Earnings call transcript: CuriosityStream’s Q2 2025 earnings beat forecasts, stock dips

CuriosityStream Inc. (CURI) reported its Q2 2025 financial results, surpassing revenue forecasts with a 30.58% surprise, while earnings per share (EPS) also exceeded expectations. Despite these positive figures, the company’s stock experienced a 4.67% decline in regular trading hours, closing at $4.93, before seeing a slight uptick of 1.42% in after-hours trading. According to InvestingPro data, the stock has delivered remarkable returns, with a 223.57% gain year-to-date and an impressive 386.14% return over the past year.

Key Takeaways

• CuriosityStream achieved a record adjusted EBITDA of $3 million.
• Revenue grew by 53% year-over-year, reaching $19 million.
• The company paid a special dividend, contributing to a 6.5% current dividend yield.
• Stock price fell by 4.67% during regular trading, despite strong earnings.
• CuriosityStream is targeting growth in the AI video licensing market.

Company Performance

CuriosityStream demonstrated robust performance in Q2 2025, with revenue increasing by 53% compared to the same quarter last year. The company’s strategic focus on expanding its content library and entering new international markets contributed to this growth. CuriosityStream also maintained lean operations, which helped improve its financial metrics.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $19 million, a 53% increase year-over-year
• Earnings per share: $0.01, exceeding the forecast of -$0.0033
• Gross margin: 53%
• Adjusted EBITDA: $3 million, the highest in company history
• Adjusted free cash flow: $2.9 million
• Cash and securities: $30.7 million, with no debt

Earnings vs. Forecast

CuriosityStream’s EPS of $0.01 surpassed the forecast of -$0.0033, resulting in a significant surprise of -403.03%. Revenue also exceeded expectations, coming in at $19 million against a forecast of $14.55 million. This marks a positive deviation from previous quarters, highlighting the company’s ability to outperform market predictions.

Market Reaction

Despite the earnings beat, CuriosityStream’s stock fell by 4.67% during regular trading hours, closing at $4.93. However, in after-hours trading, the stock price increased by 1.42%, reflecting a mixed investor sentiment. The stock remains within its 52-week range, with a high of $7.15 and a low of $1.03. InvestingPro analysis indicates the stock is currently trading near its Fair Value, with a beta of 1.76 suggesting higher volatility than the broader market.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, CuriosityStream has set a revenue guidance of $15-$18 million for Q3 2025. The company is focusing on expanding its AI video licensing capabilities, aiming to dominate this emerging market. Additionally, CuriosityStream projects an adjusted free cash flow of $11-$13 million for the full year 2025.

Executive Commentary

CEO Clint Stinchcomb emphasized the company’s strategic direction: "We will license more video and data than we did in 2025." He also highlighted the transformative impact of AI, stating, "The rapid acceleration of AI is not just reshaping industries, it is redrawing the competitive landscape." Stinchcomb expressed optimism about the company’s growth potential across its three revenue pillars: subscriptions, licensing, and advertising.

Risks and Challenges

• Market competition: The rise of AI video licensing could attract new entrants, intensifying competition.
• Content acquisition costs: Increasing costs for acquiring rights-cleared content could pressure margins.
• Economic conditions: Macro-economic factors could impact consumer spending and advertising revenue.
• Regulatory changes: Evolving regulations on digital content and data privacy could affect operations.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts focused on CuriosityStream’s strategy to maintain its three revenue pillars. Questions also revolved around the company’s content acquisition strategy and the potential for licensing non-entertainment training videos, highlighting investor interest in CuriosityStream’s future growth avenues.

Full transcript - Curiositystream Inc. (CURI) Q2 2025:

Bella, Conference Operator: Good afternoon. My name is Bella, and I’ll be your conference operator today. I’d like to welcome everyone to the Curiosity Stream Second Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. Please note that today’s call is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise.

After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I will now turn the call over to Tia Kedahi with CuriosityStream. You may begin your conference.

