LiveOne rebounds with $36 million revenue and $1.1 million adjusted EBITDA, signaling strong recovery and strategic B2B growth ahead.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to LiveOne Q2 fiscal 2026 financial results and Business Update Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press a star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ryan Carhart, Chief Financial Officer. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to LiveOne's Business Update and Financial Results conference call for the company's fiscal second quarter ended September 30, 2025. Presenting on today's call with me is Rob Ellen, CEO and Chairman of Live one. I would like to remind you that some of the statements made on today's call are forward looking and are based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve various risks and uncertainties. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the future performance of the Company, including expected future financial results and expected future growth in the business. Actual results may differ materially from those discussed on this call for a variety of reasons. Please refer to the Company's filings with the SEC for information about factors related to which could cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from these forward looking statements, including those described in its Annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2025 and subsequent SEC filings. You'll find reconciliations of non GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures discussed today in the Company's earnings release, which is posted on its investor Relations website. The Company encourages you to periodically visit its investor relations website for important content. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, contains time sensitive information and reflects management's view as of the date of this call, November 12, 2025 and except as required by law, the Company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information after the date of this call. I'd like to highlight to investors that this call is being recorded, the Company is making it available to investors and media via webcast and a replay will be available on its website in the Investor Relations section shortly following the conclusion of the call. Additionally, it is the property of the Company and any redistribution, transmission or rebroadcast of this call or the webcast in any form without the Company's expressed written consent is strictly prohibited. Now I would like to turn the call over to LiveOne CEO Rob Ellen.

Thank you Ryan and welcome everybody and thank you for joining us. This has been a transformative 12 months for the company. As we came out of the loss of over $50 million of revenues with Tesla, we not only survived but we thrived. As you look at the numbers today, the highlights are going to be is how this team and how this company has utilized technology and being a talent first platform to again prove that we can get back to EBITDA. Positive numbers. With that loss of $50 million in revenues, we're excited to tell you that we finished the quarter with 36 million. Little over 36 million, 36.6 million in our audio division with $1.1 million of adjusted EBITDA. How did we do that? The first thing we did is we leveraged technology. We embraced AI. We embraced the ability to use AI to be able to cut our staff and cut it from 350 people to 95. We have cut our costs down from 22 million down to 6 million. And with that we now have aggressively moved on our B2B plan to move to partnerships that the history of this company has been built on like Tesla. And with that I'm excited to say we closed our seventh deal. We have now expanded our partnership with Amazon from 16 and a half million dollars in a three year deal to over 20 million. That's all based on traffic and audience continue to grow massively. Our Fortune 250 partner increased from from 2 million originally to 12 to now $26 million plus a year run rate going back to Tesla. We converted over 60% of the total cars out there which was 2 million. We now have almost a million. Three cars are both paid and free. One million of those free cars are now you being those cars have now re signed back up guy of where we finally now have data and information those consumers and now the ability to try to convert those. And now using an AI marketing strategy, we aggressively converting those and generating real cash every day and continue to grow that number of subscribers and see a really exciting opportunity now to convert into those million. If we can convert 10% of them, we'll add another hundred thousand paid subscribers. If we can convert 20%, the numbers start to skyrocket. We have 72 additional B2B partnerships and fully expect to announce multiple additional ones before year end. Utilizing AI, we have increased our ARPUs by 60%. We're starting to see a $5 plus ARPU versus the $3 that we had previously. Our podcast business. Our podcast business has grown. We bought the company doing $20 million in revenues, losing 5. We've just announced record breaking revenues, over $15 million for the quarter and and announced that we expect to do 56 to 60 million dollars this year and 4 and a half to 6 million of EBITDA. That's a 6 to 8 million dollars swing from last year. We've aggressively taken our podcast and now taking our True Crime podcast which we have a slate of over 12. And we've now brought that to market to the streaming networks and we sold three podcast to television. Now what does that mean for the company? It means hundreds of thousands of dollars in option money day one and could be millions to tens of millions of dollars in the very near future as those get greenlit. We've now sold the show to CBS, to Peacock, Peacock to Paramount and we fully expect to sell additional shows. We have our first giant upcoming live event. Our last major live event goes back to Days of COVID which was called SocialGloves. That event did over $20 million and over $4 million in EBITDA. On December 11, we are going to launch Reality Olympics. The Olympics will be at LFC Stadium, the BMO Stadium, and be launched with YouTube committing over a billion impressions to the event. We just announced our launch of our subsidiary LiveOne Africa with a commitment from Virtuoso Music to raise over $20 million to a market that will be bigger than the US market in the next couple of years. Our buyback continues. We continue to buy back both stocks. We've now bought back over $6 million of stock in LiveOne. We will continue to buy back stock. For everyone that remembers we sold $10 million of stock at $7 and a half dollars only three months ago. Two and a half months ago. We'll continue to buy that as well as you will see management and board members doing the same. As we look at the future, we see the highlight films of these B2B deals providing a massive opportunity for the company. Current Amazon deal, we see it just continue to grow. It's a highlight film as the more podcasts, the more traffic we drive, the bigger those revenues are going to be as we launch our next major project. Over 30 million monthly paying subscribers. We will talk about this in great detail over the next couple of weeks. Expect to launch this year. If you think about the Tesla numbers, we had 2 million subscribers, 2 million cars, right? And we've now converted 60% of them. If you have 30 million, if you just convert a couple of percentage, we're going to blow. We're going to start to really generate very serious subscriber growth, ARCA growth, as well as revenue growth. With that, I'm proud of my team. They've survived Tesla's loss of the revenues and come out of it stronger than ever. For those of you there, if you remember, when Covid hit, we went from 38 million in revenues, we lost all of our live business, and somehow the following year we did well over $100 million in revenues. I see telltale signs that with the current B2B pipeline, the current B2B deals have already been announced, which are over $50 million in contractual deals, actually $52 million fractional deals. As they continue to grow, I see telltale signs this company is well on its way to again be well over $100 million. And with that we will continue to buy back stock. And I want to thank everybody and appreciate everybody's support and open up the floor to Ryan to talk about the numbers. Thanks Ryan.

