about a third of your revenue. It's very high margin. It's been a tremendous story the last few years. Can you spend some time on particularly international, what is going on there? It's probably a bigger business then maybe people realize. And then how you think about -- what you've learned on the SVOD front historically about whether there's some cannibalization of the core business as you release more and more product into the SVOD window because I think people have some concerns there as well.

Yes. Look, the international business continues to grow substantially. One of the things that has changed, obviously, is the great expansion internationally of both Netflix and Amazon. So it becomes a much more competitive marketplace in just about every one of the international territories. So you are seeing huge international numbers, bigger than I've ever seen before. When you announce a new fall show that's a drama, the numbers are truly extraordinary with rarely a number being below $2 million per episode for a brand-new drama, and north of $3 million for some of the more established hits. So that's fairly substantial.

In terms of the SVOD marketplace, once again we are able to make deals consistently. As we said, we have expanded our Netflix library. We are extremely pleased that our current two summer shows have deals with Amazon, and next year's show has a deal with Netflix, plus each one of the shows that go into syndication we devise new ways of selling it. So each one is done very differently than before, where you sell it to cable, you sell it to syndication channel as well as doing SVOD. So the future is extremely bright in those areas and every single piece of product we have been able to maximize, which is why we say when we announced NCIS New Orleans with a huge international deal, and already in place and they know what it is and guaranteed deals domestically as well, that's why we confidently say we are going to be north of probably $5 million in episode before the show even goes on the air, not including advertising, which is partially why it's on the air because it's a huge profit maker from day one. And the market -- so people who are worried about the marketplace -- I think those are the cable networks who are trying to shave pricing.

Thank you so much.

Jessica Reif Cohen with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

I have two questions. Given the events of the last month and the hyperfocus on HBO -- you obviously have Showtime, which is turned out to be a dual. It's amazing that almost went to Viacom. But you do have Showtime, and I'm just wondering are you thinking about changing anything in the model to either accelerate growth from, granted, a very high pace but accelerate growth or do anything to highlight the value of this asset? And then I'll ask my second question after.

You know, Showtime -- the great news about Showtime is truly every single year their subs have gone up and obviously their fees have gone up every single year plus, as we mentioned, we have added the syndication element to it because more and more of the programming on Showtime is owned programming. Look, Showtime Go -- Showtime Anytime was a little behind HBO Go, but we have now caught up. We are in most of the country. And the Showtime On Demand platform is growing. So, we are also looking at opportunities for Showtime to expand on different platforms. It's been a great growth story, and we plan on continuing it as long as we continue to do the kind of programs that we are doing. And I think we have more coming up in the fall.

Thank you. And then on content, which you clearly emphasize that CBS has now or had become content-centric company -- you are clearly scaling up. You mentioned all the internal companies you sell to or companies that you have an interest in and now outside companies, third parties. How tough is it to sell to other networks when everybody else is trying to sell internally to themselves?

You know, for the first time we sold a show to ABC. That's the first time we have done that. And I think it's about the content. Obviously, our studio looks to sell to CBS first. And obviously, a different kind of programming to the CW. But I think the world is -- look, as soon as the new Fox team was announced I got a call from Peter Rice saying we want to buy programs from you. So, I think there's an openness to doing that and our studio is selling to other cable channels, plus I think shortly you're going to hear us being in business with some of them SVODs with original programs. So there's still a great deal of growth. I think we have over 30 shows in production and that's only going to grow.

Thank you.

Anthony DiClemente with Nomura.

Les, you guys were presumably a logical candidate to acquire CNN if that would have come up for sale as part of Fox/Time Warner. My guess is that there indeed was some meaningful industrial logic there. You probably thought about it, given the redundancies of news bureaus globally. So I guess the question is, with Fox having withdrawn their bid, is it still possible on the CNN front? And then I have a follow-up.

