LiveOne - Earnings Call - Q1 2026

Executive Summary

• Q1 FY26 revenue was $19.207M, down 42% year over year and slightly down sequentially; it missed consensus revenue of $21.044M by ~$1.84M, while EPS of -$0.04 materially beat consensus EPS of -$0.30, driven by cost actions and mix shift away from Slacker. Revenue Consensus Mean $21.044M*, Primary EPS Consensus Mean -$0.30*.
• Management highlighted balance-sheet repair (elimination of $14.1M short-term liabilities YoY; staff reduced 31% to 95) and B2B momentum (Amazon $16.5M 3-year deal; Fortune 250 streaming network $26M+; pipeline of ~75 B2B deals), setting up H2 ramp.
• PodcastOne delivered a record $15M Q1 revenue; Audio Division Adjusted EBITDA was positive $0.4M despite Slacker softness; consolidated Adjusted EBITDA was -$1.812M as Slacker pressure outweighed savings.
• Near-term catalysts: a white-label launch with a 30M+ paying-subscriber partner, accelerating Tesla conversion via ads/AI, and a “Reality Olympics” live event (Dec 11, LAFC’s BMO Stadium).

Note: Values marked with * are retrieved from S&P Global.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• B2B acceleration: “We have the strongest balance sheet… and now move to the really exciting side of the B2B partnerships… biggest launch in the history of the company… 30+ million paying subscribers”.
• PodcastOne strength: “PodcastOne… doing $15,000,000 for the quarter” with fiscal guidance later reiterated at $56–60M revenue and $4.5–6M Adjusted EBITDA for FY26.
• Cost discipline and AI leverage: Staff cut 31% (138→95) and AI used to curate 500 music channels with fewer hosts; fill rate and ARPU improved, supporting conversion initiatives.

What Went Wrong

• Slacker revenue decline drove consolidated revenue down 42% YoY and widened operating loss to -$4.034M; Adjusted EBITDA fell to -$1.812M from +$2.903M YoY.
• Sequential revenue was roughly flat but profitability deteriorated vs Q4 (Adjusted EBITDA +$1.592M in Q4 vs -$1.812M in Q1) as Slacker declines outpaced cost reductions.
• No consolidated guidance provided; management deferred formal outlook pending B2B ramp and conversion trajectory, increasing near-term uncertainty for forecasting.

Transcript

Speaker 4

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. My name is Jim, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the LiveOne Inc. Q1 Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Results and Business Update. As a reminder, all phone participants are in a listen-only mode, but later you will have the opportunity to ask questions. Today's session is also being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Mr. Ryan Carhart. Please go ahead, sir.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to LiveOne's Business Update and Financial Results conference call for the company's fiscal first quarter ended June 30, 2025. Presenting on today's call with me is Rob Ellin, CEO and Chairman of LiveOne. 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 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 the 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, August 13, 2025. 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 express written consent is strictly prohibited. Now, I would like to turn the call over to LiveOne's CEO, Rob Ellin. Take it away, Rob.

Speaker 7

Thank you, Ryan. To start with, I want to thank Ryan for the brilliant job he's done as our new CFO, coming off the dramatic changes in the Tesla agreement and the loss of those revenues. Ryan has just done an absolutely spectacular job of fixing our balance sheet. We replaced East West Bank, who had called in their loan over $7 million. We replaced them with JGB with over $16.5 million. Subsequently, we just closed a $10 million equity financing. Confidently, I can tell you we have the strongest balance sheet that we've had in many years, with over $20 million in cash. With that, we have also eliminated $14 million of short-term liabilities, including $2.5 million alone this quarter. We've just taken the initiative to reduce staff by 31%, cutting our staff down from 138 employees to 95 employees. Now we move to the positive side.

As we've cleaned up the balance sheet, fortified ourselves with a big cash position, long-term partners, we now move to the really exciting side of the B2B partnerships that have been worked on for numerous years. Starting with the biggest launch in the history of the company with a Fortune 500 company, we have the opportunity of driving to 30+ million paying subscribers with that partner. We've done the first soft launch as of August 5th. We see this as a potential opportunity to not only replace Tesla, but could be much bigger than Tesla over the next five years. Secondly, our Amazon deal that we announced a few months ago has gotten off the ground to a spectacular start.