Thanks Rob. I'll spend just a few minutes providing a very brief overview of our results for the fiscal second quarter ended September 30, 2025. Consolidated revenue for the three month period ended September 30, 2025 was 18.8 million. Our audio division posted revenue for Q2 fiscal 2026 of 18.2 million and adjusted EBITDA 0.7 million. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 was negative 1 million. On a U.S. GAAP basis, LiveOne posted a consolidated net loss of 5.7 million or $0.52 per diluted share in Q2 fiscal 2026. At the operating level, our Podcast One subsidiary posted record revenue of 15.2 million and adjusted EBITDA of 1.1 million. Our Slacker subsidiary reported Q2 fiscal 2026 revenue of 3.1 million and an adjusted EBITDA loss of 0.4 million. We are pleased to report continued record growth from our Podcast one subsidiary, which we anticipate will extend throughout the year. In parallel, we are advancing several transformative partnerships from our business development pipeline, creating significant opportunities for long term growth and value creation in the near future. Rob, turn it back to you.

Yeah, just to wrap it up, I think we've covered just about everything, but just to wrap it up, you know, can't be more excited about the B2B partnerships. The history of LiveOne as well as the two subsidiaries that generate the revenues from Slacker to Podcast One have had a history of B2B deals. And these B2B deals, there's a cycle that comes and as you're watching the cycle, you see in the industry that is exploding, the audio industry, iHeart stock is up for four times. Spotify stock is up 3x, almost 175 billion in value. Warren Buffett has been buying up Sirius Radio. There's so much math right now that shows that the partnerships that are being created that, that are being announced in podcasting and audio, right across Netflix announcing, they're going to the audio business, right? And Spotify going to the video business, you're going to see more and more of this happening in the industry. And you know, my humble opinion is that you're going to see amazing strategic deals, you're going to see investments in the space and you're going to see acquisitions in the space and the acquisitions are happening, are happening at multiples of revenues, right? We're trading, we're trading at 60% of revenues. The industry is trading at three and a half times revenues. And I think you're going to see just about every streaming partner, anyone who is missing a audio platform is going to need an audio platform. When you think about the cost of content and how expensive it is for all these streaming networks, they can increase their outputs dramatically overnight by acquiring a music platform or investing in a music platform or white labeling a music platform. So with that, I'm going to open up to questions. And again, thank you everyone for joining us and thank our team for just doing an amazing job of not only surviving, but coming out of this and thriving. And again, you're seeing those telltale signs where the revenue is going to start to ramp up dramatically in the very near future. Thank you.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have dialed in, would like to ask a question, Simply press the Star 1 on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your questions, simply press the Star one Again. You are called upon to ask your question and are listening by a loudspeaker on your device. Please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. And your first question comes from Brian Kinslinger with Alliance Global Partners. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks so much. Last quarter you discussed the soft launch at the beginning of August for a B2B partner with 30 million subscribers and said you'd share more information soon. Is there any details you can share about this?

