Blackbird (LSE:BIRD) — Annual General Meeting

0:00 Good morning, and welcome to the BLACKBIRD PLC Annual General Meeting Proceedings. Due to the number of attendees on today's call, the company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review your questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. I'd now like to hand over to Andrew Bentley, Chairman. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Good morning to everyone here and everybody watching online. It's now 10:30. And as the quorum required by the company's articles of association is now present, I'd like to welcome you to BLACKBIRD's twenty twenty four AGM. May I begin by introducing myself and other members of the board? I'm Andrew Bentley and currently chairman of the company.

0:51 I'm joined here by Ian McDonough, CEO Steve White, chief operating and financial officer Yep. Next to next to Ian Steven Streeter, research and development director, and Andy Kirkhoff, who is the new senior independent non executive director to my left. May I also introduce our company secretary Mark Martin Kay, who's who's here today, and Jeremy Reed representing our auditors, Moore Kingston Smith LLP. Nick Taylor, Pierce Shimwell, and Amit Nall, are here representing our name added broker, L and B Capital. So before proceeding with the formal part of the AGM, I'd like to take the opportunity of commenting on the company's progress since we last met. As announced earlier this morning, and I'll be reading through this morning's statement.

1:39 The past year was one of significant investment and transformation for the company with the company's collaborative video content creation platform, elevate.io, designed for the creator SaaS and corporate AV markets, launched into early access in November and subsequently into general release at the end of March twenty twenty four. Elevator.io is built on the company's core patented technology, which leverages our key technological advantages around smoothness of playback, navigation, and speed on top of proven reliability. Additionally, as elevate.io is built on the AWS public cloud, it can be easily scaled and integrated with third party features and functionality helping to build out the Elevate marketplace. Early users have been positive about the simple, easy to use interface and are buying into the vision, recognizing that this will solve many of their current content creation issues.

2:34 They can also see how collaboration will reduce friction, increase speed, and improve output whilst making the production process more enjoyable. In advance of marketing, elevate.io is in the planned general release phase. And although not yet at a chargeable grade, we currently have early adopters in the high hundreds. They're engaged in uploading, creating, and publishing video. As a new platform with different ways to create video, our teams are gaining an enormous amount of insight from the early adopter activity, especially around collaborations supporting our assumptions. I'm pleased to report that we've had 100% uptime since early access began. As is the expectation of today's SaaS market, Elevator is being continually enhanced using rapid deployment method and already multiple features have been added.

3:26 These include more editing controls, general performance improvements, and the addition of markers with many more to come. Functionality and features will continue to be added and rolled out and will open up our user base and lead to a step change in our marketing and partnership activity. There's a growing number of companies who have successfully executed product led growth in parallel SaaS markets, in particular, Figma and Canva, who we look to emulate. The growth curve they followed was an initial period of investment where the focus is high quality product development followed by a steep growth phase once the product reaches an appropriate level of maturity and the users reach a critical mass. Due to its complexity, the video medium has been the last to convert to a collaborative web platform.

4:12 Inherent technological advantage of Blackbird has allowed us to finally solve the problems of collaborative web video and launch a working multiplayer video creation experience on the web, which is very exciting. But the total addressable market for Elevate is huge, growing fast, and right for distribution. Our initial serviceable addressable market, where we are targeting professional teams and content creators, is calculated at at 6,900,000,000. We've seen in parallel SaaS industries, there's a huge reward for companies who succeed. Our overarching goal, for the Elevate platform are to be able to create, manage, and distribute content. As a first step on the latter, I'm pleased to announce that prototype of our experimental player will be demonstrated after the AGM today, ahead of its release as a publishing destination from Elevate.

5:07 This will enable Elevate users to be able to to share their content with other people quickly without the need to render. Viewers of the content will then be able to reshare the content with other people or click and share. Long term followers of BLACKBIRD are aware that our award winning technology is well recognized within the professional broadcast and media and entertainment market, the M and E market. It's used on the pinnacle of content and within the sports sector on the majority of major sporting events during 2023. This year, through an OEM partner, it'll be used at this year's summer games where the platform will be used on up to 70 concurrent feeds, granting access to our full suite of tools to global broadcasters. This m and e market has previously been the main focus and drive of our go to market strategy.

5:59 However, each of our major accounts have often required bespoke integrations, which are both time consuming and costly. Combined with the pressures that major broadcasters face with diminishing audience share and reduced advertising or subscription revenues, it's proven a challenging task to grow our share of the M and A services market. This is reflected in our 2023 revenues, which decreased for the first time in five years to 1,940,000 due to a number of deal losses some nonrecurring revenues from 2022. The board recognized the challenges of the M and E market back in 2022, leading to the refocus of our investment and resources into the creator space and elevate.io. We've taken decisive actions against our M and E cost base last year and this year.

6:44 And as previously stated, we are targeting an EBITDA breakeven for the BLACKBIRD, division in 2024 this year. There've been a number of changes to the board over recent months. John Honeycutt and Dawn Arie, leaving and Andy Kirkhoff joining us as previously announced. As previously announced, I'll also be leaving the company on the August 31 and stepping down as the chair at the conclusion of today's meeting. Andy Kirkhoff will assume the role of chair, and the company is actively recruiting further nonexecutive directors. The board believes very strongly in our strategy and that it's the right one. We've developed a platform in Elevate that has the potential potential market far in excess of that available to us in traditional m and e and where we are early to market and currently with far fewer competitors.

7:37 We, the board, and senior management are shareholders in BLACKBIRD, and we are very mindful of the investment journey that each of us has experienced. On behalf of the board, I'd simply like to thank you for your belief and ongoing support, particularly as we transition the business in order to realize the full economic potential of our technology. I might have just added it's been quite a privilege to chair this company. So I'd like to now turn to the formal business of the AGM. The circular the notice of the AGM, the circular to shareholders, including the notice of the AGM together with a copy of the company's 2023 report and accounts was published on the 05/25/2024. And accordingly, notice of the AGM has been duly given in accordance with the statutory requirements and the company's articles of association.

8:26 Further copies of the reporting accounts together with the notice of the AGM are available on the company's website. With your permission, I'd like to take this as read. So the first resolution today is to receive the reporting accounts of the company for its year ending the 12/31/2023. The reports of the directors and the auditors are set out in pages 13 to 25 of the accounts. And, again, with your permission, I'd like to take these as read. Before the resolution is proposed, I invite any questions. Nope. Okay. And I propose that the may I call upon you by a share of hands to indicate those in support of the resolution and those and those those in support first, please?

9:17 Thank you. And those against. So I'd like to declare that the resolution was carried unanimously. I'd mentioned that over 99% of the proxy votes that have been launched by the company in respect of this resolution, totaling one hundred and eighty seven million five hundred and fifty three thousand two hundred and twenty twenty seven votes, including the chairman of third party's discretionary votes, were in favor of the resolution and 257,000 were against. The second resolution is to approve the director's remuneration and benefits for the year ending the 12/31/2023. Details of such are disclosed in note three of the 2023 financial statements.

10:03 It's worth noting that this resolution is being put to an advisory vote in line with the recommendation of the QCA corporate governance code of 2023, third edition, and in accordance with the provisions of the Companies Act 2006. The director's entitlement to such remuneration and benefits

10:19 is not a conditional on the resolution being passed. Before I put the resolution to the room, I invite any questions. No. And I propose that the resolutions put to the meeting may call upon you by a show of hands to indicate those in support of the resolution and those against. Thank you. I declare that the resolution is carried unanimously. I would mention that over 93% of the proxy votes that have been lodged in the company in respect of the resolution totaling 174,892,929 votes were in favor of the resolution and 12,906,498 were against.

11:08 The third resolution, it's for the reappointment of Moore Kingston Smith, LLP, as the company's auditors and to authorize the directors to fix their remuneration. Before the resolution, I propose, I invite any questions once again.

11:24 Nope. And I propose that the resolution put to the meeting may call upon by you by a show of hands to indicate, firstly, those in support of the resolution. Thank you. And those against. Again, I declare that the resolution is carried unanimously. I've mentioned that over 99% of the proxy votes that have been lodged with the company in respect of the resolution totaling 187,549,283 votes were in favor of the resolution, and 260,944 were against. The fourth resolution is for the reappointment of myself as a director. I'm standing for annual reelection in accordance with a good corporate governance practice and the recommendations of the QTA corporate governance code.

12:14 Before the resolution is proposed, I would invite you once again any questions. Nope. I now propose that the resolution is put to the meeting. May I call upon those sorry. May I call upon you by a share of hands to indicate, first of all, those in support of the resolution and those against. I now declare the resolution carried unanimously. I would mention that over 93 of the proxy votes that have been lodged for the company in respect of this resolution, totaling a 174,673,509 votes were in favor of the resolution and 13,136,718 were against. The fifth resolution is for the reappointment of Ian McDonough as a director. He's standing for annual reelection in accordance with the good corporate governance practice and the recommendations of the QCA corporate governance code twenty twenty three. Before the resolution is proposed, I again invite any questions.

13:14 No. And I propose that the resolution is put to the meeting. May I call upon you by a show of hands to indicate firstly those in support and those against. So I declare that the the resolution is carried unanimously, and I would mention that over 99% of the proxy votes that have been lodged with the company in respect to this resolution totaling 187,504,838 votes were in favor of the resolution and 305,389 were against. The sixth resolution is for the reappointment of Stephen White as a director. He's standing for annual reelection in accordance to good corporate governance practice and the recommendations of the QCA corporate governance code twenty twenty three. Before the resolution is proposed, I invite any questions.

