Its been about 18 months since Lionsgate began taking steps to separate its film and TV studio business from Starz a process Starz president and CEO Jeffrey Hirsch likens to renovating a house.

During the process, its painstaking but once youre in the house, you forget the process because youre enjoying it, Hirsch told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview Wednesday. Starz is at the in the house point now, as the streaming and premium cable outlet formally split from Lionsgate and began trading as a standalone company on the Nasdaq exchange. Hirsch joined Starz in July 2015, about a year and a half before Lionsgate acquired it, and has been president and CEO since 2019. He noted that under Lionsgate, there were multiple different segments [of the business], and so things were done rightly so for the overall growth of the company. Now that Starz is on its own, he hopes that being able to have a singular focus will help the company reach its goals which are ambitious.

Starz has about 20 million subscribers in the United States and Canada, but Hirsch said he sees an opportunity to quadruple that number to 80 million over time for comparisons sake, Netflix had 89.6 million U.S. and Canadian subscribers at the end of 2024. One avenue Hirsch sees for growth is continuing to offer Starz in bundles with other streaming services, which has been a key part of its business in recent years.

Weve always been that complementary partner of choice, Hirsch said. Comcast grew their video business by including Starz in broad-based bundles, and we replicated that on the digital side. On Amazon, were bundling with Max, were bundling with AMC+, MGM+, BET. I think youll see us really lean into that even more as were a standalone, independent company and have clean lines to be able to do deals with everybody.

Starz and Lionsgate will continue a working relationship, as the studio produces the Power franchise and other series for Starz and has a first-window deal for Lionsgates film slate. Moving forward, though, Hirsch wants Starz to own more of its programming, either outright or through co-production deals with other studios. Starz has some 50 projects in various stages of development, overseen by programming president Kathryn Busby.

I havent been shy publicly in talking about getting ownership back and building a library and reigniting the content machine that was Starz [pre-Lionsgate] and will be Starz again, Hirsch said. We want those economics back in the business.

Starz began as a premium cable channel, and while that is still part of its business, the company is primarily a streamer: About 70 percent of its revenue will come from digital by the end of this fiscal year, with a projected profit margin of 15 percent. We never looked at digital as a new business. We just looked at it as another distribution channel where consumers want to watch Starz, Hirsch said. We didnt favor one side or the other, we just moved to where the consumer was going. That allowed us to avoid a lot of the conflict that existed with the linear business.

One thing Hirsch doesnt see Starz doing is following other streamers in launching a cheaper ad-supported tier (Starz has one of the lower ad-free price points in streaming at $11 per month). If you think about Starz content, its very R-rated, and its very hard to put ads around that content, he said. Were not massive in terms of scale, and because it would limit the number of advertisers that we could put alongside our content, I think it would be very hard for us.

With series like the Power franchise, Outlander and BMF, Starz has leaned heavily into making programming aimed at (and often led by) women and typically underrepresented groups. That wont change after going solo, Hirsch said. We will expand within that framework of women and underrepresented audiences, but well be laser-focused on staying within that programming mandate.