Yeah, I mean, the success of the beginning launch was spectacular. I would say it was in line with the launch, the relaunch with Tesla right And succeeding. And again, without giving exact numbers. And Tesla, as you know, we've succeeded in bringing back 60% of those 2 million cars. Right. Which is kind of amazing in that, you know, we didn't necessarily have all those cars and not all those people, even the service, even, even if they paid through the connectivity package. Right. I think you're seeing telltale signs of that as well with our next partner. And I think you're going to be able to, you're going to be able to highlight that as we enter, you know, year end.

So is this deal part of the 50 million plus B2B revenue? And if so, when does it begin to ramp?

No, no, what we said is, is that that's not part of the 52 million. This will be an additional. Right. We have not putting it. We have not put out guidance yet, but fully expect that somewhere, you know, around year end we're going to start to put out guidance. As we said, these deals are ramping up. They've ramped up faster than we expected. Right. Both at Amazon as well as a streaming partner. And we see a telltale sign that that new partner will be very similar. So we'll be talking about our guidance somewhere, you know, probably before year end, but certainly, certainly by year end we'll start to talk about it.

I think the biggest question I think investors might have is when you provide the $52 million B2B revenue over the next 12 months, I think you said last quarter, so I'm sure it's still the next 12 months. How much of that is incremental to the revenue you've just reported in the September quarter, which I assume includes Amazon and some of your other B2B partners.

Yeah, I mean, we, we can't give that obviously until we start to give. Give guidance. Right. Which will happen again, as I said before year end. Our year ended March 31. And you know, we're getting close to it fast. Right. It's moved really fast to do that. We'll start talking about that guidance. You've already seen us raise the guidance at Podcast one, and I fully expect we'll start to talk about live ones as well. That ramp up. That ramp up will start to happen, as I said, you know, towards the end of the fourth quarter. Right. You know, third and fourth. Third a little bit. Fourth quarter. So starting to start to ramp up. We're starting to feel the momentum coming, but we'll have a lot more clarity on that as we enter the fourth quarter of this year.

Thanks. Two more questions. First, can you share the premium versus paid subscribers for Slacker. And maybe if you can or can, can you talk about the conversion that you're seeing or Tesla, if at all.

You want to give a little bit of that? If we can, Yeah.

I mean, Brian, just real quick, I mean premium versus paid. I mean you talking about premium versus plus, is that kind of what you're thinking? Yeah, premium versus plus. I mean I think you have, you.

Have subscribers that are premium, especially in Tesla, and then you have paid subscribers. And so I'm curious what the total is, maybe the split. And then I'm curious how conversions are going for those premiums.

Yeah. So you know, if you think of the combination of all of our paying subscribers, you're looking at a total of somewhere between 250, 275,000 in terms of the paid. And then the three would be the rest that Rob talked about earlier on his call. So that's basically the breakup between the two. And then, you know, Rob talks a bit about ARPU earlier as well that Brian, is that answer the question?

I'm just curious how conversions are going. It's been a few months, you know, we've been, we've been hearing about, you know, the focus on that. So is it 1%, is it 2%, is it more or less?

Yeah, we put out, I think it was a week or two ago, an earnings release on, you know, our new partnership with our AI driven data partner that's going to help us really ramp up the conversions. So that was launched, took a little longer than we thought to get that fully to market. So right now we're out there testing and optimizing the algorithm. So I think you're really gonna start seeing that come through second half of this quarter. And then I, you know, we're, we don't have full results yet as we're still kind of optimizing right now. But it will ramp up. You know, we're expecting, you know, 5, 10% increase is definitely within the ballpark. It could be higher where we're still in that optimizing phase where the algorithm is doing its work. And we're going to lose some free subscribers in that process as well. Right? We'll lose some free and we'll gain some paid. And one of the exciting things that you can be looking at just like last year. Last year, sorry, a large increase in cash right around the end of the year. Right. As you start to see one year subscriptions a, you know, re up. But also the new ones converting. So we're very aggressively out there trying to convert those, those now to continue to strengthen our balance sheet, buy back stock and put cash on our balance sheet.

Great. Last question, Ryan. I didn't hear anything. The gross margin, the first half is about 13%. Last year, almost twice that. Is that a pure function of scale with the fall off of the revenue or is there something more to that? When might we think about beginning to see a recovery? Thank you so much.

Yeah, I think the difference this year versus last year has been the change in the customer relationship with Tesla. Right where the volume there lifted the margin because we were able to pull that off at slightly higher than what we do normally now. So I think that that difference that you're seeing is really just the volume from slacker changing and driving the overall down.