Tia Kedahi, Investor Relations, CuriosityStream: Thank you, and welcome to CuriosityStream’s discussion of its second quarter twenty twenty five financial results. Leading the discussion today are Clint Stinchcomb, Curiosity Stream’s Chief Executive Officer and Brady Hayden, Curiosity Stream’s Chief Financial Officer. Following management’s prepared remarks, we will be happy to take your questions. But first, I’ll review the Safe Harbor statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward looking statements under the federal securities laws.

These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward looking statements. Please be aware that any forward looking statements reflect management’s current views only, and the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update these statements nor to make additional forward looking statements in the future. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our Investor Relations website as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in today’s press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our quarterly report on Form 10 Q for the quarter ended 06/30/2025 when filed.

In addition, reference will be made to non GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures can be found on our website at investors.curiositystream.com. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be against our results for the comparable 2024 period. Now I’ll turn the call over to Clint.

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Thank you, Tia. To state the obvious, we are living and operating today in an extraordinary and transformational time in media and technology. I will talk later about what this revolution means for Curie. I’d first like to share our Q2 highlights. Quarterly revenue grew by 53% year over year from $12,400,000 to $19,000,000 far exceeding the high end of our guidance.

Revenue also grew sequentially from Q1 by 26%. Net income was again positive and improved by nearly $3,000,000 year over year. Adjusted EBITDA grew by over $4,000,000 year over year from negative $1,000,000 to positive 3,100,000.0 also exceeding the high end of our guidance. More granularly, our subscription revenue increased sequentially and our licensing revenue powered by video and audio for AI training grew considerably. In short, our business is strong and strengthening across the board.

Brady will provide more color around these and other key metrics in his part. In regard to our subscription revenue trajectory, we recently entered into new and expanded multiyear wholesale distribution agreements in Asia, Latin America and The U. S, which we believe will ensure our overall subscription revenue is up into the right for the foreseeable future. Further underscoring our confidence, we recently launched CuriosityStream and Curiosity University in new international markets with retail channel store partners like Prime Video Channels. We licensed a slate of traditional individual titles and series to both new and returning partners, including public broadcasters, pay TV channels, and academic distributors across The US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Today, August 5, we premiere a major series on the world’s most influential streaming platform, Netflix. Titans, the rise of Hollywood is a six episode premium drama that chronicles the extraordinary rise of Hollywood studio system, driven by the ambition and vision of first generation immigrant pioneers. This world class series blends power, scandal, greed, and profound insight into the human condition. We’re eager to see how it resonates with Netflix’s broad audience. The dataset licensing for AI training in the form of premium video, audio, scripts, and study guides grew substantially for the third quarter in a row.

In addition to these premier, ethically sourced corpuses, we also licensed about 9,000,000 tokens of code for the first time ever. While video sits firmly at the top of the dataset leaderboard in value and demand, our licensing of code is a testament to the value of controlling rights to all manner of IP for licensing and an illustration of the principle land and expand, which we are doing and will continue to do by over delivering and delighting our partners. We are asked frequently by investors and content partners to help them better understand the lifespan and durability of data licensing for AI training and other initiatives. Is this recurring, they ask? Is this one and done?

Do you know how many millions or billions of video hours are needed? What is your mode? What happens if you run out of video? Aren’t you concerned about legal and regulatory issues? What will be the impact when the biggest studios move into this area?

Will synthetic training data replace authentic data? These are good and important questions, and while no one can perfectly predict the future, we have a tight team who has spent the last sixteen months working on making Curie the dominant AI video licensor. This work has been done hands on, day by day, partner by partner, shoulder to the wheel. While we have many unique advantages, four critical ones are, one, our deep and curated global premium video and audio library two, long standing relationships with rights holding premium content producers around the world three, programming services worldwide that we are simultaneously feeding and number four, something that really sets us apart, the technical capability to now structure our data in a superior manner to our peers. We believe we’ve had more conversations across the licensing and model training ecosystem than our competitors, and we’ve translated these conversations into executed partnerships.