Yes. Obviously, when the Fox announcement was they said, oh, they would have to sell CNN, we would be a logical place since we don't have a Cable News Network. We thought about it. We talked about it. It's obviously something that's not going to happen, so it becomes irrelevant. The numbers they were throwing around were sort of silly and we wouldn't have looked at it on that basis. And so, it never became a very serious conversation because until Fox was going through with this deal and it absolutely became available would we have looked at it.

But once again, as Joe mentioned, we are pretty happy with our assets right now, and I doubt we would look to do anything with something like that.

Okay, thanks, Les. And then for Joe, Joe, can you just remind us of the cadence of your reverse comp renewals and how they come up over the next couple of years? I'm wondering if you could just update us on the nature or complexion of your conversations with the independent affiliates, particularly now in a post-Aereo, potentially stronger retransmission consent ecosystem?

Yes. We have a few major ones coming up at the end of this year, Anthony, with LIN and Gray. But a majority come up in 2015 and 2016. So we will get a shot to reset to fair market value on the station affiliate side. And on the retrans side, obviously, we have DISH up this year and we have another two major deals up next year for about 13% of our footprint. So I think, again, we're going to have a nice shot to really adjust some pretty old deals to fair market value.

Okay, great, guys. Thanks.

Michael Morris with Guggenheim Securities.

Two questions, the first one -- obviously, you've been very committed to returning capital. It's a big part of your use of cash flow. I think it does raise some concern about reinvestment of the business. So you talked about programming. Can you help quantify a bit what the investment in programming looks like? Does that grow? What's the gating factor to that growth, as an investment? Is it just the appetite out there from your partners? How do you push that? So I guess what does the trajectory of growth in programming look like versus growth in your return of capital?

And then secondly, with respect to Aereo the numbers were somewhat surprisingly low, given all the hype that there was around it. And I'm curious your take on the mobile demand for your products. You made some investments, but are we still just well too early for that to become a revenue driver? And Aereo was evidence of that? Or is it something that you can push now that that's behind you?

As far as the growth in programming, first and foremost, the best ROI we can deliver to shareholders is create another hit. And so that, by far, is where the dollars go. You see an NCIS spinoff, a CSI spinoff. We're going to try to continue to create billion-dollar franchises. So we never starve investing in our business. You are seeing that with our cost. It's demonstrated with the NFL Thursday Night package. So rest assured reinvestment in the business is ahead of our excess returns. And I think the reinvestment is what drives the excess returns, quite frankly. And obviously, the summer programming -- you can see many more original hours in which we own that content. So I think -- and it's really across the board. It's a core part of our strategy we have been very consistent with.

As far as Aereo -- look, the demand for our content, I think, speaks for itself. I think we see that. And as consumers evolve and want it in different forms or shapes, we're going to make sure our content is there. And so -- but we own those intellectual property rights. And if we want to do that with a partner, they have to negotiate with us for those rights, you know, to do that. So, we are very open to those types of conversations but we need to be paid fair market value.

Do you think a move for more mobile will have to come from the MVPD side, or is it something that you can start pushing a bit, given some of the investments that you've made?

No, I don't think it needs to come from the MVPD side. If history tells us anything, they move actually kind of slow. So I think it may be coming from other technology companies or others that push that. But I think it's really driven by the consumer and I think the consumer demand is saying that, when you look at broadband-only homes, et cetera, around this country. So again, very exciting for us for owning all this content. And as it evolves, I think more and more of it should come back to the people who create it.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Alexia Quadrani with JPMorgan.

Just circling back to your commentary about the C7 deals and the upfront, could you give us a sense about how substantial they were? And do you think that they may have depressed the headline CPM increases in getting some of those deals done?

Yes. You know what, it's hard to quantify how many of them and we are not going to say how many of them. But once again, it is moving that way. I expect, by next year's upfront, it to be more than 75% of the deals will be C7's. So we are well on our way to that a year from now. And once again, it's the right way to be. Advertising agencies want it because it's a more accurate way of counting people who are watching our shows. And you saw the lift. The lift in certain shows is more than 50%. So it's pretty substantial. As I said, we as programmers have to look at the world in an entirely different way. Nobody should even be looking at overnights anymore. The C7 number is really the number that matters. And it is a substantial amount of money that has gone into it. That's all I can say.