A $16.5 million three-year deal, and we fully expect to not only hit our numbers, but to beat those numbers and start looking at larger MGs based on the traffic and audience that we deliver. With our Fortune 250 streaming network, we can now say it's well over $26 million and increasing, and could finish the year even higher than that. We have 75 additional B2B deals in the works. We are doing soft testing. Our technology team is doing a brilliant job of continuing to work with some of the biggest carriers, car companies, retailers, streaming networks, cable networks around the world, and many others that could be those next big B2B partners. We also just reported record revenues at PodcastOne doing $15 million for the quarter.

As you may remember, we started this when we acquired that company doing $17 million a year, and we're now on a run rate to do $60 million+ this year. We've just launched for the first time inside of Tesla cars. We have converted a staggering 1.3 million people out of 2 million total cars. Probably as big a number as who's actually using our service previously. For the first time, with a large partnership with DAX, the largest programmatic advertiser in the world, we have just launched our ad network and grown from 30% to 82% ad growth in Tesla cars. We have also increased our ARPU from $3 to $5, and this is the time to start converting those Tesla subscribers.

As you're hearing more and more ads, and you have more and more of our hosts driving you to convert, this is the time that we expect the third and fourth quarter of this year to start driving a percentage of those to converting of those Tesla subscribers. We just completed a $10 million equity raise with my good friends at Lucid. Lucid, David Rosenberg and John Lipman. David was my partner when we did Digital Turbine and raised our first two rounds of money, at $2 and $4 a share, and subsequently saw that stock grow to $100. We raised this in a Bitcoin yield strategy and to advance our Web3 initiatives.

We have just added three of the prominent leaders in Web3, including Steve McClerk, who ran the first ETF and sold it to Coinbase, Steve Lehman, who sits on the board of Coinbase, and Andy Vick, we brought back to our team to monetize our 10,000 hours plus of video content through tokenization, NFTs, and other digital assets. We have just sold our third TV show to a network, to a streaming platform, Barnum Town, Vigilante, and Opportunist. We took in almost $1 million from those sales, and we now have the opportunity of those TV shows to now become major hits on those streaming platforms and deliver millions to tens of millions of dollars with no additional cost to the company as we continue to build our flywheel.

We now have a slate of over 20 potential shows on our platform that are all talking to streaming networks about TV, film, and bringing back some of my team's background and some of the team's expertise at delivering some of the greatest and most profitable movies and television shows in history. Our live events business. We were shut down during COVID. We've had a tough time relaunching it, but now that we're well financed, we've just announced that we will launch our biggest live event since Social Gloves. When we did Social Gloves, we did $27 million that night and $4.5 million in EBITDA. We now have announced and are launching Reality Olympic Series, which would be some of the biggest reality stars in the world in a format like the Olympics, with over 275 million followers amongst their audience.

Our M&A opportunities, we continue to work with JP Morgan, and we have moved very aggressively now to potential mergers, acquisition opportunities, including a potential sale of a subsidiary. As we move forward, this team has proven again, we survived COVID. We survived a massive loss in revenues with Tesla. We have turned that around and rebuilt that audience with Tesla, converting 60% of those people back into free and paid subscribers. It'll take time to get those revenues back, but a huge opportunity, and we have now proven that our B2B team is starting to hit on all cylinders. As we look forward over the next three years, I see the opportunity again that we can easily achieve those goals of hitting 10 million subscribers and half a billion dollars in revenues with substantial bottom line over the next three to five years.

With that, I want to offer the opportunity for anyone to open up for Q&A and ask any questions, and I look forward to our upcoming quarter and the rest of this year. Thank you very much.

Speaker 4

To our telephone audience at this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, ladies and gentlemen, that's star and one on your telephone keypad. If you choose to remove yourself from the queue, press star one once more. Pressing star and one will also remove you from today's queue. We'll take our first question today from the line of Barry Sine at Litchfield Hills.