Okay, all right, thank you.

You know, that's offset by, you know, increased margin at podcast one. So slightly offsets that, but yeah, that's the cost.

Great, thank you. And the next question comes from the line of Sean McGowan with Roth Capital. Please go ahead.

Hi, Rob. Hi, Ryan. Following up on Brian's question on cost of sales. So what portion of that increase as a percentage of revenue is stock based comp? Is that a factor?

Yeah, stock comp is definitely higher in cost of sales than it versus year over year if you just do the comparison. So you'll see it's not out yet in the queue, but we'll fully disclose that. So you can see it. But you know, it kind of shifted categories. You're gonna see more stock comp in the cost of sales line this quarter versus last quarter, you know, a little bit lower just on the lower G and A that you're seeing year over year. And then last year we had a little bit more in G and A. So you're see a decrease in stock comp and GNA this quarter. Year over year for sure. Definitely notice a difference there. So last year over year, but still still a chunk there.

Okay, and when will the QB out?

You know, filing dates Friday. Hoping to get it out sooner, so we're hoping to file tomorrow.

Okay, thanks. So on gna, I imagine stock based comp plays a role in that too. But is this level of GNA likely to be what we should expect to see or were there extraordinary factors driving that up?

Yep, good question. So you know, year over year, obviously you're, I know you're at, you know, we're seeing definitely a lot of strong increases or decreases in the gna. If you look at this quarter of a last quarter there was a Couple of one time things that flowed through. So we expect it to be lower next quarter than it was this quarter. So what you're seeing this quarter know you'll, you'll see the improvement next quarter and in Q4 and going forward. So even less than Q1.

Perfect. Thank you. You know, Ryan, if I can ask you to repeat something right at the end of your prepared remarks, I think you made some comment about Podcast One, you know, over the next six months or something like that. Would you mind repeating that? I just, I, I couldn't quite track what you said.

Yeah, all I'm saying is, you know, we expect continued growth of the Podcast One subsidiary. That, that, that's it. Okay. You know, we upped our guidance, you know, like Rob talked about. So yeah, we just, we expect it to continue to grow as it has been.

Right, got it. It was the word growth that I couldn't quite get. The.

I think, you know, Sean, just, just to add to that, you know, you've seen our 17th additional podcast announced. Just announced, you know, and we're basically signing, you know, almost, you know, you sign 24 a year. As we said before, you know, you're, you're picking up two things. Number one is you're picking up revenues. Most of these are existing podcasts, so the space is really moved to. You watch Spotify and Amazon basically fire their entire teams. They keep their super big podcasts, but they're all waking up to realize they're really distributors, they're not curators of content. And because we're a full 360 play, these podcasts need hand holding. So we continue to add those as we add them. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. One is you're going to add immediate revenues, but two is you're going to add that immediate traffic. And the more traffic we drive, the bigger the Amazon partnership going to grow. I couldn't be more excited about where that's going and directionally right. To think that, you know, it's only been a couple of months and we're ready, you know, from 16.5 billion going to 20 and it looks like you can go way higher than that. And yeah, I've talked about landing a anchor tenant on the podcast network. If we land an anchor tenant, right. Which has been one of the only things missing from that business, you land an anchor tenant in there, you could add some very serious traffic. Right. Those metrics just keep going up and if they keep going up, you're going to pick up a lot of revenues. Lot, a lot of Revenues are going to move up the charts in terms of what number you are on contracts and overall industry. And the respect from the industry is showing in a unique way.

Okay, yeah. If Adam Corolla is with him, he's probably like, what the hell, man? I'm right here. So. Just kidding.

Adam's the best. Adam's the best. I spoke to him yesterday. You know, he's a great partner and we just continue to grow with them.

Okay, last question for me. Kip did a great job yesterday of outlining the ways in which Podcast one has used AI, kind of across the platform, across the whole enterprise, drive revenue, drive cost, drive efficiency, et cetera. In addition to what Kid talked about yesterday, could you describe some of the AI tools that are being deployed in the rest of the company, just so we have a fuller idea of that?