14:06 No questions? I now propose the resolution is put to the meeting. May I call upon you by share of hands to indicate those in support? Thank you. And those against. And I declare the resolution carried unanimously. I've mentioned that over 99% of the proxy votes that have been lodged at the company totaling 175,552,125 votes were in favor, and 753,102 were against. The seventh resolution is for the reappointment of Steven Streeter as a director who's standing for reelection again in accordance with the cop good corporate governance and the recommendations of the QCA corporate governance code twenty twenty three. Before the resolution is proposed, I invite any questions.

14:56 I now propose the resolutions put to the meeting. May I call upon you by a show of hands to indicate those first in support? Thank you. And those against? And I declared a resolution carried unanimously. I had mentioned that over 99% of the proxy votes that have been lodged, totaling 187,502,125 votes, were in favor of the resolution, and 308,102 were against. The eighth resolution is for the reappointment as yeah. The reappointment of Anne de Kirkhof as a director. He was appointed as a director by the board with effect from the 03/06/2024 and is standing for reelection and appointment by shareholders.

15:45 Before the resolution is proposed, I invite any questions.

15:50 I now propose the resolutions put to the meeting. May I call upon you by a show of hands to indicate first those in support and those against. I declare that the resolution is carried unanimously. I'd mentioned that over 99% of the proxy votes that have been lodged totaling a 187,052,125 votes were in favor of the resolution and 758,102 were against. The ninth resolution is to renew the authority of the directors to issue shares set at a limit equal to one quarter of the issued share capital of the company to date to the date of the notice. I'd make it clear that, say, for the grant of options under the company share option scheme and the allotment of shares pursuant to outstanding share options and to satisfy vested awards under the company's long term incentive plan, The directors have no current plans to issue further shares pursuant to this authority if renewed.

16:50 Before the resolution is passed, may I ask for any questions? Question at the back. I appreciate your statement. At the moment, there's no need to should you share it? What would you personally be using for files? In light of the way the company is at present, is there any particular reason why you want to have that resolution? Well, it provides us with the flexibility if events if if such an event that requires us to to issue shares comes about, it gives us the the ability to do that without calling in without calling out to shareholders for approval. It's it's it's standard practice for most organizations and has been for this company since its beginning. I I noticed that as shareholders, we obviously if new shares are issued, it means eyes overall have been diluted in the sense because things aren't going well.

17:43 Oh, yes, please. Thank you. If you'll hear me okay and Yeah. I mean, I I have no problem against, but I'm just wondering what what your plans are. Is there any plans? But I know you can't tell us necessarily because it's conventional for market purposes. But, hopefully, it's not just to actually be used for the purposes of debt. We obviously want to make sure that companies go in place. I have no problems in principle, it's been widely used. Well Yep. We will we will go through our strategy in in the the next section. So I've yeah. Hopefully, I'll answer all your questions then in in that in that respect. Okay. Can I put the resolution to the meeting? May I call upon you to buy a share of hands for the cake first of all first of all those in support of the resolution?

18:32 Thank you. And those against? I now declare the resolution is carried unanimously. I'd also mention that 99% of the proxy votes have been lodged by the company totaling 187,464,710 votes were in favor of the resolution and 345,517 were against. The tenth resolution is to renew the authority of the directors to issue shares and cash for certain limited circumstances without first offering those shares to existing shareholders. Again, I'd make it clear that safe with the grant of options under the company share option scheme and the allotment of shares, to share to outstanding shares options and to satisfy vested awards under the company's long term incentive plan. The directors have no current plans to issue further shares pursuant to this authority, but would wish to retain the flexibility to do so in the limited circumstances set out in the resolution.

19:27 But before the resolution is proposed, I invite any questions. I now proposed no. I now propose the resolutions put to the meeting as a special resolution. May I call upon you by share of hands to indicate, first of all, those in support of the resolution. Those against, I declare that the resolution has been carried unanimously as a special resolution. I've mentioned that over 93 of the proxy votes that have been lodged in respect of the resolution totaling 174,986,409 votes were in favor of of it and 12,817,018 were The eleventh resolution is to approve the renewal of the BLACKBIRD PLC long term incentive plan twenty twenty nineteen out of it for a further period of three calendar years from expiry on the 12/31/2024 and to renew the authority of the directors to allot shares in the company to satisfy vested awards under the LTIP without first offering those shares to existing shareholders.

20:38 Before the resolution is proposed, I invite any questions. K. No questions. I now propose that the resolution is put to the meeting as a special resolution. May I call upon you by a share of hands to indicate, first of all, those in support, thank you, and those against. I declare that the resolution is carried unanimously as a special resolution. I'd also mention that over 99% of the proxy votes have been lodged with the company totaling a 187,373,329 votes were in favor of the resolution and 436,898 were against. That concludes the formal voting of the resolutions for approval at today's AGM.

21:27 If any vote lost on share from oh, sorry. That's that's a note for me. As previously announced, I will be I intend to step down as the company's chairman, but remain on the board as a nonexecutive director until the 08/31/2024. The company is actively looking to recruit a further nonexecutive director, and Anne has agreed to act as the chair going forward. She has a very strong breadth of industry experience and knowledge, and Anne, I believe, is ideally placed to lead the board into the next phase of the company's execution of its strategy. And I welcome her to the board. Thank you for your attendance. I'm now going to hand over to the management team to update you on business before opening the floor to any questions from any of you. Thank you.

22:19 You. Great. Okay. Right. We've got a slide of pace. That's good.

22:28 I am gonna hold on to him. So we have two sides to our business. We have a side that's working in the m and e market for some of the most prestigious sports and news organizations and segment organizations in the world. And we have a we have a a new product that's that's emerging at an elevate.io. Today, I just wanna take us back to 2021 where we were, coming coming through the end of COVID. Our share price was very high. We were sell we were growing sales, and we were landing large deals. I just wanna remind you of that point because that was that's a it's a it's a point where we always always look back to as a kind of a point where we we looked at ourselves, looked at our business, and decided that we could make a profitable business in the m and e sector. We could we could build a nice niche business in the m and e sector in the sports and music environment.

23:35 What we decided to do was far more ambitious. What we decided to do was was build a product where we believe the technology really suited building a product that's gonna change the way that video is created on a much larger scale, and that is in the in the greater economy and and in the the enterprise world. So we raised money back in 2021 in order to really catapult the company. So I just wanna take us back to that point and remind ourselves that we could have done the the the the kind of easy solution, if you like, going down a small company route with with M and E sector. I took a I overtook took a product over in 2017 and 2017 that we we pushed really hard. We really pushed it hard. It went into the world's largest business news organization, went into pretty much every sporting every major sporting event in 2023.

24:23 It went into the world's largest business new went to the US Department of State, and this year is in the summer game. So it's it's been a it's been a really good showcase for that that piece of technology, and we wanted to make sure that we could we could springboard from that to leverage this this company much, much bigger. So next slide, please, We embarked on a strategy of product led growth. Product led growth can be can be articulated in the in the three words of it's the consumerization of software. So this is about creating a consumer grade software for professionals and professional tooling for consumers. And that and there are three companies here on the right hand side of the slide that you you I'm sure you know very, very well that about that have executed this extremely well. And and these are the the poster child companies that we wish to to emulate.

25:20 There are numerous benefits to a consumer led growth strategy, namely that we build we build the product that the customers really want lowering the CAC, meaning that there is a a virality, meaning that there is a massive scalability. You have cap happy customers, retained customers, and really compounded accelerated growth. Next one, please, Sumit. As you know, those companies on the right hand side of the slide have got extremely high valuations in in sometimes in the tens of billions. And the key features really are making sure that we they that the playbook is executed well. Now there is a playbook here, and a lot of people ask me questions about strategy and about how we how we're going about rolling out elevate.io. We are sticking to the playbook that has been well executed by by these companies. That that is really starting with a strong product vision, and Summit came on board middle of twenty twenty two that to build on our product vision of of building a a platform for the greater economy and conceive to elevate.

26:25 It is then really a a focus on quality engineering. This playbook doesn't mean that one one phase stops, by the way, and the other phase starts. Everything goes along. So the the the the product vision is continuing, and and Summit and the team are continuing to execute that product vision. There's been a real focus on quality engineering since that team arrived as well. So that will that will continue through. So those those those those two two teams are working exceptionally well together. It then then drives then we go into phase of driving adoption, driving free user adoption through acquisition, free user acquisition, free user activation, and free user retention. And have to say when you look at these three areas, acquisition, activation, retention, free user retention is really our North Star metric that we want to make sure that we become a daily driver for the for the the the customers that we bring on board. And that is really we're in that stage now where we're just starting to get we've we've we've released a general a general release version of the product.

27:21 We've got users in the high hundreds that are really showing us the way that this this product is being used, especially around the collaboration part of it. What happens then is is is experimentation. Data driven experimentation starts then where we are experimenting with with new features, with the way that we communicate, and the and the way that's that those customers continue to to stick with the product all the way through. And this is really about creating that's okay. Do you like to take a seat just just here? Just just so it's about driving that adoption and then creating a a buy model. And the buy model for us is is is we'll we'll talk about that in a in a little second.

28:07 But it's it's about making sure that our customers are really happy with the with the product first, so that that that that exceptional on engineering and that product vision is being executed. And then the exponential growth happens, then the compounding happens, then the morality happens, then the sharing happens, and and performance marketing kicks in as well. So that's that's that's that's been seen from other companies, and it's gonna be seen from us. Yeah. Next next one, please. Now we didn't we didn't conceive this product in a complete vacuum. We we we had focus groups on a on a quantitative and a qualitative basis in in the kind of 300 level of people. So this is right across that corporate sector, so the professional sector that want a consumer grade product and that that creates a sector that want professional tooling.

28:52 So we had we had users in all areas, and they told us things that can kinda fall into these kind of six or six or eight buckets. Yes. We want to have we wanna have our our video assets in one place. We want we we're over juggling hard drives around. We want to use AI tools to to to to transcript and to add imagery. We wanna do it on low powered computers. We wanna do it on Chromebooks because we don't wanna issue everyone with with high powered laptops. And as a creator, I don't have access to a high powered laptop. I want instant feedback to my to to my to my client's work. I want instant feedback to my agency's work. That was also something that we heard a lot. And I wanna be able to publish. I wanna be able to publish the put up the push push button to numerous places.

29:38 I wanna be able to access that that content very quickly, and I want it to go to all my my my different social feeds. So this is this is what we are all all always hearing through those focus groups. Can please next slide, please? So that is where we really nail down the vision of what elevate.io is. And elevate.io is far more than a video editor. This is a web based collaborative video content creation platform, and that means that it has a create part of it. It has the editing side of it. It has has the the the the video creation aspect to it. But it also has the asset management side to it. So that that is that is what we hear loud and clear. I wanna I wanna upload my assets simply from my from mobile to one place. I know where it's found, and it's gonna be there. So that's where the AWS native native architecture comes from, you know, that that is part of platform.

30:32 And then distribute. So at a push of button, I wanna go to almost what my my feeds. Across that, in order to to to future proof the platform, there'll be a marketplace for each of those areas. So for the create area, there'll be there'll be a marketplace for and this is this is to come in in the next next year. For the marketplace, there'll there'll be a for AI, generative AI, there'll be a a marketplace for effects. There'll be a marketplace for stock imagery, for stock video so that that our creators do not have to leave the platform. They the everything they need is there. There'll be a marketplace for for managing the platform, so whether it be whether it be Dropbox or or other asset management tools. And there'll be a an area where for distribution, you can go to wherever you want. Could be YouTube, whether it be TikTok, whether it be to our own our own player where it's instantaneous access.

31:25 Timeline to that exponential growth. I I I you know, I I know that this is always being it's always a question, and I wanted to show you some comparators in in the in the companies that we just talked about. So next one, please. So the first one is Canva. Now Canva was quite a simple product, actually, although it's a genius idea. Melanie Perkins conceived this product with Fusion Books back in back in 2007. She didn't launch that product as Canva until 2013. Her main product concept kind of kind of came along in 2010, but she she launched that product in 2013. So some some, like, some way between that. She did 18 rounds of funding for that product, and she had our pro tiers come in at the end of year four. By the end by by halfway through year five, she had 3.6 users. Remember, this is a consumer much more a consumer grade product.

32:12 But what I really wanted to point out on this slide is how those users really compound after a certain level. So year nine here on on on the slide, 40,000,000 from 3.6 to 40,000,000 users. Then then to 75, then to a 100. It's currently on about a 135,000,000 users. And although valuations differ, she she just about to go to IPO with the product. Estimates at the high point were around $40,000,000,000. Currently, still in, like, the $26,000,000,000 range for for Canva. Just shows you how big the the opportunity is on offer. Next one, please. So next one for us that we really wanna measure ourselves and probably more appropriate to us because of the complexity of this product where there was vector vector editing and and much more difficult pro tooling that's been that's been developed is is Figma.

33:00 Now Figma is was a that was conceived in 2010, raised seed all the way along, but didn't launch their closed beta until the fifth year of their of their development. Launched to an open an open audience later that year. Didn't launch with multiplayer originally with multi Figma's very, very famous for its multiplayer aspect and not didn't launch that multiplayer until kind of halfway through to year six. Paid tiers didn't come until the sort of the end of year seven of its development. So just another thing to just to bear in mind. Now we all know the Figma story. Well, I sorry. I know the Figma story very well. I'm not sure that everyone knows the Figma story, but I think yeah. So Figma was that's a very good point. Sorry. I'm just always talking from my own perspective. Figma was almost acquired by Adobe about two years ago. So Adobe put in a a bid for Figma.

33:53 So what would they do exactly? So Figma is a design tool that is collaborative in nature. It because I use Camtasia. It's like that. It's more like Illustrator online. So it's more like a graphics, Photoshop, Illustrator. Photoshop. Yeah. But all online and all in the browser and multiplayer. Multiplayer, meaning the So you don't have to download it in software. You could just you have to subscribe. Yes. Yes. And that's where the that's that's the similarity to us. So there's a subscription there's a subscription platform that will will allow for collaborative collaborative work. So collaborative web design in in the case of Figma. So that you and I could be jumping on the same Figma document together. In fact, numerous people could be. And

34:37 that is really the key to where to where to Elevate has its has its why we built it the way it is so that share. So you can share. To share. So, yes, it's it it really allows for a a collaborative experience, meaning that not just that we create together, but also that we can review and approve together, or we can we can have instantaneous access to to maybe our agency's files or to our client's work and and be able to see how the the progress is going without going through a kind of loop of passing backwards or forwards similar to a kind of Google Docs way. Yeah. So so it's paid to its kind, yeah, kind of at the end of end of '7. Adobe tried to buy this company. It had had it starts to get massive record sorry, large market share, and they did a raise in 2021.

35:29 The company was estimated to run a 10,000,000,000 market value. Adobe tried to buy it a year later for around 20,000,000,000. Unfortunately, by then of which of both parties by then, the market share was too large for that deal to complete, and so the deal hasn't gone through because the CMA said that it was it was dominant. But they yeah. It it it is a a highly successful company that continues to to grow to this day. They raised about 749,000,000 in in funding over that time. And then your your purpose would be to make it go smoother. Is that how I understand it? Great segue to my next so a great segue to my next slide. Okay. So this is this is this is our timeline to now. Sorry. Can I just quickly just make sure we're on the same page? See if my ambition is competition markets authority in the Competition markets authority in The UK. Yeah. That's right. That's where it came unstuck.

36:21 So it was it was gonna go through. Not really necessarily know that. I mean, that's why I'm chucking on that tonight. Yeah. No. Thank you very much for clarification. Yeah. The Competition Markets Authority said that it was it was it was dominant in the market, and and therefore, it's it's it hasn't gone through. Still, yeah, that's a time that's I guess it's a timing issue, and and, you know, takes nothing away from Figma's incredible success. So elevate.io is a is a much earlier part of its its its its growth. Now I know there's been quite a lot of quite a time between the company inception and Elevate starting, I really wanna make sure that we understand that when that that fundraise happened at the end of twenty twenty one, and I brought on key members of the team, including Summit mid twenty twenty two, that was really where the Elevate story really begins.

37:17 And so we're very we're very early in that stage still. So Summit came aboard June 2022. Just over a year later, we had our closed beta out in the market. So our closed beta early access, out in the market, and that was November 2023. We've had general access, so we've opened up that that beta to to, to to everybody to so we can experiment and learn, March 2024. And then as we look forward so this is kind of the big news, I guess, of today is that we're gonna be looking forward to to q one twenty twenty five where we have our pay tiers. So this is a this is a a real intense period of product engineering, of experimentation, and making sure that when we roll out in in the our pay tiers early next year, that that that that's gonna take the right to that product led growth that we all wish for.

38:06 Now just to I've shown these slides before. So Just before you it's probably worth mentioning that the speed at which this product's been developed is so incredible, and it's all because of the years that went before and the amazing patents and technology that the company had developed over the many years. So don't look back on this on the period before 2021 and think, well, we're now waiting for the that's when all the good stuff's happened. All the technology was developed well well ahead of that and and enabled us to move at quite a pace here that Ian's now taking his through. Because I've seen it since 2000 because of forbidden technology setup. Yeah. So it's quite a long time, you know, to wait. Well, we've we've we've found the right use for it now. I think that's really where we go. We go with it. I think there's there's two points there. Thank you, Andy, for for for, yeah, slowing down the whole because I think that that's that's true. It's it's it's not just about the about the fact that we're we're now compressing those periods, and and you're right. It's like it it it you know, for me as a as a major investor of the company and for others, it's not just that we've now comparison to the things. We're actually solving this problem that no one else can solve. The vid video is video hasn't been solved as a collaborative web experience as yet.

39:22 And it's really the biggest it's really the biggest prize of all in in in that respect because it is it's such a heavy and cumbersome medium to work with that no one else has has has may have solved this. Yes. There's been graphic design. Very, very brilliant product, and and I'm I'm glad that, you know, that they they've shown the way. Figma, vector editing, brilliant to have have solved those problems. Video is the next level of of of difficulty, and we've and we're we're solving that. So we've we've solved that that issue with our with our first iterations. We've launched multiplayer. It is a it is a beautiful experience to work with the multiplayer in the in the elevate.io. So it's similar to Camtasia focus, focus accessible and then being Yes. There is there is there is there are some similarities there. And the and the the way that it's it's architected means that as by AWS, it's incredibly scalable from this point on as well.

40:16 So, yes, it's it's really about about building on the standing on the shoulders of of two sets of giants, if you like. One is Steven's work that he's done with with building out the the software, the the codec and the video libraries around that, but also the work that Canva and Figma have done showing showing showing us the way that a collaborative web platform can really be scaled. So there's two there's two areas there where we've we've got the advantage of of learning from. And then you've been able to use AI and Absolutely. Images, I don't like. You get, like, six fingers. That that's a really good point. So the the way that we are designing it, I'll just go back up to the the market. Let me show that. This slide, yeah, I think it's the slide. That one. Back. Back. Back. Back. Back. That one. So where the marketplace is there on on this on this vision allows us to to to bring form to the amazing functionality that you hear about all the time now in in in the press on AI. So whether it be generative AI or analytical AI, that will be available to to elevate users, elevate IO users through our marketplace. So a lot of those a lot of those AI companies, they do something brilliantly, you know, in OpenAI side. Most of them do one thing really brilliantly, and we can make sure that we can do that. What we can bring that one thing to the to the Elevate platform and allow our users to to to to generate an image or to analyze an image or to to analyze text or whatever

41:47 whatever whatever it be. So that's it's really future proofing it for the for the user. Yeah. Go back to this. Yeah. So yeah. So the so so the market opportunity in the creator space, it can't it can't be under under under understated. A huge opportunity. Goldman Sachs have talked about this being a $500,000,000,000 market by by 2027, and it's, you know, it's growing really, really quickly. I mean, so it's it's the growth rates I'd like to look look at at more than more than the size of the market because we're not going for the entire market. The tools and services side of that market is currently a $20,000,000,000 market, and we'll grow to around a 181,000,000,000 by 2032. So it it just shows you the the scales in which people are looking at in terms of the growth here. Now if you look at our serviceable addressable market, this means that when Elevate is is in its paid instance, that we're looking at around $6,900,000,000 market that is today. And, again, you can factor in growth rates there. That is those professional teams that we talked about. That is those monetized creators at the top end of the of the of the creator economy.

42:58 Now you might say, well, 6,900,000,000 compared to the 500,000,000,000 doesn't sound so great. Well, if you put it in into context here, Figma's TAM is currently about a $1,100,000,000 market. It's gonna grow to about 4,000,000,000 by 2027, but it just shows you you can build an extremely valuable company off the back of a smaller TAM. FigJam is its second company its second product. That TAM is that total addressable market, sorry, is around $2,600,000,000. So Figma has built a very valuable platform in in a in a market that's around half the size of the the platform the market that we're going for. Again, back to my sorry. Yeah. Back to my first slide. This is a product that's gonna be used by two sets of of of audience. One is the content creators, that really fast growing group of users that are monetizing their content, and secondly, the the the pro teams working within a corporate or enterprise environment.

43:59 Yeah. Just for the beat. So they want to have a professional tooling in the content creator side, and they wanna have a consumer grade product, easy to use product in the pro teams side of it. So it's really, really important to know that. Yep. Excellent. Right. So I'll go to market. So I'll go to market. I'll split into two different slides. One is 2024. So this is to to just to reiterate, this is before we we go to a pay tier, which is early twenty five. This will be a largely light light investment and focus upfront in terms of organic organic growth. So it's making sure that we've got the right blogs out there that we're we're we're highly visible to people searching for the likes of a Chromebook editor or the likes of a of a a video editor on the web or a collaborative editor. So those blogs out, working with our teams internally to build out video, organic video on all the major platforms.

44:54 So for the creators on Instagram and TikTok, for the editors on on Reddit and Discord, and for the corporate users on on LinkedIn and and Facebook. And, course, they all they all intermingle, but if you think it into those those kind of three main buckets. Yeah. Next one, please. And going into retention, this is goes back to my point about quality engineering, making sure that those product those those those features that we view as being sufficient are brilliantly engineered by our team and make that that product do the work in terms of the the the growth and the retention. And then we'll also be be we're building a community around around the the the products, making sure that our users can talk to us, making sure that our users can talk to each other, and really building a love for for Elevate.

45:44 Next slide. Now going into 2025, things get more interesting. We really will we'll be looking at a conversion there, so making sure that we we will be investing more heavily in terms of paid search. We will be investing more heavily in terms of paid social. We'll be expanding our organic video into more long form YouTube. We'll be working much more with influencers, and we'll be bringing on partnerships. And those partnerships may well be could be hardware. They could be public cloud, or they could be creating networks. And we've had a lot of interest already, from from creator networks, who wanna work with us when our product is is is at the at the stage where that can be used by a large group of their creator, input team. What is the creator network?

46:30 They used to be called MCNs, which is kind of multichannel network. Multichannel networks existed. I think it was Magic Studio. Was it Magic Studio, the big one? Disney one. There was there was ten years or so ago. There was you would outsource your video that you wanted to put on YouTube to these kind of large multi channel networks. They've developed now into likes of Jelly Smack who who are who have thousands of creators that input content into into a kind of pool of so you if you're a if you're a Unilever, you might well go to Jellysmack and ask for in influencers to create video for you. And then yeah. So so interlocutor just a question. Yeah. Just a quick question. Yeah.

47:16 Sorry. Thank you. Will you be setting aside, I'm crunching my words carefully, a relative budget for advertising. So, for example, you got the. I don't think you need to spend too much, but I'm well aware of CYREN having become complacent with with a a brilliant product and unfortunately led to its demise. So are you would you have a a certain percentage set aside that So it's a it's a really good question. If if you recall my my slides on Figma and Canva, they didn't ever stop funding that business. They wanted to make sure that business was being properly funded at all points to make sure that they were maximizing their technology and maximizing their idea. So, you know, the we we want to build a company worth in the tens of billions, and I'm, you know, I'm not gonna shy away from that. We wanna make we've got big ambitions, which is why in '21, we didn't just push onto our our niche product. We built we're building a product for a bigger market.

48:17 Will I continue to to put money aside for for advertising? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Can I just ask? Yeah. Because I'm a bit confused on the time last year. Where where is the money coming from? Because it's all very well once you start monetizing. We don't know when that's going to be. But at the moment, we've got a good product which which isn't making any money. The share price is tanking. So a rights issue is not the way forward at the moment. Mhmm. You're going to have to spend a lot of money to develop the product. You're going to have to spend a lot of money marketing the product. And until you monetize, there is only a very limited pop.

49:06 Correct. And thank and thank you for your question. So we've indicated that we will start our our monetization from q one twenty twenty five. So that's the first thing to note. We are we raised money back in 2021. We're currently sitting on just under 6,000,000 in terms of cash, and we will we will con we will get our product out in terms of the the the monetization side of it and getting it to gain traction. We haven't changed our our our message on that, and that is exactly what we're gonna do. So we want to make sure that we we we are of course, we will, you know, always look at our our numbers, and we have a very prudent cash control person sitting right next to me. But we want to make sure we get that product out, the engineering done right by by early twenty twenty five to start monetizing that product then. Yeah. The entity business would be great. How much would the subs would you have a subscription for users or payments or or a one off payment?

50:00 So this this is correct. Yes. So the subscription is based in in in several tiers. So there is a free tier. So as is as is the the way that product led growth works is a there's a free tier, and then we will we will convert, and that's just what's what the the purple exactly where I am now. We'll convert that free tier into paying users. Those paying users will be on several different tiers. So the first will be the a creator tier, a pro tier, and some of you'll talk about this a little bit, I think. And there'll be an enterprise tier. So that there will be different levels of of investment for the user as they go through it. Have you decided yet how much? I I would say we've got an I've got an idea about some of this, but to be honest, it's a dynamic space. Some of the competitors that we are looking at keenly are moving their their their pricing around, so we will be we'll be absolutely making sure that we are maximizing every every every user to to ensure, one, that we get the return, but also that we get the growth.

50:57 So it's it's a it's a balance. But, yeah, we've got a very good idea about where we'd land. So it's Kiwi Kiwi. Kiwi. That's That's a a competitor. Competitor. It's a so there's there's a couple of different you know, like, the market, but, you know, kind of early, there's one called scenery.video who's who who's out there. Scenery.video. Yeah. And and, yeah, a number of number of Ozone is out there. But we just they're they're they're kind of just all kind of an early early stages of rollout. So as we said, we're early to this market. There's not a lot of competition, but it's a it's a keenly sought after space to have a collaborative web platform, and so it's not devoid of competition altogether. K. Yeah. There is. There is some competition, but it's not it's not a lot of competition. It's a small amount of competition.

51:49 Yeah. I've got one too. Number sorry. A number of companies who have needed to raise money recently, which are listed on AIM, have decided the best route forward is to delist and become private companies. And I also note that two examples, the two case studies you put out there were both unlisted private companies. If you found that coffers were running low and you still haven't sort of achieved, if you like, the inflection point for takeoff, is it something you would consider for BLACKBIRD? I think you know what my answer is gonna be to this point. But there are absolutely no plans to do that. I think I think it's worth making the point at this stage though, and I'm almost finished with my side, worth making the point is that, you know, no companies are identical. Right? But this company is is highly unusual.

52:46 And and this company is highly unusual for two reasons. One is because it's been around a long time. But secondly, this is the only opportunity for a UK investor to to get involved with a greater economy. It's it's it's highly unusual that it is on it is on AIM. It's that it's it's public. And, you know, I think that, as you say, everyone everyone else is private. They have their their numbers private, and they can do you know, their valuations go up every time. You You know? As you can see, ours haven't. So it is it is it is a, you know, a tricky thing for me to to to walk, but it is an it is a real, I think, opportunity for for for investors in this country to get involved in the greater economy. It's pretty much the only one in a meaningful way. I I think most current investors in Blackbird would be very disappointed if you were to go private. And and as you know, I'm a current investor in Blackbird, so, yeah, here you go. That's a I'm almost finished, guys, so I'll just do this last bit.

53:41 Oh, sorry. I just I'm still not on the on this yeah. I'm still on the screen. So yeah. So it's really about making sure that our premium features then can convert that that that that user base into paying subscribers. So so whether it be in the the creator tier, the pro tier, the the the enterprise tier, convincing them with blogs, convincing them with emails, convincing them through socials, having a customer success team as well for those corporate users at that point is really important. And and at that level, with large corporates, some enterprise sales. It's really not the focus. The enterprise sales is not the focus, but it will there will be some some part of it. It'll be there. And then the last arrow there, please. I'm going back to to again, just to this the risk of repeating myself, feature updates. This is about engineering again, making sure that we have the correct engineering, the correct product engineering to make sure that those feature updates are really what the the user wants to see, that the ecosystem that we built, I. E, the marketplace, means that they don't have to leave to go and find something else. That community is strong and that the customer support is exemplary.

54:48 And, yeah, that's where I'm gonna pass over to Summit. We just to be forced on this, we have got a long list of pre submitted questions, which we're gonna go through. So happy to take questions as we go along, but there was also a lot of questions that we're going through. You, Ian. So I just wanna reiterate something that Ian's mentioned because if you're tuned into our podcasts, you're gonna see a slightly different story, and there's a very good reason for that. Consumers buy what's in front of them. Obviously, investors are taking a long term view. So if you watch the podcast and you see the presentations that we did last week and the next ones that are coming up, you'll see us focus on a very small part of what we do well, not a very small. Sorry. A third of what we're doing, which is the creation piece.

55:34 That's the first bit of the product that we're building. The benefit of what we're doing on, because it's online, is that we have a lot of opportunities. And what we've really identified is that elevate.io, even though to the public market, it's really important because we do get questions from the podcast saying we'd like to hear our full vision. Well, please understand that's what the AGM's for, and it's what we do the special events for. But what we say publicly may not always or what we say to users may not always tally with what we're telling you here. What we want to reiterate today is that Elevate is a video content creation platform. It is a management platform, and it will be a distribution platform. That doesn't exist really that much in the world. There are, of course, content management systems. There are distribution systems like YouTube and Insta and Vimeo. And, of course, there are video editors, are traditionally installed software.

56:25 Our plan is to bring the whole thing together into one offering, but you can't do it all at once. Otherwise, we will run out of money. So we have to do it in the right logical order and in order to make sense, and that starts with creation. That's at the heart of BLACKBIRD, and it's what Steven's been working on for so long. But as a byproduct of what we've been doing for so long in the m and e space is we have obviously developed technologies in content management and in distribution as well. So we'll talk less about them because they are more things which we're gonna be doing down the road. But for now, if we focus on create and I'm conscious of time because we are running late, so I'll be very quick with my demos. If you are more interested in the creation space, please do tune into our podcast. The previous episodes are all available on demand, but the up and coming ones will be a much deeper dive into the actual technology.

57:11 I don't wanna bore everybody with it here today. So for those of you who haven't seen the editor, the Elevate editor, this is the editing interface. And it's all running in a browser, and it is all running through the network here. And we we we we have nothing installed on this machine. And it's quite remarkable that the example I'm about to show you, this was something that we ran as an internal competition team four within our company where we divided everybody up into groups of four and we had eight teams or something in the end. And everybody went away and without any warning on the subject had to develop a video together. And they were all in different locations, so they could only use, you know, their sort of messaging and email tools as well as our product to collaborate and create a piece of content together.

57:56 So I'd like to just roll that from the beginning. So that was an example where they had an hour's time, four of them remotely to build an advert for a perfume bottle. They used AI actually to generate the perfume bottle. But, traditionally, this would be impossible. It's an impossible task. You wouldn't be able to have four people in in different locations around the world.

58:46 One of the members was in America. It's not possible to do that. The world of content creation always exists, and and there's a joke in the industry that the project that the the computer the project starts on is the one that it finishes on. And you always have someone who's in charge, and the way with which you do approvals is very lengthy. It's very time consuming. Of course, it's gotten quicker. We're no longer DHL ing, VHS tapes off for approval. Of course, there are other online tools, but none of them are built into the product itself. So also on the content creation side of it is that we have been aiming always from day one, again, because of the background of BLACKBIRD, to build actually a professional editor. There are other editors that are online in in the marketplace. None of them are as sophisticated and as accurate as the ones that we built.

59:34 And that that doesn't mean that there isn't a use for those. There's a use for those in lower down the market, and that's completely a different proposition. You need a lot more money to attack that market. It may be bigger, but it's the more consumer it is, obviously, the more you have to spend. We are absolutely going for this the the the the middle of the market, which is people who are creating serious content, organizations, obviously, education, obviously, YouTubers, and and and and the like. And they require a tool which is comparable to the installed software. So things that we've included that you would never see in any other online platform are tools where, so this is just one that we developed recent recently. Select forward, select back. We have good color controls. This is at the moment something that we're working on to improve, but we have real time color correction within the product.

1:00:27 We, at the moment, have, what you can see on on on the product if you sign up for it and use it, is we have some simple transforms. But and this is, again, something that we're willing to share and show to to investors, but it's not something that we sort of put out into the general market. But we've got much more sophisticated controls coming with really, really high accuracy. So these are tools that are that that you would expect from a professional video editing product, and those will be coming in a release. I don't know exactly when, but it'll be sort of in the in the next month or so that release for this will come out. So, again, I just wanna double down on the point that we are building a serious video editor. It has a huge range of applications. It will extend right up into the broadcast sort of side of the world, and it will be perfectly usable for YouTubers or anybody in organization that needs to use the technology.

1:01:21 So our interface, this is a mock up of our of of where our interface is going. We're actually building out our advanced color controls at the moment, and we're building out better track features. But this is something, and this is the feedback that we get from the people who use it, who are in the industry. They are really surprised and shocked that it is happening in a browser, and they really feel like it it's like using a piece of installed software. That's always been our goal from day one. If you try our product against other products that are are browser based, you'll see instantly that we have a real great feel and and editing is all about feel. It is an it is an art form in itself, and having control of the tool is just absolutely important. The nearest thing we can think of is it's about like it's if an editor is like a racing driver, the car is just so crucial how it works, how it feels, and everything being in the right place is just absolutely imperative.

1:02:14 The other piece that was touched on earlier was about generators, and we don't have the monopoly on good ideas. We certainly don't have all the resource in the world, and we want to leverage lots of other technologies that are being developed. In fact, there's never been a bigger market at the moment for a marketplace because so many people are out there building tools. And AI isn't just we we always think of AI as, you know, image generation or even, you know, potentially video generation, but AI is incredibly useful for other things like speech to text, for recorrecting text, for auto leveling audio. So a whole bunch of things that are very time consuming ordinarily for for for sound engineers or editors to go through even if it's like picking out scene changes. Trivial thing to do, but if it's an hour long, it's gonna take you an hour and a half to do it. And if you can press a button, it could be done in twenty seconds. Because I use three speech to text letters, but you sometimes have to try 10 different voices to make them look better. You do. You do. It's still quite timely.

1:03:12 It is, but it gets it gets better and better. Better now in the future, but it's not it's not it is quite slow. It is. But the best thing is we don't have to pay for that development Because it's a generator, because it's something that we're using from third parties, it means that it's products that we can embed within our product Yeah. And charge accordingly, but we don't have to run the development of that, which is incredibly expensive. And it's a race that is there are a lot of people in that game, who are doing it. And I would say that if you look at the progress in the last two years, another two years, and it is gonna become indistinguishable. I mean, we are we are it is just getting faster and faster. But it's used in a whole bunch of other areas, auto tagging. So a lot of our market for traditional Blackbird and something that we expect to do with Elevate is where people are gonna use our product to log the content ahead of it actually being edited. Well, that's incredibly menial. That it's object detection and speech detection.

1:04:07 If you can have the computer go through and do it for you, that's an incredible advantage in time. Editing is all about time. It's time not only time to complete the products and to get it turn it around, but time is money. And anything that can be done to actually make it easier for people. And by the way, even if it's not AI, what we're seeing is that a lot of YouTubers in particular want to shoot their content, and they want to finish the content, but they ship it off in the middle usually to, Asia tends to be the hub where most of this is done. That process is quite cumbersome. With a product like ours, it becomes incredibly easy to upload the content, ship it off immediately. Just add someone to your project that you're working with a freelancer where the labor cost is a lot cheaper. They will go through, put together what's called a rough cut. You can then pick it up and go, okay. Fine. Now I can just tweak the bits I want and so on and so forth. Or sound design is really important, and you can be the best editor in the world. You may not be very good at sound. It's a it's a nice well, we brought Jack with us, one of our engineers who works on the audio side of our business because he's running the sound for this today, and it's a real skill. It's not a skill I have. So it's far better to say, okay. I've got this far in my project.

1:05:18 Now let me leave that to somebody else. And we're looking at and and this is something that we're working on with Jack at the moment. We're looking at auto tools to do things like auto ducking, and to do auto noise reduction. Again, things that mean that you can just press one button and have it done for you, and that's incredibly useful for people. If the one thing that we want people to use our product is to realize it isn't just that it enables you to do more than you did before. It's really that it becomes a huge time saving. And once that time saving is put into monetary terms, especially for organizations, it becomes a no brainer. So generators, we believe that we we we can't even imagine where they what they're gonna end up being. We know the obvious things, connection to stock photo libraries, as we mentioned, some AI generation, text generation tools, audio tools that I've mentioned a little bit.

1:06:07 But what we're hoping is that people are able to develop outside of us. We'll obviously put build them to start with, but we will produce an SDK which will enable others to produce them for us and take part in the monetization of that as well. And we'll expand. We're talking to some of the partners who are in the video space as it is, the people who produce plug ins for traditional tools. We've been talking to them about how they could repurpose some of their tools that they use in traditional editors into working in our world. And what we believe is that it means that we get, obviously, a better product to market. It means we don't have to do the work, but, of course, we get to partake in the revenue share. So marketplace is gonna be really important. The second area that I mentioned, and and Ian touched on this, is content management within organizations. It's a classic mess, and every organization is the same. Everybody invest in video. They get a project done, use it from an agency.

1:07:05 It goes on a website, and then very quickly, the assets are lost. No one can ever find anything. It's always this sort of where was that? When did we do that? And more importantly, and this is a really big one, people pay a lot of money to have assets developed, but they never end up with the rights to the content that they paid for. And one of the things that a platform like ours does is it forces organizations to have the ability to impose on the companies that work for them, whether they're freelancers or agencies. They it forces on them essentially that you must store everything in in our world. You must store it in our domain, our vault. So the people who actually pay for things to get created end up with an asset that enables them to be reused later on. It means that they've got access to everything that went into a project, and everything can be tagged. Everything can be searchable.

1:07:54 Everything can be repurposed for other productions later. This is also gonna be incredibly useful for YouTubers who often reference previous videos, in their work, whereas at the moment, they a a lot of them have to rebuild a project to find the piece or grab it off the final cut of what they've done previously. We believe management is something that is taken care of a little bit at the moment by the content management space. That's quite a advanced space. It's quite complex. That will exist still through the likes of BBC and and and other big news networks. But we believe, again, in line with who we're aiming our product to be creator at, that there'll be a benefit to the management tool. And sorry. Sorry about that. Questions. These these will be rather large files, and I'm assuming there'll be some they'll be stored somewhere. What would that be? Like, you know, what would cost that company?

1:08:46 They'll always be with Amazon at the moment. That's our current partner. And if if we we we actually if if you saw the podcast the other day that we did, we we we went to quite some depth with a with a pro videographer. Okay. And I'll just give you one quick highlight. To shoot video on a a a digi beta tape, which is the format from ten, fifteen years ago, The cost of that tape, just the monetary cost of it, is equivalent to about five hundred years of online storage. So that didn't mean we're on video files are getting bigger. And, obviously, we're shooting more because the cost is less on acquisition and that memory cards are reusable. But what we're seeing and we won't implement this immediately, but we will be implementing glaze glacial storage, which is something that Amazon offer, which essentially is, you know, putting it into the the vault. It takes a little bit time to get it out, but it's incredibly cheap to keep it running. So we believe that the eventual move that you're seeing I I've never deleted a a photo of my phone as an example.

1:09:45 But, you know, think of how that was compared to using film and then too early cameras you're rotating memory cards. But, you know, I've I've I've got over 30,000 photos on this. I've never deleted one. And so we expect that to happen with video. It's just gonna be now anything that you create, anything that you shoot, you'll just keep it. We'll hold the, obviously, the master file. Obviously, that's available for you to download if it needs to be sent somewhere else. But, of course, our whole point behind our product that's been developed is that we have the proxy file so you can edit with it in a low res but very, very efficient format and then, you know, rebuild your project and then get the full full full quality version exported later. Taking it further, there's the management piece. There's the content creation piece. But, of course, the one thing that's just changed astronomically in the last twenty years, where twenty years ago, we only had television and DVD and straight VHS.

1:10:39 Of course, there's all the whole world of distribution has changed. Netflix to YouTube to Insta to TikTok. It's a world that I ran a company in for twelve years, so I know it very well. And we have a golden opportunity because even though we're not gonna head out and compete, we're certainly not gonna become Netflix anytime soon. We're not gonna go for YouTube. We're not gonna go for those main players, but there's plenty of opportunity for people who use our product to be able to obviously, we're not cutting off people from using our product through our plug in infrastructure to publish directly to YouTube, to go directly to Vimeo, etcetera, but we will also be bringing out our own distribution. Now that has a lot of benefits, especially for organizations, people who do not want to. If you take the pharmaceutical industry as an example, very regulated, can't just put things on YouTube and so on and so forth. So people who want to create content directly within our product and immediately are able to to push it out and with such speed. And I wanna demonstrate that speed to you. This is the first time that we've ever hooked up Elevate to the player that Steven's been working on.

1:11:42 And we take the video that I created or here well, I didn't create it. The team created it here. And I just go up to here to export. You'll see there's an option for getting an m p four of traditional video file or getting Spark. Now all I have to do is hit that button. There's a transfer of content so that it's more available into the public Internet, and and it gets cached around the world so it's easy for it to be deployed. But now the link that's being created means that that can be embedded into other platforms even if it's social media networks that are video based or it's into here it is. So here comes the video. Now it's a self contained video. And I can obviously jump ahead. Now I won't steal the thunder because Steven's gonna go into a lot more detail about this. And as I mentioned, distribution is probably the biggest opportunity that we have, But it is the one that has to be done in the in the appropriate order, and we're going to be doing that in the right manner because what we don't want to do is to flood the market with where it all we do everything immediately and before we've even got one aspect of it monetized.

1:13:01 So that's the biggest one that has the biggest opportunity, and it's the bit that will complete the platform that we're building. Just got one more question. Can you make a film available to be available to only to some people but not to others? Correct. Yeah. There's that's the the things that we're gonna be building into distribution and where we're gonna be a bit different from the YouTubes. And and, again, this really is a question for Steven. But for us, it is more that we're building something which is going to be more controllable and more appropriate for, say, let's just say, some media of the future where people want to actually gauge content or monetize content or things like that. But I I will say no more for Steve. Okay.

1:13:47 So over to I might start with a couple of slides. Now. Yep. Take your time for me. Right. So some of you may know we've been working on a player for some time. The latest version of the player actually is elevate, which is built around the same technology. But we think that it's worth making us dedicated player but integrated with elevate. So we've codenamed it Spark. Still in development, but it's basically working. And I'll just summarize in three slides what Spark is all about. So the first thing is the vision. It's virality is really important. People have touched on this, how much money we're to spend on marketing.

1:14:33 And some of this limited time didn't have a chance to tell you at least half a dozen features of elevateelevate.io, which make it much more viral than you would expect from a normal editor. But as you use it, you'll discover this. And the multi pair is one of those examples. But a player is much more has much more viewers than an editor. So from a point of view of virality, it's a really good it's it's a a really really good good thing thing to to have. Have. We need to have an integration with with the Elevate editor. We need to have content easily made. And so that's this is what so it showed editing at elevate.io and publishing to the player. So the first thing is instant it will be instant. It wasn't quite instant, but there's nothing in the player that is slowing it down. That's just, you know, early prototype thing.

1:15:22 But secondly, when people get to see it, it's a very engaging experience. It's very responsive, and I'll show you this in a minute. Very responsive. It gives you very it gives you a number of features you don't get on a normal player. But in this first version, it extends existing features. And one of the main ones for reality is that you can clip the content very easily and reshare it. So what we're allowing is very easy content creation and very easy dissemination of that content even you find the nice bit of the content liquid that you like and you share just that bit. So the second feature is scalable. So some of you may know from our our history how margin in our original products up at 95% of gross margin.

1:16:08 Very, very efficient and scalable. And so what we're making with the player is using that technology and elevate, making it very cheap to supply. But what that means is we can give customers a lot more features, including client side features because we have an intelligent player. We don't just have a dumb player. We have an intelligent player where we can, over time, add more and more features that would be uneconomical to provide individual service for every viewer of the video. But with our technology, we can do that. And then looking further to the future, monetization, all the big companies that you've heard of, you know, YouTube and TikTok, it's they're all on the distribution side. So we want to get a a foothold. Although we can use them in Elevate, we want to have a foothold where we can directly benefit from monetization monetization going forward. We'll own those viewers. So that is all for the future, but the the the infrastructure is all in the plan.

1:17:07 So how can we make this thing? It's taken not very much work compared with just just having the infrastructure. We we leverage our own IP. We have a lot of IP. The two things that that are most relevant, instant publishing. So we can actually publish in a fraction of a second to the player, and the video is there immediately. It can even be there even before you've uploaded it all because of the way that the platform works. And also integration with other elevator.io. There's no point in having a brilliant player if you can't edit your content in it. And that integration integration can be quite advanced, and I'll talk about that going forward. The second thing it does is to accelerate our new technologies. So back by ten, we we put that to our side while we were getting Elevate working, but now back by ten's coming back. And it's really good to have a showcase for that going forwards and for testing. Buffalo is our new high quality audio, which my colleague over here has actually written.

1:18:10 And instead of being just normal audio, it's loss free. It's perfect quality. Not that we need that, but maybe we do. But it's now technology capability we have, which is available in Spark. And we also have a whole cloud infrastructure which organizes I mean, on a microscale, Sumit talked about content management with 30,000 clips and things. But this is on a microscale. When you're actually editing, it organizes what's stored in the client, what's downloaded when, what's rendered when, to give you a a experience when you're using Elevate that everything just happens immediately. So this is another example where we're using Bitly, the video library, and that is at the core of the path. And And finally, on this slide, the the technology enablers. This is a a springboard for disruptive innovation.

1:18:59 It has very fast turnaround. So with elevate, we're already up to several releases a week. You won't won't notice that when you use it, but new features are arriving, optimizations, improvements. They're arriving all the time. But with Spark, we don't just have lots of upgrades a week, but we have a very short pipeline. So Sumit is just starting to get involved, making suggestions from the product point of view. And in a couple of days, they're out there available for users. And that really tight tight pipeline is only possible on a simple product, but it does allow us to push forward all the technologies quickly. And then just a little bit about this prototype which I'll just go through at the end. It's a simple player. So I'll try and keep my analogies down to one. No. You know, kick me otherwise. But you go to an expensive restaurant and you've got two choices.

1:19:52 You could have your fish and chips, but the best fish and chips you've ever had that you would never be able to make at home. The best batter, the crispy chips, the spices. You You know? Know? So that's one choice at your restaurant. Or you could go and have, you know, roast novel with Icelandic clams. You know, you would never make anything like that at home. So you have this choice. So we're starting with the player with the fish and chips end, but really, really good. Okay. Elevate will have all the all the beautiful features. So the user experience is simple and familiar, which means when people use it, they won't be trying to work out what's this amazing feature. How does this magic trick work? You know, like, Hogwarts has spent years trying to learn how to get the tricks. Everything will work just as you expect. So they'll have lots of standard features, but a lot of them are enhanced because of our technology.

1:20:41 We can just give you a much nicer experience of of the of the player than you would get on a normal player. So the second point is the integration with elevate.io. So, obviously, the simple the simple there's publishing makes it a lot easier to share content. So you can just make a copy, make your own link, send it to a friend, then only they would have access. You're not giving stuff to social media to do what they do with it and copy it and share it. You and it supports the Elevate process, which you've seen the create side where Elevate editor is. Manage is not that relevant to to the Spark player, but distribute. Elevate Elevate will will be be distributing in all sorts of ways, but this is just an extra string to the bow where we keep control of it. You haven't actually sent the control externally.

1:21:33 So I'll just show you Spark in a second, but I'll just tell you how to get hold of it. The first thing is if you see a Spark pair around, you can just use it, and you can click. Anyone who sees it can click the bits. They can share them anywhere on social media they want to. So it's a real way of getting content out there and increasing, obviously, brand awareness for Elevate and our our products and our infrastructure. And then secondly, you'll be able to publish with elevate.io. We need to get the legal terms and conditions sorted, which are very simple for Spark because it's just a player. But we do need those in. And as soon as those are ready, this will be available through your freemium account on elevate.io. So I will just quickly show you whoops. One second. Sorry. Right.

1:22:21 Thanks. Oh, there it is. Thanks. It It was was easy. So the sort of things we have, this is sort of similar to the YouTube interface. When I shuttle here, I'm not sure what frame rate you're getting over the Internet, but it's 60 frames a second as you shuttle. It gives you the big screen. You can actually change the screen size here. I'm not sure what that looks like on the screen. So everything's really, really high frame rate. You can also if I just push this up you've got frame accurate access. So now as I move, you see every single frame. And this is the thing that annoys me most on on social media. They have some funny thing that happens with a cat, say. And it's so fast, you just don't know what's happened.

1:23:14 And you try and do it, and it you skip five frames or 10 frames. You can't see what's going on. So this gives you really good access. And just like with YouTube, they have minutes and seconds. We have minutes, seconds, and frames here just to show you that every single frame is accessible and and really smooth as well. We have a couple of other features. I won't go into all of them, but flagging is quite important for a player with all the new regulations. This is Steve's doing most of the heavy lifting here with our lawyers. But there are 350 pages of regulations we have to obey to put a player out there. Most of which, luckily, doesn't apply to us because we're a small business. But one of the things we have to support is flagging and clipping and sharing. I'll just show the clipping. So if I like a bit of this, I can enable clip.

1:24:07 And then if there's instructions, we'll improve this interface. Find where I want to start, so maybe start here. And and I just drag out and just choose the bit I want. So maybe go to that. And I can reverse or confirm. And now I've got a new link with just that clip. So So this is the second thing that I think would benefit typical social media people. They put a really long video up. Maybe they put the video of this AGM up. But, obviously, the only bit that's interesting, you know, is this bit. Mhmm. It doesn't look at this bit out. So this will allow you just to take those few seconds, six seconds out, and publish that as a separate video. And you won't be trying to say, oh, it's, like, three hours twenty seven minutes in somewhere they said something interesting. You just clip it out yourself and share it. So idea is we just make things that should be easy.

1:24:56 We make them easy. And the elevate does this in spades in the edit aside, but this allows every viewer to do this. Share that share that interesting bit on the link that, you know, with their friends, with the people who will be interested in that bit. So each piece can go viral to a different audience. So, yes, that that's really the player. And, yeah, any Elevate user will be able to use this. Do you want me to question, Tom? Good. Yes. We are gonna move to questions now, guys. So as I mentioned, we've got a quite an extensive list of questions to go through that were pre submitted. So I know you've got questions in the room as well, so I'll try and get through as as quickly as possible. Okay. Sorry. This This one? One? Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay.

1:25:49 Can you please provide precise user, freemium, and subscriber numbers today and forecast the next twelve months? What sort of adoption rates are being seen? So as we've mentioned, we're in the pre marketing phase of of elevate.io. The user base is growing, and we're currently in the mid hundreds. Marketing will be more modest until we get to get to a post payment phase, which is 2025, as I just mentioned in my presentation. What is the pricing structure of the platform? Well, we are this is a dynamic area. We are we'll be competitive within within the PLC, within the product led growth and SaaS to work tool space, and we're keeping an eye on on competition and, of course, making changes adjusting accordingly.

1:26:34 Question three, what are the costs today associated with running free users AWS? They're in the single digit thousands monthly to to currently. We're regularly monitoring and regularly optimizing those those costs. Question four, when will the marketing of the platform start properly, and what outlets are you targeting for highest user adoption? Marketing will will well, marketing this year has already started to roll out, but very, very early, and and paid marketing will be from 2025. Partnerships and influencers will be a key part of that next year. Question five, is there any live opportunity for powered by Blackbird in the in the pipeline? So there's a question about our other business, the Blackbird business, to clarify a real live conversation with an interested party, not a legacy conversation.

1:27:20 Be clear on this one, there are no current conversations happening around Powered by Blackbird that are that are live conversations. Question six. Elevate seems a very small, low key launch, and despite the limited functionality, it seems to work well. What are the next plans for Elevate, and how soon will we see advanced features arrive? 2024 is a really key key year for us. We're rolling out features, like we said, on a on a weekly basis with improvements. So it's giving you a bit of a brief look at what's happening next in terms of the product. And q two q one twenty twenty five is when we see the the the payment gateways arrive on that one. Question seven. Pre Elevate launch, it was suggested that Elevate would generate revenues. Will it?

1:28:06 Are they expected to significant? So will it? Yes. Are they gonna be significant? Yes. When will they are likely to have a product that users will pay to subscribe to? Q one twenty twenty five. Approximately, how many regular active users does Elevate currently have? We've talked about this being in in the the mid to high hundreds currently of of engaged users and early adopters. Question nine. In terms of personnel, what is the split of r and d staff between media entertainment? So the Blackbird platform and the new Elevate platform. Is it fifty fifty or more resource source to get dedicated to Elevate? It's really about the focus is really on elevate.io now. We we believe that elevate.io is where we're gonna get the the best return, and and it is the most investment investment heavy at this stage, and that's where we the focus is.

1:28:53 Question 10. From an investor point of view, the Elevate launch was significant in a few ways. First, to show us BLACKBIRD's tech capabilities. Second, to show how we can attract users in serious numbers and to offset cash burn in the overall business so we're not in such a weak position in the future. Despite some positives on the platform and its ease of use, I'm not fully convinced in all of these points. Could you please address them? Well, I think in terms of tech capabilities, I feel really happy about this. I think that we've solved a problem already in the in the, the collaborative video content creation space that's not being solved by any of the big guys or any of the other the other small guys. We've already created a beautiful experience in the multiplayer environment. So it's a stable environment, quick loading, low latency, high performance. I think the next the next thing is to really to to to show that that bit of the presentation we talked about, free user acquisition, free user activation, and free user retention. And that is gonna be a part of the go to market plan that I took you through.