Speaker 6

Hey, good morning, gentlemen. A couple of questions, if you don't mind. First, can you give a rough idea of what the annualized revenue of all the currently signed partnerships would look like for LiveOne and PodcastOne, because I know that includes Podcast?

Speaker 7

Yeah, we can't go much deeper than we've gone, Barry, in that we've said we expect $50 million in B2B revenues, right? We can't get deeper than that, but we will shortly. As I just articulated, we've just launched what could be our biggest partnership in history with multiple others that could be very close behind that.

Speaker 6

Just to clarify, Rob, the 50 includes both Slacker and PodcastOne B2B, correct?

Speaker 7

Correct. It's across our entire audio business.

Speaker 6

On the expense side, you just announced the staff reductions. What does EBITDA look like pro forma with those reductions? I'm concerned, have you reduced the, I know you've added to the Slacker team over the last year or so, have you reduced that team or the Slacker technology team? Those would seem to be key to all of the 75 partnerships you're working with.

Speaker 7

Yeah, as you know, we can't provide guidance at this point and give you EBITDA numbers. What I can tell you is those cuts are across the board and a substantial amount of those are at Slacker Radio, right? What AI has done and has done for not just us, but for the overall industry, including starting on the content side, it gives us the ability that we have 500 music channels and growing, right? And over 50 million songs on our platform. We have the ability to curate now utilizing AI with a way smaller staff to be able to deliver radio stations at an equal or better level than we've ever done before with a way smaller staff. We've cut across the board and we're not done with that, Barry, right? We will have additional cost savings, right, moving forward.

We're really excited about what AI and AI initiatives have done for our industry, right, across the board and what it does for our technology team. Couldn't be more excited about the opportunity right now where we are. I wish I could share guidance with you today, but we have not put out any guidance. We will in the very near future.

Speaker 6

On the Tesla relationship evolution, I think you had at the peak about 2 million subscribers. I think you said you've converted about 1.3 million to paying. What kind of ARPU are you seeing there? You mentioned AI. I know you've talked in the past about using AI to help your advertising to help the conversion. How's that going? The rest of them are ad-supported. About how many ad-supported on top of that 1.3 million subscribers do we have and what does ARPU look like there for ad-supported?

Speaker 7

No, that 1.3 million is total of the Tesla conversions, right? There were 2 million cars of which previously the consumer had to choose whether or not they paid for $10 a month for connectivity, right? That didn't mean that all of those used, that they all used the radio service, right? In fact, obviously there's a large percentage that didn't. We couldn't be more proud and more excited by the fact that 1.3 million have converted. We don't break down the exact numbers now. We're well over 1.5 million total subscribers, and our ARPUs are increasing from $3 right now to a little over $5. We see opportunities for those to increase, including with our new B2B partnerships to increase to closer to $7. As you see Spotify and see raising rates substantially, we're still at the early stages of these additional raises in prices.

We're so far below the market. We are at a very comfortable level that we are still the cheapest by far in the industry, averaging $5. Even at close to $7, we'll still be in the lowest end of the range.

Speaker 6

Rob, just to clarify, the $5 ARPU, that's a blended ARPU of people who are paying to subscribe as well as advertising revenue from the base?

Speaker 7

No, no, no. That's the paying subscribers, right? Advertising, you're only going to, you're only just starting, right? This is the baby steps. We partnered with DAX, the biggest programmatic advertiser, right? We've just started to launch that advertising. If you're on our service, you'll notice, right? You're going to get a staggering amount of ads, right? There was zero 30 days ago. All of a sudden, those ads are going to kick in, but that's only going to be $0.50, $0.60 in that range, right? You're not going to make up for that $3. What you're going to get is you're going to get the opportunity now by putting in that advertising, right? You're going to get the opportunity of now understanding that customer better, using AI to drive them and convert them, using your host to convert them, right? Really reaching out to them on a regular basis.

Candidly, you know, as Spotify likes to describe it, a lot of people don't want to hear ads. There are going to be some people that drop off the platform, and there's going to be some people that convert. What we're watching is a conversion rate that is above $5.