Our perspective isn’t theoretical. It hasn’t come from commissioning an overpriced McKinsey study or from spending time in the Yale faculty lounge. Our point of view is rooted in real world experience indeed. Every new type of business model tends to go through a period of early chaos and uncertainty. But eventually, the clouds clear, the blue sky presents itself.

In regard to the questions I cited earlier, we know that large scale AI models require enormous volumes of video data for training. Simply put, as they become more advanced, they need to be fed more. Scaling laws in AI show that additional video improves accuracy and generative capabilities even with diminishing marginal returns. The AI company is not generating continuous performance gains, they are losing. Further, freshness and recency are critical because cultural trends, products, and virtual references are constantly evolving.

In other words, models need ongoing updates to stay relevant and avoid obsolescence. As to synthetic data, it is incomplete. Simulated video can augment real data, but doesn’t fully replicate real world physics actions for the diversity and context of authentic video and data. We believe the market for high quality, ethically sourced, rights cleared video and audio content is incredibly durable and only growing for the foreseeable future. We are reviewing real video and audio RFPs, so we do have some insight into the quantity requirements, millions of hours, and category and structural imperatives.

Everyone should do their own research, but there are estimates that the industry wide need for video could range from billions to tens of billions of hours. Some of what I just shared may sound a bit like consultant speak. I’ll speak more plainly to the recurring nature of this business. Everyone wants seconds and thirds and some already fourths and fifths. So for us, this is de facto recurring revenue, which again comes from having the overall best corpus of video and audio in the industry and from working to treat our partners on all sides of the equation like gold.

We run out of content to license. No chance. Just as painters are always painting the Golden Gate Bridge, always, it never stops, we are similarly continuously creating and acquiring content for our streaming services and channels around the world. Further, the hyperscalers and the many other AI companies who are, and who we believe will, license video for training, want to work with partners who control a highly reputable critical mass of content. They tell us that this typically means a minimum of several hundred thousand hours.

The long term durability and recurring nature of this revenue is further sustained by the additional monetizable grants of rights that are emerging and will be required. To be clear, we are granting today only a training right. In the future, we will negotiate and license additional monetizable rights. A few examples include display rights, certain derivative rights, transformative rights, certain reproduction rights, and adaptation rights. Another near certainty is that we will be asked to license rights in the future that we haven’t even contemplated today.

Another common question, what is your moat? Most obvious tangible moat is our superior volume of premium rights cleared content available for license. The largest studios have libraries of 100,000 to two hundred and twenty five thousand hours. We have control of and access to exponentially more hours than that, and our volume is growing every day. In addition, our ability to structure our data gives us a real competitive advantage.

I’m referring to our ability to clip, index, label, and annotate at scale, hundreds of thousands of hours into any segment length in a very short time. To index, to annotate, and again, to label at scale. Think traditional metadata on steroids, but steroids wildly more powerful than the ones given to the best Eastern European javelin throwers. This structured metadata makes content we supply that much more valuable to our licensee partners. Intangibly, it’s also simply action, action, action, enhancing our existing relationships and building new ones.

As we have done and as we continue to do the hard foundational work, we’re well armed to execute at a scale we think beyond potentially anyone in the space. Again, I’m referring to our ability to structure our data, clip, index, label, annotate. We’re now able ourselves to create this type of metadata for our content that we would not have thought possible even three or four months ago. This metadata makes the content we supply that much more valuable to the AI licensees. Lastly, on this topic, it’s critical to be able to distinguish between signal and noise.

All of us are deluged every day with viewpoints around AI from seemingly every information source, like legal and regulatory concerns. What did the president just announce? What did the AIs are? David Sacks say on the All In podcast. Will your job be replaced?

