John Hodulik: Great, thanks. Two questions, if I could. First on the ACP commentary, I think you guys had to contact ACP subscribers this year. Any way you could quantify the size of the base, or maybe the financial impact, and should we see anything this quarter? Or is it really something, if it doesn’t get renewed, that we could really expect for, say, second quarter? Then over on the media side, it looks like you guys saw some real ad strength, so just any commentary on what you’re seeing in the ad market? It looks like if you sort of look at core advertising, it was actually up this year, and I’m wondering if that’s just strength in NFL and maybe Big 10, or just what some of the underlying factors are there would be great. Thanks.
Dave Watson: Hey John, it’s Dave. Let me start with ACP. To specifically answer your question, we have 1.4 million customers that have benefited from this program which we obtained through the national verifier program, so feel good about the credentials of these customers. Most of these customers in this customer base were already our customers prior to the ACP program. We’ve been very consistent on this. We want the program to continue, but I think we’re very well positioned to support these customers if it does not. We have a good business and model in place and a history with knowing how to segment our customer base and have products and packages at a variety of price points to serve our customers well, including well over for a decade and that would include internet essentials. We’ll evaluate this as it plays out. It may be a risk, but one we feel is very manageable for us, given how we work with this program and how we manage our customer base in general.
Mike Cavanagh: John, it’s Mike. On the advertising side, I’d say that the ad market, we have seen it remain stable, and we’re definitely pleased with our performance in the fourth quarter. When you exclude 2022 World Cup and normalize for that, we did grow ad revenue even with the difficult comparison to last year’s political quarter. We are seeing a few encouraging signs, like stabilization across most categories, CPG and retail too that improved in particular. We’re not seeing any pressure, any real pressure on cancellations from last year’s up-fronts, which is good, and scatter premiums are pretty healthy, double digit increases is what we’ve seen recently. But I would say that it’s too early to say that there’s a sustainable rebound going on.
Too much remains uncertain on the macro side and we’re heading into a period, for us at least, that has less sports programming in the early part of the year. But regardless of the full year ahead, whether the environment macro-wise gets better from here or it doesn’t, we feel like we’re well positioned with our must-see tent poles, which include obviously the Olympics coming up, the elections, and then going back to your earlier point of now being much more scaled at Peacock, we’re seeing nice progress on the capacity and inventory that we have there. So those are the dynamics I think we’re seeing in advertising.
Marci Ryvicker: Thanks John. Operator, next question please.
Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Jonathan Chaplin from New Street Research. Your line is now live.
Jonathan Chaplin: Thanks. Two for Jason. You mentioned that if you saw opportunities to expand your footprint with good economics, you’d do it in a heartbeat. Are you referring to the opportunity in BEAD, and is that something that you expect could potentially hit later this year, or is that more of a 2025 impact? Then on repurchases, we saw the reauthorization of $15 billion. You’re going at a pace of $3.5 billion a quarter at the moment. Should we expect that to continue through 2024?
Jason Armstrong: Yes, thanks Jonathan. Let me take them in reverse order and then potentially tag team with Dave, if he wants to, on the footprint side. Buybacks, you’re right – we reauthorized or re-upped this morning for $15 billion. Never meant to be guidance when we do this, but nonetheless healthy reauthorization. Saying that, I think the formula that’s been in place for very strong capital returns continues to be in place, so I think we’re comfortably within our leverage range, as I stated, which is right around 2.4 times, continue to generate very strong free cash flow, and if you look at the recent history since mid-’21, since we started buying back or restarted the buyback program, we’ve bought back 15% of our stock in that time frame, so very good metric there, so more capital returns to continue, feel very strong about the trajectory into 2024.
I think on the footprint side, we’ve been very clear that, to the extent–you know, first and foremost as we talk about capital intensity in Dave’s world, right around 10%, it’s been there for the last couple years. The expectation is that it will be there again in 2024, but we’ve also been very clear, that’s not necessarily a constraint on the business. To the extent we can move faster, we’ll do that, and we’d like to. I think as you look at the past couple years on homes passed, we did 850,000 homes passed in 2022, we were able to accelerate that in 2023 up to 1.1 million, and we gave guidance this morning for 1.1 million or slightly higher next year, so we think we can further accelerate that. Most of that in terms of the guide for 2024 is self-funded, but we have been making our way into the ARPA program and had some success there.
To the extent we’re successful with BEAD, and I think we certainly expect to be, that would be more 2025 and beyond.
Dave Watson: This is Dave. I would only add that when you do these programs, and we have started and we are aggressively pursuing opportunities, as Jason said, at this stage mostly self-funded, but we are working with local governments on programs like ARPA and others. We are going for opportunities where it makes sense. The great part, and a little bit what Brian mentioned right from the get go, there’s just been terrific execution as we scaled operationally, getting ready for this, so the 1.1 million that we did this past year, looking to do that or more into ’24, we are on it and this is a real opportunity for us. Having said that, the nature of these projects, it takes a while to build them up and then driving penetration, and I would look for more of the benefit in ’25. BEAD, we plan to participate where it is consistent with our business goals, but the process, quite frankly, with BEAD is still in flux.
