I have utterly no inside information. We’re not part of either party. What I read in the press is that the strike is more optimistic that it will conclude then it will continue through the end of the year. And then when that happens, we’re going to have thousands of men and women out there making movies, making their job and creating value for the shareholders of our company.
Alan Gould: I mean, Hilton, I understand your bullishness on the studio, but wouldn’t it make sense to have some nonrecourse financing, especially based on the cash flows that are about to start coming in?
James Ryan: Alan, as we said I think enough couple of calls ago, now that the Studio phase is completed, we said very clearly, like I said a couple of calls ago, that we will be taking a pause and thinking very hard about what the possibilities are over the next 3, 5, 7 years to continue to unlock value there. And I remind everybody that there’s still a approximately 50 acres or so that is undeveloped. Okay. Hilton corrected me, he said it’s closer to 80%. So that’s my bad. So that is financing options for assembly that’s part of that evaluation. That’s part of that thought process. And I would remind everybody that assembly studios is in an unrestricted subsidiary. So it is currently outside of all of our credit agreements. So it gives us a lot of flexibility on a go-forward basis to consider a wide range of possibilities.
Hilton Howell: And Alan, this is Hilton. Let me follow up on your comment. Yes, I am a bull, and I suggest to everyone on this call that all of you should be a bull on what we are doing as well. It is a unique asset for our company and for our state in the film and television production business is the fastest-growing part of — one of the fastest-growing states in this country. And I think you should all be very bullish on what we’re doing.
Alan Gould: Okay. And then to follow up on the CTV side, I know a lot of the those put there stations, the local news on fast stations that makes sense with the growth of CTV. But Pat or Kevin, what impact does that have on your retrans when you start putting some of your local news on these fast stations or CTV stations?
Patrick LaPlatney: There hasn’t been any effect. As we sit here today, the CTV — the Connected TV business for us is still small, and we would expect some growth we mentioned today that there’s going to be a number of more rollouts. Candidly, 18 months ago, we thought we’d have most of our stations rolled out due to technical challenges on the part of our partners. We haven’t gotten as many rolled out as we’d like. But we think over the next year or two, there will be meaningful revenue coming from that area.
Alan Gould: Okay, thank you.
Operator: Our next question is going to come from Craig Huber with Huber Research. Your line is on.
Craig Huber: Thank you. Your retrans subs, I believe you guys said three months ago, they were down low single digits year-over-year net. Just can you give us an update on that number, please, this time?
Kevin Latek: Hi Craig, what we are saying is our sublots are generally consistent with what we’re seeing in the industry on broadcast peers, we’re not doing it quarter-by-quarter calculation any longer. We’ve got too many long source — discussions over days over how we define the word subscriber versus others. So just take it at a high level. We’re not materially better or materially worse in terms of sub numbers and our peers. Half of our footprint is in large markets, half or 45% of our footprint is in midsized markets, so about 5% is in small markets. So we are — there was a while there where our sub numbers were much better than our peers because we were predominantly midsized and small markets. And given our current footprint, we’re very much now, like everybody else, a large market, midsized market company split almost evenly between the two.
So we’re finding our subtrans are consistent generally with everybody else’s. So there’s not really anything to call out that we’re better or worse than what the peer group is seeing.
Craig Huber: Okay. My second question, please. Your core advertising trends have certainly held up better than your peers out there. I’d just like to hear your thoughts on why you think your core advertising has been doing much better than your peers in this market in particular.
Patrick LaPlatney: Yes, well, it’s a strength of our stations. If you’ve been on calls before, you’ve probably heard me talk about our training program and our vertical program, those things which are unique in the industry have an impact on our local ad sales every quarter. We also have this [Indiscernible] focus on new business development. So I think those three things combined with the strength of our people and our stations are the reason why we tend to lead the industry, core advertising.
Sandy Breland: Yes, absolutely. We’re really fortunate to have strong general managers and strong sales managers that have made new local direct to focus and continuing to improve quality, and we see the results of that in core.
Craig Huber: I appreciate that. What percent of your Big 4 TV stations are ranked, say, number one or number two in ratings right now?
Hilton Howell: 90%.
Craig Huber: Isn’t that the big reason why you guys are shining versus your peers? [Indiscernible] What you’re saying, right?
Hilton Howell: Absolutely.
Craig Huber: And then added at 90%, how many are ranked number one in ratings?
Kevin Latek: I guess, it’s in our…
Hilton Howell: Hang on one second.
Kevin Latek: Gray section. We have 113 markets. I would say we have 80 markets with the number one ranked station in 102 markets with a first or second ranked TV station.
Sandy Breland: We’re pretty proud of that number. I mean the stations have obviously continued to focus on quality local content, and we see that our audiences respond very positively to that.
Craig Huber: Great. That’s all I had. Thank you.
Operator: And our next question is going to come from Jim Goss with Barrington Research. Your line is open.
James Goss: Thanks. I think you’re talking about the large, medium and small markets. Are you seeing any appreciable difference in ad trends among them by market size? Or might it be more geographic to the extent there is differences.
Patrick LaPlatney: Jim, not really. There really isn’t any any group, whether it’s small, medium or large and outside and outperforms the others. So geographically, the same situation, we really can’t point to single area, whether it’s the Midwest or the Southeast or whatever, where certain stations are performing better than others in different geographic reasons. So answer is really no.
