Earnings call transcript: CuriosityStream Q4 2025 sees revenue growth, stock up

CuriosityStream Inc. reported its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings, showcasing strong revenue growth and improved financial metrics. Despite a wider-than-expected loss per share, the company’s revenue exceeded forecasts, leading to a positive stock movement in after-hours trading. The stock rose 1.59% to $3.20 following the earnings release, although it saw a slight dip in aftermarket trading.

CuriosityStream demonstrated significant financial improvement in the fourth quarter of 2025, with a revenue increase of 36% year-over-year, reaching $19.2 million. This growth was driven by robust performance in both its licensing and subscription segments. The company’s adjusted EBITDA turned positive for the fourth consecutive quarter, highlighting operational efficiencies and cost management.

• Adjusted free cash flow: $4.3 million, up 33% from the previous year.

CuriosityStream’s Q4 revenue exceeded expectations with a surprise of 1.96%, reaching $19.2 million against a forecast of $18.83 million. However, the company reported a loss per share of $0.07, significantly wider than the expected $0.0125 loss, resulting in a negative surprise of 460%.

Following the earnings release, CuriosityStream’s stock rose 1.59% in after-hours trading, closing at $3.20. This movement reflects investor confidence in the company’s revenue growth and operational improvements, despite the wider-than-expected EPS loss. The stock’s performance remains within its 52-week range, with a high of $7.15 and a low of $2.3.

CuriosityStream provided forward guidance with projected EPS of $0.02 for the second and third quarters of 2026, and $0.04 for the fourth quarter. The company anticipates continued revenue growth, forecasting $21.5 million for Q2 2026 and $22 million for Q4 2026, reflecting strategic initiatives aimed at expanding its content offerings and subscriber base.

CEO John Hendricks stated, "Our strong revenue growth and improved financial metrics demonstrate CuriosityStream’s ability to execute its strategy effectively. We remain committed to expanding our content library and enhancing our subscriber experience to drive future growth."

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about CuriosityStream’s strategies for content expansion and subscriber retention. Executives highlighted ongoing investments in original programming and partnerships to enhance the platform’s value proposition. Concerns about market competition and economic headwinds were addressed with confidence in the company’s strategic initiatives.

Operator: Welcome to the CuriosityStream fourth quarter and year-end 2025 results conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the call, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Tia Cudahy, Chief Operating Officer. Thank you. You may begin.

Tia Cudahy, Chief Operating Officer, CuriosityStream: Thank you and welcome to CuriosityStream’s discussion of its fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results. Leading the discussion today are Clint Stinchcomb, CuriosityStream’s Chief Executive Officer, and Brady Hayden, CuriosityStream’s Chief Financial Officer. Following management’s prepared remarks, we will be happy to take your questions, but first I’ll review the safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. Please be aware that any forward-looking statements reflect management’s current views only, and the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update these statements nor to make additional forward-looking statements in the future.

For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our investor relations website, as well as the risks and factors discussed in today’s press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, when filed. In addition, reference will be made to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures can be found on our website at investors.curiositystream.com. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be against our results for the comparable 2024 period. Now I’ll turn the call over to Clint.

Clint Stinchcomb, Chief Executive Officer, CuriosityStream: Thank you, Tia, and good evening, everyone. CuriosityStream was built on one timeless idea: curiosity changes the world, that every breakthrough begins with a question. A thousand years ago, Leif Erikson sailed west into the unknown and discovered a new world. Nearly a millennium later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface carrying the same enduring message across time. Discovery belongs to the bold, and curiosity is our compass. From ocean waves to moon dust, that spirit propels us forward today. In that same spirit of bold exploration, we delivered strong full year 2025 results. Revenue grew 40%, $71.7 million from $51.1 million in 2024, while adjusted free cash flow increased 46%, $13.9 million from $9.5 million 2024.

Q4 revenue rose 36% year-over-year to $19.2 million from $14.1 million and adjusted free cash flow climbed 33% to $4.3 million. These gains reflect the strength of our complementary revenue pillars, licensing driven by high volume and heavily structured video fulfillments for AI model training, subscription sturdiness through operational execution and new partnerships, amplified by cost discipline that expanded gross margins to 60% in Q4 from 52% a year ago and reduced non-discretionary G&A expenses by 33% year-over-year. In 2026, we believe our annual licensing revenue will exceed our overall subscription revenue. We believe we will grow our subscription revenue by low- to mid-single digit percentages because of three key drivers. New pricing, which we began rolling out March 1, new wholesale and retail partnerships and organic growth from existing partnerships.

The recurring, reliable and predictable revenue from our subscription services cements our foundation. Why do we believe we will see licensing revenue eclipse subscription revenue in 2026? Why do we believe licensing will be robust and durable for the foreseeable future? What is the impact to top line, bottom line and margin expansion? While we’ve covered some of this before, many investors, analysts and commercial partners tell us it bears repeating. CuriosityStream’s licensing business is durable because it’s built on assets that are durable, that are scarce, rights aware, difficult to replicate and increasingly valuable across multiple end markets. We’re not talking about a single opportunistic window. We’re talking about a monetization model anchored in premium, unscripted and scripted media, enriched structured metadata, flexible rights, and growing demand from AI developers and traditional media companies.

CuriosityStream has built a large differentiated content library of rights to nearly 3 million hours of premium factual content, plus sports, plus news, plus general entertainment, animation and film, finished and raw, supported by more than 200 content and data partners and flexible licensing rights. This is not commodity inventory. It is scaled, unscrapable, curated, a corpus that took years of capital, relationships, editorial focus and dense work to assemble. Enduring revenue streams are almost always rooted in assets that are hard to replace and expensive to rebuild. Demand is broadening, not narrowing.

Beyond repeat business from existing customers, we expect our overall roster of partners to more than double in 2026 and potentially increase 5x-6x in 2027 as the fine-tuning of open source and certain proprietary models opens opportunities for thousands of companies. Historically, licensing meant selling finished programs or package rights to broadcasters, streamers, and pay TV partners. That business remains alive and healthy, and in 2025, we announced new licensing agreements with linear broadcasters, educational platforms, digital-first outlets, global streaming services, and of course, next generation AI training developers. This diversification makes licensing more durable and cycle resilient. Traditional media licensing is healthy and not going away, but AI licensing is accelerating much faster and driving the bulk of our growth here.

Over the next five years, AI model development, model refresh cycles, geographic expansion, enterprise fine-tuning, education applications, agentic systems, and multimodal search should all support continued appetite for premium licensed corpora. For AI license partners, as their model sophistication grows, so does the need for more video inputs. Developers require large volumes of high-integrity, rights-aware training inputs. Premium broadcast video, clean audio, scripts, captions, study guides, metadata, and derivative assets have utility well beyond entertainment viewing. They help train, tune, evaluate, ground, and improve multimodal systems. The more advanced models become, the more they need high-quality, structured, legally licensable data rather than undifferentiated scraped material. Key to note that rights-cleared, structured content will become more valuable over time, not less. There’s plenty of media on the open web, but much of it is noisy, duplicative, poorly labeled, low quality, or legally ambiguous.

By contrast, CuriosityStream’s corpus is assembled, curated, and increasingly product