With a new year almost upon us I think it's useful, Janus-like, to look back at the Company's progress over the past 12 months ...and forward too, to likely developments in 2017.
In May, when Linius Technologies Ltd came to the market via the shell of Firestrike Resources, the Prospectus outlined 4 milestones, the achievement of which would "underpin the value of the Linius technology in the marketplace and the Company as a whole".
While it is a moot point whether the accomplishment of those milestone
s is indeed yet being reflected in the marketplace, it has been pleasing to see those 4 technical objectives achieved with alacrity over the course of the year - on or ahead of time, and under budget compared to the original forecast in the operating plan.
Here's how they were set out in the Prospectus, and how they were accomplished:
Milestone 1 – Linius enters into an agreement with Digisoft, Cork, Ireland for a limited deployment of its technology with the objective of demonstrating personalisation of video streams.
Achieved on 21 December 2015 with Linius' entry into the agreement with Digisoft.
Milestone 2 – Linius completes an alpha release of its technology demonstrating Linius’s core patent claims, namely that the technology is able to (1) index content, and (2) disassemble and reassemble content dynamically.
Achieved May 12th, when the company successfully demonstrated an alpha release of the Video Virtualization Engine performing Linius’ core patent claims, and demonstrated a use-case of video personalisation by:
- Ingesting a video from a remote location and creating a virtual index that pointed to the raw video DNA of the remote file;
- Reassembling the video DNA on the fly, to playout in a format different to the original file, demonstrating the reduced need for transcoding; and
- Inserting content into the middle of the video playout on the fly, demonstrating personalisation.
Subsequent to alpha release, the development team focused on building and stabilising APIs, with a focus towards integrating with showcase partner Digisoft.
Milestone 3 - Linius enters into an agreement with a third party (unrelated to the party under Milestone 1) for a limited deployment of its technology with the objective of demonstrating removal of the requirement for transcoding of video and reduction of storage. This deployment will be in partnership with a tier 1 transcoding and/or storage partner, likely to be a content delivery network.
This one was achieved with the signing of the Suitcase TV Limited showcase agreement, and announced on 2 November 2016.
The deployment, being in partnership with an organisation that is able to take a standard video and transcode it into all standards-based formats and store it at broadcast quality, demonstrated removal of the requirement for transcoding of video, and reduction of storage.
Milestone 4 – Completion of a limited deployment of its technology, the material deliverable from which is a third party (which may or may not be one of the parties under Milestones 1 and 3) provides a report on the outcomes of the deployment and likely market sector impact.
The successful completion of the transcoding showcase with Village Roadshow, as announced to ASX on 19 December 2016, completed the quartet.
The relevant milestone was the completion of a limited deployment with a third party which demonstrated that the Linius technology removed the requirement for transcoding of an original MPEG-4 video file to play out on devices traditionally requiring differing formats and in doing so reduced storage requirements. The issue of a report, verified by Village Roadshow, confirmed this.
Of course, it was of more than academic interest to the developers of the technology to see those benchmarks attained - 50,000,000 shares were conferred on each of the 4 occasions a milestone was met.
With hindsight, shareholders might perhaps have wished the bars to have been set a little higher, the rewards a little lower ...and perhaps with a stronger commercial emphasis to each.
But it'd be churlish to lament in any way elements of the deal that brought this remarkable technology to our Australian company in the first place.
Besides, although the specific milestones were technical in nature, implicit within each of them have been quite large steps towards successful commercialisaton.
Digisoft deepened its relationship with Linius in July, signing a reseller agreement. And together, Linius and Digisoft demonstrated personalised advertising with a beta version of the technology at IBC in Amsterdam in September.
Linius, we have been told, entered into significant
additional partnership discussions in the wake of IBC.
Village Roadshow boss, Robert Kirby, so liked what he was seeing in the technology, he invested $500,000 in LNU through his private Family Trust in September!
The point is with Digisoft, Showcase TV and Village Roadshow, we are already in showcase deployments with likely end users.
And there are plainly many others out there taking an active interest.
Our erstwhile leader, Mr Rudd, was once pilloried for his use of the term "programmatic specificity". Rightly so, I guess, for a 'man of the people'. But it ain't such a very bad idea in my view to set out particular objectives and a timeframe for their achievement.
So I wouldn't mind hearing our CEO, Chris Richardson, come out with a new set of milestones for LNU in 2017 - this time plotting the pathway to successful commercialisation of the technology (though without perhaps the accompanying blizzard of Performance shares).
Oh, and even if it's only aspirational ...it'd be great to hear a little more about possible revenues - quantum and timing.
Good luck to us all in 2017!
(20min delay)