Yeah. As you know, Sean, you know me a long time, you know, all of my companies, you know, are media companies from a revenue standpoint, but are always focused on next generation technology. And we're right in the heart and center of it. You're going to see more and more partnerships coming out of us in the AI space. But the team, Brad and the team over at Slacker, you know, under siege, right? You lose $50 million in revenues, you've got to take costs down. They've just done an amazing job of embracing technology both from a marketing standpoint. Right. To convert subscribers to lockdown. To think that we locked down, you know, you know, 60% of every Tesla car, you know, and got them, even though a lot of them are free, is just, it's just an amazing thing. And that was utilizing AI. They've also utilized AI in that we used to be way more host, right. You can now create a music channel, you know, way quicker. And you can combine the use of AI with the human, with a human. Right. As a dj BJ host to able to cut those costs down. I think you see a lot more of those initiatives happening as the revenues ramp back up. Right. On the other side of the business, as those ramp back up, we'll continue to grow those. And you know, and we're looking at, you know, consistently looking at, you know, more and more ways to do it. And we've been able to cut our staff from 350 people to 95. Ryan's just done a great job of restructuring, fighting through this, literally surviving, surviving a loss of $50 million in revenues. Most companies can't survive that. We've come out and now we're thriving.

Thanks for that additional detail. On the circling back, for one second, I just thought of something else I wanted to ask. On the number of subscribers that you've converted, it is amazing. I never would have thought you'd get to that 60%. You kind of feel like you're at that limit now. I mean, it was never going to be 100, you know, it's probably never going to be even 50. And you manage that. But I noticed that the number is about the same as it was at the end of August. So have we converted pretty much everybody.

We'Re going to convert from a free standpoint? Yes, right. From. From a post standpoint now. Now we just started to put advertising in, right? So we partner with dax, the biggest, you know, you know, ad agency, to do that, doing programmatic advertising. And it does three things, Sean. You know, number one is. Number one is it annoys the hell out of people, right. All of a sudden you're. All of a sudden you go from, from no ads to a ton of ads, right? My son, my son was giving me a hard time because I had in my car because I want to hear actually what's happening in it. I want to make sure those ads are relevant, right? A, so the people that are going to stay for free are actually going to use it, right? That's A. And then B is I want to convert them, right. So we're now using Intuzi, right, which is a amazing AI marketing technology platform, right, that really is able to find in multiple different spaces. First in the automotive space. Now, the goal is to convert those people. And just think about if we converted 100,000 of the million, right, in an average ARPU of $60 a year, most. That's going to be paid up front. We could generate a lot of cash right now. All right, and that's the, that's. That initiative has just started. We went from zero advertising, it was three months ago, Ryan, to today. We're like 90% advertising, you know, 90% fulfillment, which generates some revenues as well, right. To new revenue stream will start to kick in the advertising side of it. But our real goal is and Spotify says they convert 60% of every. The reason they have a free tier is 60% convert. I don't know what the timeframe they convert, but if we can convert 10% of this, 20% of it, if somehow we converted 60, obviously the numbers would be off the charts. But if we can convert 10 to 20%, we're going to generate a ton of cash upfront and we're going to generate. Yeah, long term revenues with those subscribers that are going to be beyond the advertising side.

All right, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Any other questions? And once again, if you would like to ask a question, seem to press the Storm 1 on your telephone keyp. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn it back to Robert Allen for closing remarks.

I think we. I think we covered everything. I'm looking forward to our next call. I'm looking forward to the next major announcements of this company. As I said, there are 72 B2B deals in the works. This is what I've done. My career has always been sort of the smaller company that's been able to partner with these massive distributors. There's so many of them now that are out there that as the cycle has changed, right? And you look at the cycle, everyone from Facebook to Microsoft to every streaming partner to auto companies, everybody's fighting for data again. And I think we're right in the sweet spot that Live one has the opportunity to be that strategic partner that we're nimble with the lowest, with the lowest price and we're willing to white label. I think you're going to see more and more of those B2B deals. And you see a couple more Amazons, you see a couple more streaming partners, you see a couple more retail partners, you can easily see this company in the next five years doing a billion dollars of revenues. Years. And with zero cost to marketing. Right? We're not chasing an individual subscriber. We're chasing a pool of subscribers. So we're looking at leveraging this great content we have, this original programming we have, and really leveraging and positioning ourselves that we partner with anyone who has 10 million to 3 billion eyeballs, like Facebook. And we partner with a lot of them, Right? You know, both before I own this company and, you know, since we've owned it, we partner with the likes of everyone from TikTok to Facebook, right. To Amazon to Paramount, right? We continue to do that and we continue to grow with it. And I see telltale signs that, you know, we're starting to build real momentum on those B2B deals. We land a couple more of these and we're going to have another exciting run. And like I said, I'm proud of our team. I'm proud we fought through this battle, and I see the future extraordinarily bright right now for where the company is going with that. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate your time.

Thank you. And this now concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect.