Until now the focus of discussion on these threads has been almost exclusively on MatchVision, the novel personalized highlights business-to-consumer product Linius & SwanBay have brought to the sports market.
However, upon relistening to JB's revealing webinar (from the 12-minute mark), it's become abundantly clear Linius has 2 flywheels concurrently in motion (B2B & B2C), and the bigger money is in the business-to-business archive search and edit product.
Per CEO James Brennan:
"Cricket Australia is the biggest deal in Linius’ history. The deal is the biggest in terms of revenue it’s generating for us as well as the number of fans and the potential this deployment brings. Billions of content views each year and hundreds of millions of plays on their YouTube channel every month.”
“Linius was the only tool they [Cricket Australia] could find that could unlock an archive of this size and at the scale of their fan base.”“This business-to-business tool [Linius’ Archive Search & Edit product] allows the Cricket Australia staff to quickly search through the archive across 40 years, thousands of games, 20,000 hours of content.”
“They can quickly edit those [the moments that matter] together into professional highlight compilations & publish those out to their website, applications & social media channels, in particular, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram.”“They [Cricket Australia] are going to be looking to create short form content ….. but they are also looking at longer form content – 30 to 90 minute segments – you know it could be on let’s look at the greatest players from the 80's or let’s look at the greatest rivalries, put together 30-90 minute programs and they’re going to be publishing them on their OTT FAST (free ad sponsored television) and those are deployed on web and mobile apps today.”
“The Linius search and edit tool allows this team to do it quickly at scale, they don’t have to have special hardware or tools or training, they don’t have dedicated staff to do this, and we do it without ever creating new files & processing for them, so they’re not having to deal with another huge set of additional storage and media that they have to manage.”
“We’re going to be generating significant revenue from day 1.”
“On the commercial side, it includes a set-up fee that covers the product enhancements that we need to do in our archive search and edit tool as well as the discovery and virtualization of this massive 20,000 hours of content, there’s then a monthly recurring license fee, which is contracted monthly recurring revenue [MRR]. It’s the largest MRR contract that the company has had to date. We also have a significant revenue share opportunity on ad and sponsor revenue from the published videos. This could be substantial for Linius. We don’t quite get a majority share of the revenue, but it’s close. And these revenue streams already exist.”“The content that’s shared on cricket.com.au and on their websites and on their apps and on their social channels is already monetized today with ads and sponsors. There’s an existing pipeline of advertisers and sponsors and they have a dedicated sales team to selling this supply. Their team was asking for more ad space and the videos created with the Linius products will provide that.”
“Revenue from this rev share is expected to begin at launch and the best part of it is it’s only just the beginning. There’s so much more opportunity that we can dive into to help Cricket Australia further monetize this content. We’re teaming closely with their media and marketing teams to look at current and future use cases. They started with the deep archive and business to business use case, but they are just as excited about the potential of business to consumer applications and to focus more on some of the current content and current matches. We’ve shown them how our solutions can make the archive search available directly to fans.”
I wrongly assumed competitors could provide a similar search & edit tool, but it seems Linius' Archive Search & Edit product has something the competitors don't, for industry giant WSC Sports (Linius' closest competitor) is already Cricket Australia's automated live highlights provider.
Cricket Australia Taps WSC Sport for Automated Content Creation (sportsvideo.org)Finn Bradshaw, head of digital, Cricket Australia, notes that video clipping is a slow and laborious process and was previously outsourced.
“We actually employed an agency to do the basic clipping of key moments like milestones, session highlights, etc., while our team focused on the high-quality production content,” he says. “WSC’s automated video solution has saved our team both hours and their sanity!”
I can't see any reason why Linius' Archive Search & Edit product would be limited to sports.
Wouldn't it extend to any video archive?
GLTAH
(20min delay)