I would just add that even if a certain amount of advertising is only paid for C3, we have now dynamic ad insertion that we can insert new advertisers to generate more money. So we are going to monetize the consumption one way or another.

And to that point, looking at the world in a whole new way and monetizing consumption one way or the other, if you fast-forward a couple years from now and the viewership patterns have really evolve even further, do you think you guys come out in the same place or ahead than you did maybe 10 years ago when everything was more just traditional standard day ratings and CPMs on that?

Alexia, at the end of the day it's all about content. And clearly, we are heading towards a universe where people are going to watch it when they want it, how they want it. As long as they are counted and as long as we can keep being sort of dominant in being the premier supplier of network programming, we are always going to win. We are always going to be fine monetarily. So, we are very excited about the future. We are very excited how technology is changing what we are doing. But it still depends on -- people won't watch bad shows on good devices. It still depends on having a good show.

Thank you.

David Miller with Topeka Capital Markets.

Hey, Joe, one question for you -- I just want to make sure I have this straight in my head. So, I've always thought of CBS's return of capital program as being three levels of buyback. Okay? There was the $6 billion organic buyback that you guys announced in your second-quarter call last year. Okay, May of last year. Then there's the $2 billion ASR which you announced in, I believe, February of this year. You did that very quickly. That's done. Then there's the share exchange, which you did all in one tranche, which is pretty incredible, if I might add that.

The $6 billion today -- I just want to make sure I understand -- is that just absolutely purely organic again? Or is that include a portion of the first level that wasn't, as of yet, completed as of today? Thanks very much.

Yes, look, it's a timing thing, David. I think you got to look at the $6 billion as a fresh $6 billion -- $6 billion from today over the next 12 to 24 months. And as necessary along the way, if we need to reload we will reload again and again, and look at the ratio. So I think, again, you've got to look at more an actual and what we did over the last seven months that's done, the amount we bought back the year before is done. And we are going to execute. So yes, it's a little bit fungible in the authorization. But I think we were clear in that the pace in the buybacks is going to increase significantly, again, because we have the capacity.

Got it. And Les, on this whole C3 versus C7 vernacular that's going on -- we had thought just going into the upfront process that maybe you guys would sacrifice price and then sell more volume on the lower price. And it looks like what happened was you did sacrifice price, but volume just didn't come up to the level we thought because you guys sacrificed price.

So what gives you the -- it sounds like you are very confident about the second half in terms of a lot of dynamics soaking up that scatter inventory. Is it all football? Is it football soaking up that inventory? Is it higher ratings? Is it the economy? Just what gives you that level of confidence that you talked about in your prepared remarks?

Number one, David, I respectfully disagree. I don't think we sacrificed price, particularly. I was very happy with our CPM growth, which was fairly substantial. And in terms of volume I think we went from selling 78% or 79% of our inventory to approximately 74%.

So all it means is I have 5% more of my inventory to sell in scatter. Now, that could be football at very high pricing or other programming. Once again, we are not worried because I think in 10 of the last 11 years scatter pricing has been up and in most cases substantially from upfront pricing. So we view that only as a positive thing, and going into the fall, especially with Thursday Night Football and more original programming on the air because of that we are going to have no trouble selling our scatter pricing when you compare the amount that we have and what we have to our competitors.

Got it. Thank you very much.

Laura Martin with Needham and Company.

I love these numbers you gave on Elementary, Under the Dome, and Extant, talking about this 35% to 50% audience lift within the seven-day window. My question is, if we think about economics, the (technical difficulty) trends to digital platforms are higher than the network CBM's because the audience is younger. But I also understand that the digital platforms are much less [built out to] the monetization generally is weaker. So I'm interested in whether this lift punches above its body weight. Is it actually more additive to economics in the audience list? Or is your gut feel that today it's less [effective] because of the immaturity or the nascence of the platforms?