What are the threats to humanity and our personal security that we need to address? How do we keep the god in the box? Is China beating us in the race? For our purposes, ninety nine percent of this is noise, meaning irrelevant or distracting data. Now more than ever, we will be successful by simply focusing on the signal, the meaningful information we need to detect and understand and act on in the direct service of our business objectives, namely meeting the licensing needs of our AI partners.

We see and hear the signal. We will not be distracted by the noise. Over the past century, value creation media has consistently migrated to those able to capitalize on paradigm shifting innovation. The first TV broadcast in 1928, the global satellite link of 1967 that brought billions together to watch the Beatles, and from cable and DTH in the late twentieth century to the rise of YouTube in 2005 and Netflix’s streaming model in 02/2007. Every new wave crowns new leaders and less slow movers behind.

Today, as we enter the mid twenty twenties, we’re standing at the threshold of the most profound disruption and advancement yet. It’s not an iteration. It’s a redefinition and one that will surely bring about a reordering across many, if not all industries. Looking ahead to 2026, we at Curie are confident in two dynamics. One, we will license more video and data than we did in 2025.

And two, we will be the or among the dominant licensors of video for AI model training. In closing, we believe our strong balance sheet, dollars 31,000,000 in liquidity and no debt, and our continued double digit growth in both top line revenue and cash flow, our leadership in AI video and data licensing, our library of over 1,000,000 of video, and our $0.32 annual dividend position us as a high performance outlier amid a historical technological revolution. The rapid acceleration of AI is not just reshaping industries, it is redrawing the competitive landscape. We believe Curia is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this shift. Our diversified revenues from subscriptions, licensing and advertising, our expanding ecosystem of technology and media partners, and public market currency create powerful operating leverage and optionality.

Simultaneously, our disciplined cost rationalization efforts ensure efficiency without compromising growth. Over to you, Brady.

Brady Hayden, Chief Financial Officer, CuriosityStream: Thank you, Clint, and good afternoon, everyone. Our full results will be presented in the 10 Q that we’ll file in the next day or two, but let me quickly go through some of the second quarter results that we want to highlight. Clint said in the second quarter, we reported revenue of $19,000,000 exceeding our guidance and a 53% increase compared to $12,400,000 a year ago. Continued to generate net income in the second quarter with earnings coming in at $800,000 or $01 per share and a $2,800,000 improvement from 2024. Likewise, we reported another quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, which came in at $3,000,000 an improvement of $4,000,000 from a year ago and also the highest adjusted EBITDA in company history.

Adjusted free cash flow came in at $2,900,000 near the high end of our guidance range and an increase of $400,000 compared to last year. This also represented our sixth quarter in a row of positive adjusted free cash flow. Revenue for the second quarter was led by content licensing, came in at $9,300,000 an increase from last year of over $8,000,000 driven by significant new business from AI licensing. Our subscription revenue, which we consider our D2C, partner direct and bundled distribution revenues, was also $9,300,000 in the second quarter. This was a $1,700,000 decline from last year, but a sequential increase from Q1, a trend that we believe will continue.

Second quarter gross margin was 53%, a slight improvement from 52% a year ago. While we’re seeing continued reductions in content amortization, our cash cost of revenue increased slightly, a result of growth we’re seeing in the licensing of content that we have acquired through revenue share arrangements and associated storage costs. Regarding other operating expenses, combined costs for advertising and marketing plus G and A were down 8% compared to last year as we continue to benefit from our ongoing cost rationalization. And excluding stock based compensation, G and A declined 10% from a year ago. As I mentioned earlier, adjusted EBITDA was $3,000,000 in the second quarter compared to a loss of $1,000,000 a year ago.

And adjusted free cash flow was $2,900,000 in the quarter compared with $2,500,000 a year ago. In June, we paid dividends of $10,400,000 including our ordinary Q2 dividend of $4,600,000 as well as a $5,800,000 special dividend. And at yesterday’s closing price, our shares currently provide for about a 6.5% dividend yield. We ended the quarter with total cash and securities of $30,700,000 and no outstanding debt. We believe our balance sheet remains in great shape and that this provides a significant operating flexibility.

