David Zaslav: Look, the key for us is, as we have accelerated the delevering now and made the turn that we focus on growth. And focus on growth will be we now have command and control of each of our businesses. We’re going to give the same rigor and focus on how do we drive growth across each of our businesses. And one of those key initiatives is one company. How do we use this — the unique set of assets that we have that no one else has globally to drive growth. And that’s what we’re continuing. We’re starting much more on to focus on growth and you’ll see it and we’ll be talking more about it. The content licensing, look, we have one of the best TV and motion picture libraries in the world. As you — if you look at our overall — the overall economics, I think we’re actually below the last couple of years in terms of we’re selling.
If the strike continues, there may be more demand. We are always looking to maximize. We’re hoping this strike gets settled as soon as possible. It’s important. It’s important that we get going that we get back to work doing what we love and we’re hoping that both of these strikes get resolved soon. That’s our focus.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ben Swinburne with Morgan Stanley.
Benjamin Swinburne: David, you’ve been through lots and lots of cycles, advertising cycles in particular in your career. And I’m wondering how you would describe this kind of environment [ph]? So, I guess the question is, I think about your Jack Welch story from all these years, talking about ratings going down and advertising going up and weather there’s any concern in your mind that we maybe linear TV has reached that point. And the corollary would be, with Max, it would seem like you have a great opportunity to sort of move some of that linear money over to D2C. And I’m wondering if you’re optimistic that you can kind of capture that one for once. So it’s sort of a bigger picture advertising question but would love to hear your thoughts.
David Zaslav: Thanks, Ben. Look, the market is — it improved a little bit last quarter and we think it feels like it’s improving a little bit this quarter. We’re seeing some more improvement, not anything great but we’re seeing some more meaningful improvement outside the U.S. But this is unusual. In my 35 years, I think a lot of us expected that there would be a — that we’d see a meaningful recovery in the second half of the year and we haven’t seen it. And we’ve needed to figure out how to make up for that. We just came out of an upfront that is encouraging, at least for us. We’re seeing mid-single increase on the sports side. We got price increases with some of our affinity networks. Some of these networks are really important to advertisers and we’re still doing a lot of original content which makes us unique.
And some of our smaller networks were slightly down. Max was the star. I mean a big star, as JB said, some of this content, the greatness of HBO and Max, the KC, all that content, that we have 127 Emmy nominations, the idea that you can get in front of Succession, you can get in front of the highest quality content for the first time. And it’s very uncluttered. It’s one spot right for now on the front end of it and some of the older content is limited. And so we’re seeing really good pricing. We can’t say one for one. We need to build up Max for now. It’s — there’s a huge demand for it. We’re going to be pushing for — as we look at growth everywhere, we’re going to be pushing now for how we reduce churn and grow Max. But it’s very helpful to us that we have a significant digital footprint.
We have a really strong product in Max. And look, for us, we can’t predict what’s going to go on with the linear business. But we have a lot of command and control, as I talked about earlier. And the viewership on our platforms are actually quite strong, it’s just that they’re older. And there’s a load of people still loving and watching our content. And most of our content now is going over to Max. So they’re watching Diners and Dives and then we’re getting — we’re monetizing it again to all of our subscribers on our ad tier and around the world. So we have that symmetry. We need to build up the other side. But we’ve been very aggressive and we will continue to be about driving the margin. And we’re aware that there’s a decline in the traditional business.
And we’re fighting to keep that free cash flow and we’ll pull every lever we can.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Michael Morris with Guggenheim.