It obviously helps it because obviously the younger viewers that are watching it on these other devices and mediums is obviously going to be very attractive to advertisers. So I think, once you count that in I think you're going to see the broadcast ratings skew younger and larger and the gap between broadcast and cable will be further demonstrated. So I think it's going to be a nice point for advertisers to really get behind as that audience grows.

And you made a very valid point. As those numbers are up 35% to 50%, a large chunk of them are in the younger demographic, a bigger chunk than watches it live. So it will be, by definition, more valuable viewers.

Okay. And then, Joe, just on the back half -- like you say, you are very confident in the back half. Can you give us any margin guidance for the second half versus the first half?

We don't give margin guidance, Laura. I think we've demonstrated that we are able to manage our margin. I think again, as I said, we are investing in our product. Obviously, the new Thursday night NFL contract wasn't cheap. But again, we think it was the right thing to do. So, look, we are going to continue to manage our margins and grow the top line and be focused on that. But overall I think you have seen margins be accretive as these new incremental revenue streams become more and more meaningful.

Okay, very helpful. Thanks, guys. Good numbers. Thanks.

Vijay Jayant with ISI Group.

It's David Joyce here. Just had a couple follow-ons to a couple other questions, one on the reverse comp. We had the earlier working assumption that you would get half or a more than half of the retrans fees from the non-owned TV stations. Is that going to be creeping up or given the investments in the programming now? And where do you see that getting to by 2020?

Secondly, on the dynamic ad insertion I was just wondering how widely distributed is that at this point for you and when do you think that capability for CBS will be fully distributed?

I'll take the first one and then Joe can take the second. In terms of reverse comp, initially when reverse comp came into play everybody said, well, it should be 50-50 and that was the rule of thumb. It's changed quite a bit since then. Obviously, the retrans numbers have gotten higher that some of our affiliates have gotten. And obviously our programming is stronger. So we don't use that as a basis. We actually are now calling it a program fee, which is a more appropriate term to acknowledge that. And that 50-50 no longer is even a base that we use. We decide what we think is fair. It generally is higher than the 50% number. And we negotiate on that basis. And once again, we are -- in looking at the station groups, they are all doing very well and they are doing well primarily because of network programming both in primetime and in sports. So we feel it's a fair proposition for both sides.

And for DAI, we have deals with all of the major players now. So you can see that roll out and scale up with the new season.

Great. Thank you very much.

John Janedis with Jefferies.

Les, how bifurcated is the ad market? You talked about some softness. But properties like NFL on Thursday and I assume many others of yours are selling well. So is the impact on you more so that there are some big categories that are weak and affecting sell out and pricing across the market? And is the pickup in the third quarter broad across categories?

The pickup is across all the categories. And the pacing, as I said, nationally and locally is going up quite a bit. The second quarter was a softer quarter, which happens from time to time. It also involved a lot less live programming and events like that. So yes, the NFL is selling something like -- on Sunday the package is up 30% to 40% and the Thursday night package is up substantially. In addition, because of Thursday night we're going to have more live programming, and that goes on in the third quarter and the fourth quarter. And that's going to help us quite a bit. So I wouldn't call it bifurcated. I would just say look, occasionally there's a soft quarter. The important thing for us is that picking up substantially in the third and the fourth will be better than the third.

Thanks a lot.

Alan Gould with Evercore.

I've got two questions. First, Les, in this new on-demand world it seems like the repeats aren't playing as well as they used to, unless it's a mega hit like a Big Bang Theory. Does this mean that you, besides the summer season, will have to program more original programming and less repeats?