Speaker 6

I better make sure I can renew my subscription so I don't hear all those ads. On the reality series, a number of questions there on visibility. It sounds like it's early going, so you probably don't have these, but you know, everybody remembers the huge success of Social Gloves. Do you have a formal name for it, a host, location? Do you know your distribution will be on cable, pay-per-view? When might we see that? Is it going to be expensive to produce? I would assume you're going to monetize it as well as distribution rights through partnership sales. You'll want to have, you know, key name sponsors there. A lot of questions on that. What visibility can you give us on that reality?

Speaker 7

Yeah, so you are going to read a lot about it very shortly. It's coming, guys. This is not in the early stages. It's actually moving fast. If you remember in Social Gloves, right, in Social Gloves, we were able to get $2 million from Hard Rock Stadium. We were able to get $3 million in NFT money, right? As you know, crypto is just on fire right now, right? I just brought in my dear friend Andy Vick, who produced that show, who helped bring in that money alongside a Jackie Stone, our Head of Marketing at the time, right? We couldn't do any of these things, right, for multiple reasons. One was COVID, but then we just weren't capitalized properly, right, to be in the position to really do this. That show sold $3 million of NFTs and had 160 million followers. This already has 230 million.

From what I understand from the producers, right, of this show that are partnering with us, they expect the numbers to be over 400 million on social media. There could be a pay-per-view component to it. There could be a distributor like we did with Social Gloves. There could be a VR element to it. There is certainly going to be a very sizable NFT element to it. You are going to have music on top of it, which we have not announced the artist. This is going to read and smell exactly like Social Gloves, except for I don't have the risk of someone getting hurt like boxing. I don't have the risk of a commission having to approve it, right? In this case, the social media has come to us. The talent has come to us to do this. The excitement and energy around this is really unique.

Yeah, we couldn't be more excited about it. It won't be the only one. We have multiple other events like this, small, medium, and large. This will put us back very much in the forefront of that live events, music, pop culture crossover that made us, made this company in the beginning before COVID. We are really excited to be back in that business and excited to manage it. Obviously, you get the most important win at the end of it. You get the one-time win where in Social Gloves, we did $27 million that night and $4.5 million of EBITDA. The bigger win is you get all of these, you get millions to tens of millions of people coming through, right, who you are collecting data on, who eventually become your subscribers and your partners.

Speaker 6

The flywheel, I think you like to call it. Those are my questions. Thank you.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks, Barry, as always. Call me. Let's make sure we set up a follow-up call.

Speaker 4

Our next question today comes from John Liviakis at Leidenberg. Mr. Liviakis, your line is open.

Speaker 0

Hi, Rob. Can you hear me?

Speaker 6

Hey, John. How are you, pal?

Speaker 0

Fine. Could you elaborate a little bit on how this new Fortune 500 B2B deal might work with the 30 million subs? Do the subs have to opt in to the Slacker Radio service? How do you get paid here?

Speaker 7

Yes. I can't answer too many questions yet. We will be able to very shortly. I'll then tell you, as I said, way over 30 million paying members, right? Having over 30 million paying members, whether it's a carrier or car company, this is a staggering number compared to Tesla, right? This will be a white label solution where they're actually branding it and aggressively marketing it to those members as a product of their own, right? We'll be in the backgrounds of it and we'll be powering it like Intel inside, right? This will be them going out and reaching and using all of the things we've built over the 20 years and the $200 million that we spent building Slacker Radio and building PodcastOne and building the infrastructure and the live events and so on.

They'll be using every muscle in that to be delivering what they believe is a fantastic service at a discount to their members.

Speaker 0

Their members have to opt in.

Speaker 7

Of course.

Speaker 0

Okay, of course.

Speaker 7

Opting in, opting in may be as simple as pressing a button.

Speaker 0

Okay.

Speaker 7

If you think about Disney and Verizon, when Disney launched, they got to 100 million subscribers in no time. How did they get there? Verizon gave it to anyone that wanted to, that re-up their service or bought a new phone, they immediately got Disney service for free. They subsidized it.

Speaker 0

Okay. This $50 million of B2B revenues, is over what time period is that?

Speaker 7

Over a 12-month period.

Speaker 0

Beginning now?

