Linius Technologies Limited (ASX:LNU) CEO, Chris Richardson, discusses the company's Video Virtualization Engine™, 2018 AGM, its commercial SaaS platform launch, and video hyper-personalization.Rachael Jones: Hello I’m Rachael Jones for the Finance News Network. Joining me today from Linius Technologies Limited
(ASX:LNU) is CEO, Chris Richardson. Chris, welcome back to FNN.
Chris Richardson: Thanks Rachael, great to be back.
Rachael Jones: Linius Technologies has developed a Video Virtualization Engine™. What can you tell our viewers about video virtualization?
Chris Richardson: Video virtualization is the ability to expose the underlying data inside of a video. This technology is unique to Linius; we have the globally granted patents. And it allows you for the first time to really index, splice, dice, analyse and enrich video content in ways that you couldn’t before. With nearly 80 per cent of traffic on the Internet being video these days, we’re really poised to explode in many multibillion-dollar industries.
Rachael Jones: You had your 2018 AGM last week, where you talked about video hyper-personalization. Why the consolidation of strategy and how was this received?
Chris Richardson: The AGM went I think, extremely well. We demonstrated a hyper-personalization capability in the context of sports, in this case particularly boxing. And what the video technology from Linius allows you to do is really have an infinite number of hyper-personalized streams. Everybody going forward can have their own unique TV channel, with exactly the content they want. So in the case of boxing you could say, I only want to see fights from this boxer and I only want to see the commentary from this fighter. And you don’t have to see what everybody else is seeing ever again.
And that capability is something that we’re deploying in a number of verticals. It’s really successfully being received in education, gambling, sport, corporate communication, news and just a tonne of places where hyper-personalized content really makes a difference.
Rachael Jones: You’ve previously told FNN that Linius’ goal is to make the world’s video accessible as data; that sounds like quite a tough task. How is that progressing?
Chris Richardson: It certainly is a big task; we’re setting very large goals for ourselves. And we really do think video virtualization can transform the entire world of video. In terms of what we’ve been doing to proceed towards that goal, first we’ve commercially launched our LVS, LiniusVideoServices, which is our SaaS platform. And that allows really anybody, who has a new idea of what they can do with video virtualization, to come and build their own products on top of our technology. It makes it accessible to engineers, system integrators, hobbyists; large corporations that really want to do things that we may not have even thought of yet.
The other thing is we want to make our technology as ubiquitous and accessible as possible. So it’s now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. It’s also available through the AWS Partner Program and of course, we’ve historically been available on IBM Cloud. So, really, you can get to Linius anyway you want. And last but not least, we’ve really added some heavyweights to our Advisory Board.
We’ve added the former Netflix Director of Content Acquisition, a gentleman named Simon Gallagher. We’ve added the former Sky UK Head of Operations, Dave Butorac. And we’ve added the Chairperson of Newstag and former parliamentarian from Sweden, Dr Camilla Dahlin-Andersson. And really, we’re looking to the three of them to expand on the capabilities that we already had from David Pann from Microsoft. To get us in to all the credible places, to help us with our commercialization of the technology. We’re looking to go great guns in 2019.
Rachael Jones: Last question now Chris. What can investors expect from Linius in 2019?
Chris Richardson: Going forward we are not changing our strategy at all, we’re sticking with what we’ve been doing. And it’s really a three-pronged approach. So first, we want to continue to drive direct sales and proofs of concept in key verticals, to prove out solutions to the marketplace. And then take those solutions and replicate them through our channels. Through Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), through IBM (NYSE:IBM) and make them so that they can be sold at scale.
Linius isn’t going to go out and build a 10,000-person sales organisation. We’re going to build solutions that work for everybody in an industry, and let channels deploy those globally.And then last but not least, now that we have commercially launched our SaaS platform with LVS, we’re really going to start putting some marketing weight behind that. And get that out there and into the hands of developers, and let people start innovating with that. I’m very excited about where we’re going in 2019, and hopefully the stock price reflects a very successful year for us.
Rachael Jones: Chris Richardson, best of luck and thanks for the update.
Chris Richardson: My pleasure Rachael, thanks for having me.
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