Linius Technologies hits milestone: Live with IMG and Peach Belt Conference

Paul Sanger: I'm Paul Sanger for the Finance News Network, and today I'm talking with Linius Technologies, ASX code LNU, and they have a market gap around 10 million. Linus is a global software as a service company headquartered in Australia and operations in London, New York, and Europe. Linius has invented and patented the video virtualization engine TM, which indexes, analyzes and tags each frame in a conventional video file and transforms it into a fully searchable virtualized video. Linus technology exposes the data that makes up the video file, making cumbersome video as flexible as all other forms of data. We welcome back Linius CEO, James Brennan. Welcome James.

James Brennan: Thanks, Paul. Great to be here once again.

Paul Sanger: Good to have you. Now, James, you've had a busy week this week. You've recently announced that you've now gone live with two customers, Peach Belt Conference and IMG. Let's start with the Peach Belt Conference deal. You announced the partnership, I believe back in December and literally a month later you've just announced that you've gone live. Can you talk to us about the process and what this means for Linius?

James Brennan: Yeah, absolutely. This has been a tremendous week for Linius, literally the biggest week in the history of the company with these two customers going live. We've had lots of great customers, but I'm happy to talk about why these two are so substantial. Particularly with the Peach Belt Conference, as you said, we announced that deal back in December, and that deal is to bring our Wizard product, which allows their staff within the conference and within the schools to go into their videos. We're currently working on the current men's and women's basketball season, and it allows their staff to now utilize those games more effectively and to use that content to create produced content and automated highlights out of their videos. As a small division two conference, these schools and these conferences, they don't have the staffs that a big professional league and federation would have where you would think they've got teams of people who are putting these videos together and making them available for fans.

These schools have limited budgets and limited staff, and for the first time, Linius now provides them the capability to create these packages after the game, player of the week packages, conference recaps for the week, top plays of the week, and mini matches after every game. Following every game that's played each week, we're producing a series of packages that allow them to produce content up to social media, up to their websites, and really to engage the fans, alumni, friends and family, people who are invested in these schools.

Paul Sanger: Fantastic. Let's talk now about the going live with IMG, obviously taking a little bit longer. I think you announced the partnership back in April, May last year, so it's taking a little bit more time. Maybe before we get into it it maybe worth reminding our audience IMG what that entails and why it took a little bit longer than the Peach Belt Conference.

James Brennan: Yeah, so Peach Belt was very quick and easy for us to get up and running. We're talking about a current season that just started, a limited set of content and a fairly simple solution and very much out of the box. For Linius, we were connecting to video sources and data sources that we've worked with before, and we were able to get that deployment up and running very quickly. That's the scalability that we've now created with our SaaS platform is the ability to do that over and over again.

With IMG maybe I'll just start out a bit of who is IMG. A lot of viewers might not even know who they are. First of all, IMG originally founded as the International Management Group, and they were a sports management company that started out with Jack Nicklaus and golfers in the US in the sixties or seventies, and they grew into one of the powerhouse sports and entertainment companies in the industry. They manage major sports stars, they have video streaming, video archives, so everything that you can think about in the world of sport, entertainment, fashion media, IMG is really at the heart of it. They're one of the world's largest conglomerates in the sports and entertainment area. Further, they're owned by a New York Stock Exchange company called Endeavor Group Holdings, who is literally one of the top few sports and entertainment companies in the world. They own the William Morris Agency. They own IMG. They own the new TKO Sports, which is the combination of WWE and UFC, so massive, massive sports and entertainment company.

Now Linius is at the heart of their video archive, which is incredibly exciting. We announced this deal back in April of 2023, and we just went live with them this week, and this is absolutely the most important moment in the company's history. Signing up IMG was fantastic. That was great news. But actually now having this product live in the hands of their users, in the hands of all the sports and federations that are part of this, it's a game changer and it's everything that Linius has been working for for the past five or six years to get our business to this point where now we have a world leading innovative video solution that's being used by literally the biggest sports and entertainment company in the world. Again, we're using our Wizard product, which breaks apart video and allows users to search for anything that they want. But we're doing this across 15 different sports, multiple federations, including the likes of the Premier League, the Masters, Wimbledon, PGA, ice skating, MotoGP, cycling, some of the biggest federations in the world.

We're doing this across decades and centuries of content. The interesting thing is we literally have the ability to search content back, the oldest content I think is from 1898. Some of the content from Wimbledon and the Masters goes way back. We're able to help users now be able to go and easily, quickly search across that archive, find exactly what they want, and put together combinations of video that they can then license and publish out to their websites or for use in films and advertising. It's putting Linius in the spotlight for sure within the industry.

Paul Sanger: James, just to close up, so this really is a pivotal spot for Linius. [inaudible 00:07:20] signing a client, going live is a game changer. What are the implications now going forward for investors? You've gone live with these two clients, what can investors expect to see over the next three to six months?

James Brennan: Yeah, well the really exciting thing is that these are now live and visible to not only the customer but to other clients as well. In the case of IMG, they've just relaunched their IMG Video Archive Website with all new branding and all new capabilities including Linius capability. Within that new website we're being branded and promoted as their new advanced search capability. Users, shareholders, fans, anybody can go to the IMGvideoarchive.com website and go into the advanced search feature and take a look at the type of content that we're able to surface. Only registered users are then going to be able to play and to utilize that content. But anybody can go to the website and start to see how Linius solutions work, which is really exciting. It's the first time that there's a public visible use case of the Linius Wizard technology that's not behind the scenes being used by the customers.

That is going to put a lot of spotlight on the Linius product, allow us to show it off to different federations. But then every one of those federations that are within that archive are now going to be utilizing that product to build their own content and to search their own content. It really puts that front and center and is already paying dividends. We've been having multiple conversations with IMG about how we extend this capability further now that it's searchable by B2B users. How do we then bring this to the Federation to enable B2C use cases, so direct to consumer use cases where fans could go and search?

It's really interesting, you can go in and literally just type in the search bar, give me Tiger Woods' eagle putt from the Ryder Cup in 2018 and it'll pull up various angles and shots of that. We've had fun with it pulling up David Beckham's free kick goals, pulling up every goal by Alan Shearer, pulling up 260 goals and being able to watch those instantly. It's actually a bit dangerous because you can get sucked in and just start playing with this stuff. That's what's so exciting about it is now it's available and visible and it's starting to drive multiple additional opportunities within IMG, their federations, and literally every sports federation and industry user who is aware of the IMG archive. Linius is promoted right in the spotlight there.

Then fairly similar with Peach Belt, we now have the ability to show off a US customer. Whenever we've talked to customers in the US sports and federations, they're like, "Great, you've done all these things around the world, but who is using it here?" We had our first US customer with the North American Hockey League that was live, now we've got a college conference, we're doing US basketball. We've got opportunities to very quickly extend that into other college conferences who have been waiting to see Peach Belt go live. We anticipate that that will bring us into American football for the first time, which is very exciting. Just off the back of the announcement with the Peach Belt going live, we've already had multiple Division Two and Division One conferences that we've been talking to who have said, "Okay, love it. I'd like to get a formal proposal from you now. Let's start really talking about how we do this."
These two customers going live, it is been a massive week for us. Really, really exciting.

Paul Sanger: Well, James, look, congratulations to yourself and all the team at Linius. Amazing to get these two clients live. Clearly from what you're saying it's going to have big implications for Linius going forward. We wish you the best and we'll watch this story very, very closely. Thank you for your time today.

James Brennan: Thanks so much, Paul. Take care.

Paul Sanger: Thanks, James.