Speaker 7

Correct.

Speaker 0

Okay. Did you?

Speaker 7

Some of it started a little earlier, right? As you're building it up, it's a slow build-up, but you'll start to see that really quick. You'll start to see that really quick in the third and fourth quarter. Really, the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter, starts kicking in a much heavier way.

Speaker 0

Okay. Right at the end of your prepared remarks, did you say something about the sale of a subsidiary?

Speaker 7

What I said was that, you know, based on the inbound calls that have come in, right? You and I have talked about this. I've been traveling around the world. As you know, my background historically is signing partnerships globally, right? We've never had that ability before. In that, right, there are many people that are missing, you know, any piece of our services, right? There are multiple inbound calls. As you hear the likes of Netflix going into audio and Spotify going into video, everybody is infringing on each other's businesses. You just saw, you know, Napster sell for $210 million. They were doing $40 million in revenues, right? You saw Tidal sell a few years ago for $400 million. Neither one of them were anywhere near profitability. We're losing, you know, fortunes of money, right? It's really hard to rebuild the DSP. Tesla tried to do it, right?

Tesla tried to literally behind our back years ago build their own music service. It's really hard to do. We have had a staggering amount of inbound phone calls. We need to be vigilant. We need to be protective of our shareholders, right? Make sure that if a sale of a division happened or a merger happened or an investor came in, strategic investor came in, there's so many parties in this space right now that must have a music platform, right? Facebook's missing one, Microsoft's missing one. Walmart just bought Vizio. They're missing one. Costco's missing one. Target's missing one. Every single carrier is missing one. Every single streaming network is missing one, right? Do you think that Disney, HBO, and so on are going to have an audio version of the platform?

They're already, everyone's already talking about how podcasting is literally moving mountains and how much video is now being sold and the amount of revenue is coming from video.

Speaker 0

Okay. One last question. You raised the $10 million to buy Bitcoin. Have you actually purchased it?

Speaker 7

Yeah. We'll be talking about that literally in the next 72 hours. What we've done is we've done a Bitcoin treasury strategy, right, which the partner that we've hired to manage that has been delivering between 12% and 15% returns for the last five years. It's actually a managed account that is actually protected, it protects you on the downside, right, and is yielding cash flow, which, as you know, we have a $110 million NOL, right? If they can generate on a $10 million call, and if they can generate $1 million for it, that $1 million of cash flow comes straight through and can be used to either buy additional Bitcoin treasury or to buy other things. The other part that it does for us is, again, it positions the company very strongly back into the NFT/tokenization market, right? It positions us because we have so much content.

It really puts us in a very unique position that, as you know, we took in $3 million in NFT money and over $5 million total in NFT money off our content in the first round of this. The numbers are going to be staggeringly higher the next time. That was with no additional cost to us.

Speaker 0

Let me ask the question in a different way. In Q3, when we look at your balance sheet, will there be $10 million of Bitcoin on the balance sheet?

Speaker 7

I mean, you'll see when we publicly announce our next JGB move, you'll see what we're doing. Right? I can't ask you what has happened until we publicly release that.

Speaker 0

Okay, you said that would be within 72 hours?

Speaker 7

Coming any minute now. Just to give you a review, we've been in the process of setting up our accounts with the Coinbases of the world, which took a little longer than we thought it would take. As soon as that is completed, which is momentarily, you'll start to see what our position is there, and you're going to start to see some of those things across all of Web3 and where this is going.

Speaker 0

Okay. Thanks. Bye.

Speaker 7

Thank you.

Speaker 4

Our next question will come from Brian Kinstlinger at Alliance Global Partners.

Speaker 5

Great, thanks. I have a list of questions. The first, to one of the questions you just responded, that you expect $15 million of revenue over the next, say, 12 months or so. Can you give us a sense of what the run rate is today on B2B so we can understand the incremental contribution?

Speaker 7

Yeah, we can't give any further guidance than we publicly have. We have not put out guidance yet on LiveOne, right? That may be coming soon.

Speaker 5

I'm looking backwards. What has been the trailing B2B revenue?

Speaker 7

Yeah, the breakdown of it, you know, very small amounts of that today is kicking in. It's just beginning.