Looking forward for the third quarter, we expect revenue in the range of 15,000,000 to $18,000,000 And for 2025, we expect adjusted free cash flow in the range of 11,000,000 to $13,000,000 for the full year. With that, we can hand it back to Bella and open the call to questions.

Bella, Conference Operator: Your first question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham: Okay. Great results. Congratulations, you guys.

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Thanks, Laura. Thank you, Laura.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham: My first question is, so Financial Theory tells us we must ignore clock hash. So my question, Cole, is why are you in the media business, the core media business? Which is

Chris Tittle, Analyst, IPO: Oh, why are we in core media business, Doug?

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Yeah. It’s it’s a great question, Laura, and I appreciate you asking that. I think we’re in the core media business because we have a subscription video on demand business that is strong, you know, that that is global, that is durable, and I think represents the core of who we are as a company. And so I think you may be asking, like, okay. If you’re doing this type of, you know, technology licensing, you know, why are you know, why do you continue to do this?

And our answer is all of this works hand in glove. All of this works closely together. I mean, the the vision that we have for Curiosity over the near, mid, and long term, Laura, is that we will have three solid revenue pillars, subscription business, the licensing business, and an advertising business. We believe our subscription business will grow steadily. We’ve done a lot of work to enter into certain wholesale agreements and other agreements that we believe really firm up the foundation and put us in a position to grow steadily.

So we believe subscription will grow steadily. Licensing, we believe, will, you know, grow rapidly and certainly a high growth area. And then advertising, which for us is still nascent, they hold significant steady and high growth opportunity over time. And I say everything works together because the reason that we’re able the reason we’ve been able to build such a large library for AI licensing is because of all the existing relationships that we have around the world with producers and distributors. We’re constantly acquiring content, you know, for our three subscription services, for our linear pay TV channels, for AVOD, for fast.

And so because we’re doing this, because we have, you know, the the people in place, the processes in place to do this, it’s not a huge extra lift to add on, you know, the ability to to license AI rights or, you know, other rights as well. So we’re in it because it all works it all works hand in glove. It it all works together, and I think it’d be very difficult to be in just one of these today.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham: Okay. And then what are the extra costs? So they sent you for aggregating more and more content and licensing to a broader flock of people. They all have different needs. They all have different tech stack.

What are what are we should we expect to see the cost increases happen as you pivot more towards this high growth licensing for Imprint business? One

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: of the things we’re very proud of is we’ve amassed a library of over a million hours of content primarily on a rev share basis. So what that means is as we license our content, you know, obviously, if it’s our content, there’s a 100% margin. If it’s our partner’s content, we’re paying out a piece to them. And so, you know, it’s maybe 40 to 50% margin, something in that in that frame. So our approach, you know, because because as we got into this, you know, we knew a couple things.

We knew that we were gonna have to amass a lot of content in order to make it a a meaningful business. And, you know, we knew that we need to work with lot of partners, but at the same time, like, you know, we also have told you and many other people that we’re gonna run a profitable business. So we needed to do all of that in a way that didn’t layer on cost to our business today. So we can continue to mass content like this. Over time, will would it make sense for us to, you know, pay outright for certain, you know, large libraries that are available?

We’ll look at that, you know, as as an ongoing basis. But, essentially, right now, you know, the only cost that we see going up would be, you know, storage and delivery cost to some extent. But, you know, in the grand scheme of things, those are relatively de minimis.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham: So, like, hosting cost and r and d cost and hiring, that’s genius thing. That doesn’t add a lot cost

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: structure? It does not. It does not, Laura. We’re, you know, we pride ourselves on, you know, being a a tight company of, you know, 42 full time people. And, you know, I think, you know, over the course of this year, we’ll be at, you know, million 5 to $2,000,000 per employee in revenue.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham: Excellent. Thank you.

