Hi, Ok, where to start? How about I start with the ugly and work my way up:
1. The Ugly: Linius has been around for a while now, around the end of 2015, hard to call it a startup sometimes, but really it's still in the tech startup position. What happened in the years preceding, where are the revenue generating deals, etc.? I believe the first year or two Linius (under the helm of CR) focused on personalised advertising through cable TV, and they signed on with Digisoft in relation to this. Nothing in terms of revenue came from this, maybe they developed the tech in this time, i'm not sure. They appeared to change tract however and moved into the horizontals we see today.
I would summarize the first few years as, CR and the team trying to find their feet - where will this tech best fit. You could argue the tech is so "disruptive" that it's difficult to know which market to go after, what is the path of least resistance?
2. The Bad: Many here were drawn into investing upon the news of the Warner Bros. POC and the Kirby Family investment. The share price rocketed and the volume was massive (take a look at the charts) - the SP over time with lack of any revenue-generating deal dipped down with the new holders obviously dismayed by nothing coming from Warner Bros. (Village). Keep in mind the POC with Warner was JUST to check if a virtualised video played the same as a traditional video and that DRM worked them. With the obvious Kirby Family interest and investment and being involved with Village Roadshow many expected (myself included) something to come from it, nothing did. Couple of things to say about that - virtualised movies/tv shows on it's own doesn't add much value to the producers/studios, in my opinion. The Kirby's have been very keen on reducing piracy, and I believe that is a big part of why they signed on. It however appears nothing of the anti-piracy (check: https://bvs.linius.com/) Linius now has was trialed.
Obviously capital raises are not well liked by a lot of investors, they are however the status quo of many tech startups. The dilution is not insignificant either.
3. The Good: End of last year Linius had a few sports clients signed, notably: NBL, Essendon Football Club and Racing.com (which is generating some revenue). They have obviously been pushing to land a big deal with a broadcaster or sports club, with a focus on the EPL. We have swanbay tv as a distributor of personalised sports content (https://www.swanbay.tv/personalize-video.php) with again an obvious focus on soccer. Linius announced a paid POC with Sky Italia, we haven't heard about that since, hopefully it's just NDA stuff and we will hear more in the near future.
COVID put a hold on many of the sports deals Linius signed, and to their credit they pivoted to corporate communications. That is where LiveTiles comes in, who seem very keen on their partnership with Linius and trying to capitalise on the massive influx of internal video conferencing, in particular with Microsoft Teams.
4. In Conclusion: Linius is a small SaaS tech company with patented IP, I believe CR intended to be a small footprint company that enables other businesses to utilize the tech to their specific use. It's been a struggle getting from POC/POV to implementation - are companies wanting an example of a solution fully fledged out before investing in the development? The adoption curve I believe is finally beginning to turn upwards. I like the tech and think it brings value to many markets and once it is shown to bring value to a business in a given vertical, should bring about more widespread adoption.
It's been a rough road till this point, but I don't see any other tech stock that is this exciting with this much potential, will it reach it's potential? I sure hope so.
(20min delay)