Speaker 5

Okay.

Speaker 7

You are going to see a lot more of that revenue. As I said, a lot more of that revenue is end of third quarter and really in the fourth quarter.

Speaker 5

Okay. Can you articulate your digital currency strategy? There are those that are raising capital as quickly as they can, and they trade it at a premium, and they have, they call it, to buy digital currency rapidly, mimicking MicroStrategy. There are others that are just wanting exposure on their balance sheet, so they're raising a little bit of money opportunistically, so they have that digital currency exposure. Where do you lie in that?

Speaker 7

Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the movie hasn't been written yet, right? You know, this is, we wrote the script. We got ourselves in here because we've been a thought leader in technology, right? My team has been thought leaders in technology for 40 years, right? We always want to be at the forefront of where technology is going, and we're huge believers directionally where this is going. We also want a protected position, which is why we did this Bitcoin yield, where you have an option strategy against it, so you're protecting against the downside, because it is a very volatile market, right? We absolutely have, you know, deep, you know, plans for and approval by our board, you know, for substantially more money to come in, right? That could come in from a sale of a subsidiary.

That could come in if the stock performs like it should, right? You know, it's trading at, you know, fair market value. It could come in, right? In the interim right now, we're very focused on what we've accomplished so far. I think you'll see some of that strategy starting to materialize, both the acquisition of Bitcoin yield, as well as our NFT and token strategy starting to kick in, which will drive both revenues, as well as having a balance sheet that has ownership in what we believe strongly will go way higher over the next couple of years.

Speaker 5

Okay. You just recently began aggressively working or focusing on the conversion from ad-supported to paid subscribers for Tesla. I'm sure it's too soon to evaluate execution, and you've been clear it's not going to happen overnight. How long do you think it will take before conversion will have a major impact on the results?

Speaker 7

You know, again, it's such a tricky question, right? You know, as you look at, you know, Spotify and they say the reason they have their free service, right? I could tell you, I keep both because I just want to see how it sounds. I can tell you, honestly, for me, listening to ads all day long is difficult, right? For me, I would convert immediately, right? You're going to lose, you're going to lose some people that just walk away because of it. You're going to gain some people and you're going to gain revenues from those advertising and then you're going to convert a percentage of them. I think our aspirations are the same over a 12-month to 24-month period to convert somewhere between 20% and 30% of those subscribers.

Speaker 5

Got it. Now you talked about the B2B partnership and the 30 million paid subscribers. In the press release, you talk about the Fortune 250 streaming network. Maybe this is something you've talked about in the past, so maybe I'm just confused, so I apologize. Can you provide any detail around that as well, like you have for the $100 billion company?

Speaker 7

Not yet. We will be able to very shortly. All I can tell you is that there's been a soft launch, which has gone exceptionally well. There will be a larger launch shortly. It has leaked out there from the management of the company. There are some things, if you search around, you may be able to find it. We want to be good partners. We want to be spectacular partners, right?

Speaker 5

Makes sense.

Speaker 7

Because there are more of these deals that are now inches away, there's something like a, you know, I'm a big basketball guy. When you go on a hot streak, we just feel like that streak's coming, right? Obviously, this has been a tough long sales process. You're talking about massive companies. We truly believe that we will have another car company and another carrier company and a retailer this year, all three of them over the 12-month period. We're behind, so we have to accept that. We have to accept that these took longer than we expected. Some of that obviously is, there was some skepticism about our balance sheet. There was some skepticism about our cash position, right? Now that we've cleaned those things up, I think all of that has gone away.

It's now about what can we do with this business now and how big can we grow it? Can we recover from the loss of Tesla, right? When COVID hit, as you know, we lost 50% of our revenues. We not only recovered, we grew from $38 million and we grew to $100 million, right? We've now taken a second missile that we have to recover from, right? I give my team so much credit. Nobody's backed off. Nobody stopped. Everybody's focused. People are working around the clock, and there's literally the excitement and energy. I haven't seen this much excitement and energy since I bought Slacker Radio going back, since I bought PodcastOne, right? We've gone through some great times. We've had some great stock runs. We've gone through some really difficult times.