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Thank you, Laura. Much appreciated.

Bella, Conference Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Chris Tittle with IPO. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Chris Tittle, Analyst, IPO: Hi, thanks a lot. You guys did a great job covering everything, so I don’t have a lot of questions. One thing you did say that surprised me, Clint, is you said something about code. And I guess I wanted to understand a little bit more about, you know, what that is and and how that you know, if that’s something that we should be looking for more of in the future and, you know, that that’s pretty interesting comment.

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Yeah. Thank you for asking, Chris. You know, as we began licensing data for AI training, you know, we took a look at what we had and we we took a look at the industry. And obviously, like video, as I said, that sits, you know, that’s at the top of the leaderboard in terms of value, in terms of demand. You know, audio is kind of underneath that.

Images, you know, study guide scripts, those are valuable as well. But we did also have code. And in the early in the earliest days of AI training licensing, there was a lot of code that was scraped that was scraped from the Internet sites like GitHub. There was also some proprietary code that wasn’t there that people licensed out. I never thought in a million years, to be honest with you, that we would be able to license our code.

But, you know, we’ve included it in our sales materials with, you know, a number of different partners. And so, you know, as as we build relationships with these companies and, you know, as their needs evolve and change, it is something that we have. I don’t you know, I can’t really speak to the the long term value of it, but the long term nature. I just think it goes to the value in owning and controlling good IP. That that’s I think the the the big point here.

And, you know, that’s why I think if you control, you know, millions of hours of video and other data, there will always be ways to monetize that. And I just point this out as something that is it’s just kind of unique, you know, unsuspected and representative of something else that I said, like, you know, talked about these additional rights that we’ll monetize. I think it’s in addition to potentially data that we’re not aware is valuable, I think there will be, you know, additional, like, licensing rights that we haven’t even contemplated today. So hopefully, that’s helpful.

Chris Tittle, Analyst, IPO: Yeah. I mean, one slightly expanded follow on question there, which I guess gets a little bit into what Laura was bringing up. You know, there’s entertainment content, and then, you know, there are I can’t even tell you how many millions of hours of training video content has been built at very high levels of quality for in the hospitality industry and, you know, of things like that. Are those areas that you’re currently involved in? How how significant I mean, is that on the road map?

I’m just trying to gauge, you know, where that is on the the timeline.

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: I think that’s a it’s a really good question, Chris. And we’re not actively looking at that right now. What what we’re primarily focused on the massing in the video space is obviously, you know, continuing to build out our massive factual entertainment library. But, you know, as part of this, we definitely increased our scripted content, meaning, you know, general entertainment, movies, series, animation, kids. We’ve increased significantly our our sports content, and, you know, we’ve we’ve increased significantly some of our audio content as well.

So as it relates to those those types of videos, whether they’re promotional or instructional, I think I think they can absolutely have value, particularly if they’ve the challenge comes, have they been in front of the paywall or behind the paywall. So a lot of that content, if it’s, you know, free running around on the Internet, you know, there’s a good chance that it’s already been trained on. At the same time, there is a whole lot of video, to your point, outside of what traditional media companies own that that has value in the licensing space. And if you believe that, you know, that these models will need billions or tens of billions of hours of of video and, you know, it certainly can’t all be, synthetic and it can’t, you know, all these stuff that’s, been freely available to the Internet, it it could definitely have value.

Chris Tittle, Analyst, IPO: Yeah. All that stuff is is you know, Four Seasons doesn’t put that stuff, you know, outside of the paywall.

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Right. Yeah. So so it becomes it it does become a value. You just need a lot of it.

Chris Tittle, Analyst, IPO: Right. Alright. Well, listen. Thanks a lot. I will stay tuned for the queue.

And after I go through that, I’ll I’ll circle back with you guys in a few. Thank you for the question, Chris.

Bella, Conference Operator: That concludes our Q and A session, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for joining. You may disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.

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