We are already doing that. Yes, there's no question the repeats aren't doing quite as well as they used to. So, we are definitely trying to pack in our schedule with as many original programs. That's what launched our summer programming idea, when the repeats during the summer weren't doing very well and we were able to get such good pricing both internationally and SVOD. So that will go on throughout the year that you get a better ROI on original programming, especially when you have ownership and you can cash in on the backend. So you are seeing that.

One of the advantages of Sunday night football, Thursday Night Football, once again, you are talking about 24 hours of original programming that can be pushed back into the rest of the year, which will lead us to have more original programming throughout the year and less repeats and more live programming. So it's definitely changed somewhat but we've taken advantage of it.

And if I could follow up with a second question, the Netflix extension -- can you give us some idea how this -- or the new Netflix deal, I should say, as opposed to extension -- how this compares with your original deal from three years ago?

I would say, look, it's not as large in terms of the number of titles. But I think, again, I think it's critical to emphasize how Netflix -- we continue to extend our relationship with Netflix and broaden it, again, domestically and internationally. So again, I think if they want some less product we are happy to do that, but they still have to go through CBS because of the amount of volume we do have. And our shows are working on their platform.

Now, is this just US? Or does this include also the six new countries they are going into?

This was just US.

Okay, thank you.

William Bird with FBR.

First, I was wondering if you could talk about Nielsen's move to multi-screen currency and whether or not that changes your windowing strategy. And then separately, ex-Thursday Night football could you talk about how network is pacing in the September quarter? Thank you.

Obviously, everything Nielsen does is a positive for us. They have been a little behind in their ability to account for C3, C7, online, other areas. They are doing a full court press to improve that. And a lot of the advances that they are doing clearly are beneficial to us. So we are very pleased with that.

In terms of the pacing without football, it's very good. It's much higher than it had been and we are pleased with it.

Thank you.

Marci Ryvicker with Wells Fargo.

Joe, I have two for you. And I'm sorry; I'm going to ask another share repurchase question, I think.

I love share repurchase questions, Marci!

I know. It's just been --

I love them. Come on.

-- three days of hell. We are slow.

Come on, whatever you got.

Are you going to have more opportunistic pace per quarter instead of just a flat pace per quarter? I think where just trying to figure that out.

Yes. I think the answer is yes. I think that's why, in our prepared remarks we didn't want to just buy if the sun comes up. So I think we're going to be smart about this and look for opportunities. But again, that being said is we are going to be aggressive because we do have the capacity. So, I don't think you should look for an even quarter each and every quarter to doing that. Obviously, in this third quarter, the first 45 days here, the first whatever days that's gone, we were out of the market with the Outdoor exchange and earnings. So by definition it is going to be a little bit spread differently over the quarters. But if there's an opportunity we are going to go in heavy.

And we are going to restart immediately.

Okay. And then a question on the TV side. The stations, I think, were down 6% in the quarter. I know you mentioned some tough comps. Do you have an apples-to-apples growth number?

For Q2?

Yes.

Yes. Underlying, Marci, was probably down low-single digits.

Okay. Can you remind us how much exposure you have to national versus local?

Yes. I think our stations skew a little bit more national. I think local did perform a little bit better. I think one category, in particular, in auto probably shifted money to live events, maybe the World Cup or other things in Q2. I think the good news is we are seeing that come back in Q3 with all of the live events and originals we talked about. So it is our largest category order for local. So we are excited that we see it accelerating.

And I have one last small one. With the consolidation of the affiliate groups, is that going to have any impact on what you can get from them for reverse comp?

No. We don't see it having any impact on what we ask for or what we get. We hope it gives them more strength to go get higher retrans dollars on that end. But we have a view of what fair market value is for our content and we get those same fees in markets where we own stations. So we are feeling really good about our position in those negotiations. And obviously they are doing that to get some more financial strength and wherewithal. So that means that they have the ability to pay. So that's got to be a good thing.

Great. Thank you.

Good. Thanks, Marci. And this concludes today's call. Thank you everyone for joining us. Have a great evening.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. We appreciate your participation. You may now disconnect.