This has been a difficult time on both sides, both the stock as well as the business. I can tell you that there's more optionality in this company than any company I've ever been involved with before. I got to fight through. I got to battle through. At least now I got plenty of cash. I got plenty of balance sheet. I've got amazing assets here that if I can keep fighting to survive, right, we're going to come out of this stronger than ever. Over the next couple of years, this will be, you know, I think it'll be my biggest company I've ever built. It's the best team I've ever had. I just got to keep them focused, keep them energized, right, and keep battling through.

Speaker 5

Great. Last question to actually follow up. If some of these are white labeled, will you ever be able to announce who they are? Because we won't see it, right, as a LiveOne button or a Slacker button. Are there some cases where you won't be able to announce?

Speaker 7

You actually will. You actually will see it. Not only will you see it, you'll actually see powered by it. It'll be very much like Intel inside. You'll see powered by LiveOne, right? Because these are, of course, audio, video. This isn't necessarily just audio. There's massive opportunities, as you know, streaming network is more video, right? Our video content is now coming into fruition, as you see, podcasting as well as all of our live stuff, right? We have thousands of hours of the biggest music events in the world that can all be revived and brought back. Now you're watching that video being so important, especially for AI models, right? One of our holdings that you represent, they're making a lot of money off of Google just wanting their content because they can't get the A-plus content. They can't get to Disney and, you know, Warner.

They have to use content to build those AI models. We have a lot of content that could be monetized right now. I've always talked about this flywheel, right? I just watched one of my dear friends literally make tens of millions of dollars utilizing his video content of effectively what's a podcast that he was doing for 15 years. Literally, he's getting paid by Google just to use that for their AI models to build those because they don't have enough content to do it on, to prove their models and prove them out. I see a lot of opportunities there for us to really utilize that flywheel that we've been talking about for years. As you know, video, YouTube just came out and said their numbers, you know, YouTube podcasts are just going through the roof. It's going to be billions of dollars, right?

It's going to dwarf the other numbers in the next five years. I see tremendous opportunity for us to monetize all of this rich media. As you know, with music, it's very inexpensive to have made this content. This content has enormous value because you have the biggest stars in the world.

Speaker 5

Yeah, okay. Thanks so much.

Speaker 4

A reminder to our phone audience that it is star and one if you'd like to ask a question. We'll hear from the line of Sean McGowan at Roth Capital Partners.

Speaker 2

Thank you. Hi, Rob. Hi, Mark. Question about the ARPU figure. Is that, I just want to clarify, is that actually what you're getting now, or is that a goal like for the near term? Or are you actually getting an average of $5 per paying user?

Speaker 7

That's what we're getting.

Speaker 2

Okay. Thanks. That's what I figured. To clarify also, when you become a paying subscriber, you then don't have any ads?

Speaker 7

Correct.

Speaker 2

Okay. On those shows that you mentioned, you know, Barnum Town, Vigilante, Opportunist that are, you know, are in production now for other screens, where does that revenue go? Is that within podcast or is that somewhere else when you start booking out revenue? I want to know where we're going to see it.

Speaker 7

That is going to be more on the podcast side on those three shows. That does not mean that some of the other content does not cross over, right? Monetizing of television, film, could be anything from documentaries. You know, we shot six years of Rock and Rio, right? Having full content, some of the greatest content in the world. There could be multiple revenue streams that come out of it. The NFT side of it, and the tokenization side of it, could be coming more on the LiveOne side, probably than the podcast side in the beginning. On those three specific television shows, which are true crime, those three shows have been sold to major networks. Those shows are close, right? I cannot tell you they are fully greenlit yet, but if one of them gets greenlit, that was the upfront money, right?

The $1 million was the upfront money. Now that money going forward is you get paid per episode, you get paid back end on it, and we have no additional costs, not a single dollar of additional costs in there.

Speaker 2

Right. Makes sense. I just wanted to know where we would be looking for that revenue going forward, you know, when it starts to come in, assuming that they get greenlit. You mentioned a total of 20 potential shows on the platform. Any sense of, you know, when there could be some realization on that? Are we talking about, you know, a couple of years from now or a couple of quarters from now, a couple of weeks from now?

Speaker 7

I mean, you sit waiting by the phone in these things, right? Obviously, you've just watched the transformation, right? Warner just changed the whole team. Paramount just got taken over, right? Management teams are moving left and right. You got to get in those crosshairs of getting signed. The beautiful part of this is we're right now in the trenches of, it could be greenlit next week, it could be three months, or it could be six months, but they're in the trenches. They're in production today, meaning they're paying millions of dollars to writers, producers, to build towards making a show. That doesn't mean they'll greenlight, right? You still got to get that final greenlight, right? There's only X amount of shows greenlit a year. Having three of them there, I'd be shocked if at least one of them wasn't greenlit.

Barnum Town is one of my favorite podcasts ever made. That'd be the top of my list. Vigilante has multiple seasons that can get picked up. It's not even just one. Multiple seasons have an opportunity of being picked up as different shows. Opportunist could be multiple seasons, but it also has elements of documentaries and so on, which doesn't make you as much money, but there's still very nice money for it. As I said, Sean, this is just pure cash flow, right? We just collect the check. When I produced the movie 300, that production money, I still get, I still got checks on it 21 years later, right? I just got a check for Spider-Way Chronicles. That money just keeps flowing through and every time it goes back in the system.

Obviously, it's not nearly as big as it used to be, but it's money that gets paid to you for the rest of your life.

Speaker 2

Every day there's something that reminds me that I'm getting older. The idea that 300 was 21 years ago is the thing that's going to make me feel old. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Speaker 7

Yeah, I feel old with you.

Speaker 2

A little bit more color on that reality show. Can you just tell us what kind of show are we talking about? Is it a physical athletic competition show, like, you know?

Speaker 7

Yeah, it's like the Olympics. Like the Olympics. There'll be a long jump. The beauty of this is no one's getting hurt, right? No one's getting injured, right? The faces, right, aren't just there for a couple of minutes of a fight, right? They're there for hours at a time, and they're collaborating over a full weekend of this. You'll read about it shortly. It'll be done in Los Angeles. It'll be done at a major stadium, right? It'll be done with some of the best people in the industry. You're going to see reality names of some of the biggest stars.

Speaker 2

It's like the Battle of the Network Stars brought back from the 1970s, right? That kind of thing?

Speaker 7

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Literally to a T, you hit it right on the nose.

Speaker 2

Got it. See, it pays to be old sometimes. Where would that revenue be?

Speaker 7

That revenue is at LiveOne.

Speaker 2

Okay. A couple of other questions. When will the Q be out?

Speaker 3

We're on track to file tomorrow. You should see it tomorrow.

Speaker 2

Okay. Figure that. Okay. Just to clarify, Rob, when you were talking about the $50 million in revenue over the next 12 months, and you said more 3Q and 4Q, I assume you meant fiscal 3Q and 4Q?

Speaker 7

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Okay. All right. That's it for me. Thank you very much.

Speaker 4

Mr. Carhart and Mr. Ellin, I'll turn the call back to you for any additional or closing remarks that you have.

Speaker 7

Yeah. I want to thank everyone for taking the time and taking the call. I just reiterate that the company has just bought back another 300,000-plus shares. We've also bought back a lot of PodcastOne shares. We still have $5.5 million remaining on our buyback, right? We will be prudent and smart about when we use that capital. As I articulate on this, I truly believe this is the most exciting time for the company in many years where we have a tremendous amount of optionality and a tremendous amount of upside. These partnerships, Amazon partnership, streaming Fortune 250 company, S&P 100 company, right? We're really a 500 company. We really put ourselves in a position where that B2B business, right, which is what I built my entire career on, really feels like it's building that momentum. The flywheel is building and revenue is coming from different places.

We got a lot to make up with Tesla, right? That doesn't happen easily. This team will come through as they always do, and we'll prove ourselves shortly. I just want to again just tell you how proud I am of my team of not only surviving this, but coming out of it and coming out of it strong again. This should be a really exciting next six months for this company.

Speaker 4

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference, and we do thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.