1:29:51 The cash flow side of things, this will only this will only materialize after the payment gateway starts in q one twenty twenty five. Eleven. I understand that Summit and Moe would be working together as an experienced effective team during a period of gaining significant market penetration with Elevate. Why has why is Moe no no longer listed as part of the leadership team? Does Does his his apparent departure signal a significant change in the launch plan? No. It does not signal a change. Moe has been an incredible asset to this this team since he joined in mid twenty twenty two. He's He's been been absolutely instrumental working with Summit in terms of product development and working with with the with the teams across the piece in terms of brand and and and naming of the platform. We've gotta make sure as we go forward that we have the right skill sets in place for the next stage of the of of the rollout, which is really about execution.

1:30:43 And that that's the key reason why Moe's on with the with the business because he really was more strategic strategic than execution. We'll continue to strengthen the team around Summit to make sure that we can execute well against this strategy. Is elevate.io going to be fully launched independently by BLACKBIRD, or will this be done in arrangement with a larger company with a much larger existing market presence? We want to get the product to a point where we can charge for the product. And as as I mentioned, I think that partnerships are are are a key area of growth, but at this stage, there's nothing in place, although there has been interest in that area. When do you plan to start promoting elevate.io, and do you expect to be offering a chargeable version? You can't give a plan date to give an indication at least two months away from now. Well, we started with with organic growth, and that will continue the right way through 2024.

1:31:31 2025, we'll start seeing more paid marketing around the product. '14, do you do the profitable market prospects for Elevate now seem better, the same, or worse than six months ago? Absolutely better. I can't emphasize how much we've you know, how how big this problem is that we've already solved, I e, the multiplayer environment on the web as a collaborative video tool. So, yeah, six months ago, we hadn't we hadn't solved that problem fully, and we are improving it every day. So absolutely happier than we were six months ago an awful lot happier than we were twelve months ago. How is the enterprise product performing? Is there any significant improvements to its prospects for making a trading profit? We're aiming for for breakeven on that product e EBITDA breakeven on the product this year. And I said the emphasis really in terms of development is is in Elevate, but that that product continues to to to have have a sales team and have have conversations, and we will we're aiming for breakeven this year.

1:32:30 16. The interview with proactive investors, Ian said a payment gateway would be ready before we started seeing revenue, and we start seeing revenues by the end of q one. It appears that there'd been a delay in the product development. Can you please explain the delay and update when the product payment gateway is scheduled for? Well, I'm updating today that the payment gateway is scheduled for q one twenty twenty five. The fact that I said there would be a payment gateway to start, I think it's a dynamic it's a dynamic environment here, an agile process, and that we thought we thought it best that we develop develop our our engineering and our products before we we and and drive adoption before we we put a claim gateway on. We wanna make sure that those that when we go to convert those those free users that it's really a product that they really want to pay for. 17. In the twenty two twenty second March twenty three finals presentation in response to a question on marketing for the creative product, Summit emphasized Moe as a linchpin in the process. Moe appears to have recently departed Blackbird. Is he still involved?

1:33:27 And if not, then can you please explain how the marketing strategy has been adapted? As we've said, Moe really had the right skill sets at the time and then really helped us drive drive product innovation and and branding. As we as we we go into execution mode, we believe we need a different skill set than than Moe's providing. So anything you wanna add on that one at all? No. I mean, we we Moe created the name Elevate. He's created the brand. He's helped create a lot of the proposition. He's forever influenced what we've done, but we're now moving to an execution phase. And things change now, and it becomes a lot more focused on sort of hand churning activity. And, you know, that that's what's key to us. I've got a couple of questions now that are very long.

1:34:15 So I'm gonna try, on the fly, try and edit them. Right. Okay. So first one is some comments from x. The idea is great. It still looks a little limited. To summarize this question, will you be building out the features and and making it more frictionless? I think the quick answer to that is yes. We will be making it more fully featured, and, yes, we'll be improving the friction or or or reducing the friction. Wow. Another long question. So something about it's if this is about the copy and and advising that our copy doesn't feel very, doesn't feel very true to what people actually say, I think this is a period of experimentation. We're really working on on how the, how the mechanics of the marketing work now is is it is prepaid marketing, and we take your points and and and note that we're evolving evolving this process.

1:35:09 There's a question on inheritance tax, which I don't feel in a position to be able to answer. Have to say so. Move on to the next one. That one. When will be released for commercial purposes? Shareholders so, yeah, q one twenty twenty five. Why is the company's share value continue decreasing in value if you have a descriptive technology? Well, the the the the value is is a sore point, obviously. I mean and we're embarking on a product led growth strategy where the rewards for this product the for a successful execution are absolutely absolutely enormous. And and, you know, really, as I go back to that point where I made, say this is the only opportunity for the majority of British investors to get involved in the greater economy. So I really do, impress on you that this is a huge opportunity to look for your support. I top up where I can. I'm a big investor in this company. I think it's exceptional value, and I really think that, you know, that's that that is how I can best answer that question.

1:36:06 Yeah. As as an investor, I, you know, I feel the pain as much as anybody. What additional key features, enhancements, needs to elevate to reach premium status? Sam, do want to take that one? What would you need to create to create to Premium readiness for elevate. Which sorry. Sorry. Wrong question. There's two bits. What so quick. Part of the first part of the question, what additional features and enhancements are needed for Elevate to be ready for premium status? I guess that means paid status. Mhmm. And secondly, what is the estimated time line for achieving premium readiness? We've talked about that being q one this year. So So the the main thing at the moment that we're building out or one of the main features is Teams. So at the moment, everybody who goes on to Elevate and signs up for it, they exist as an individual person. And they can use multiplayer, and they can share things. But it can't, at the moment, combine them into a group of people. So Teams is that concept where people are able to be grouped into a an entity. So it obviously works for organizations and education, etcetera. But more importantly, it's the billing point.

1:37:09 So that is the prerequisite for billing. It's also the beginnings of our content management phase. So without Teams, we you that that's what stops us doing the billing at this point in time. We also have a number of the generators, which we're working on the moment. Text is the most obvious one. Text and transitions, we did demo transitions at the podcast the other day. But they're the main things which are needed for the product to be monetized. Question 26. Is the current lack of promotion for Elevate due to strategic decisions to minimize costs such as storage until the platform is ready for its premium launch? I think the quick answer is yes. That's right, and it's ready to maximize ROI. So when we do start spending money on on on on paid advertising that we can monetize that in terms of a payment gateway.

1:38:03 Another question on Moe. I think we've answered the question on Moe. There was a question on on Juicy. We hired a lady called Juicy, as social media manager back in January just to very much touch that very quickly, where Moe provided enormous amount of value for the company. I'll say the name came from Moe, and and a lot of the strategy came from Moe in terms of product. Juicy was not the right hire, and just we we we let you to go pretty quickly. And we have filled her space with somebody else, and he is in this room. If cost saving is is the reason for not replacing these roles okay. The roles were replaced. That's fine. I understand Elevator's initially targeted high end creators with an uncluttered user friendly platform.

1:38:49 Given it's relatively easy product to mass to to master, what is the projected timeline for expanding the target audience to a broader user base? Well, I've talked through some of those timelines with regards to Canva and Figma, and we talked about the payment coming next year. I think that's that's when we start to see the ramp up of numbers the ramp up of pay numbers. Question 30. The company was hoping to achieve traction for the market for Elevate before cash is depleted and other funding is required. Does this expectation remain, and how will it be achieved? So just to reiterate, we have almost £6,000,000 in the bank, and we've always had the same message that we would get our product our product out with a payment gateway and and and get traction. And that is what we intend to do with the money that we have. Which payment gateway are you going to use?

1:39:37 It's quite this subscription, it can be. Yeah. So this is this is well, we took a passive space. We don't want to take too much about it, but there is and we wanna talk about Huddl or there is a We're mainly looking at Huddl as as the front runner of Huddl because it gives us the ability to deploy it to many, many countries without having to worry about the tax association. As soon as they're essentially currencies if you're, like, carbon. So Currencies as well as Uh-huh. They have all the tax consideration. Yeah. Well, I just first of all, since it's my first time at the AGM and joining the board, wanted to tell you a bit about why I was so excited about the opportunity. And I was in the office Friday when we were doing the release updates. I think about it as two ways. First, for the content creators. What we're doing for the content creators is giving them power, power that used to only exist in a broadcast world.

1:40:30 And we're giving them control, which is a massive issue right now. For content creators, those are the two things they think about all the time, power and control. And then on the other side of the fence, we're literally changing the unit economics of producing video. And we're doing that with two super simple things, speed, which is the biggest factor for anybody who's done video editing. Hundreds of hours of of content go into one minute of content and takes hours to produce. And then the second thing, is equally important, not just for us, for the content creators, but for the economy and the well-being of this planet, is we are getting rid of wastage. And waste is probably the second biggest cost in the content creation economy and in video specifically.

1:41:20 And that's what's making it so exciting. Thanks. Thank you. Alright. Yes. Good. Sorry. So just to go back to your £6,000,000, £6,000,000 is not a huge amount of money in the context of where you want this company to be. It's going to be probably nine months if if you're you're lucky, lucky before you start monetizing. Is that the first quarter? How fast are you burning through your cash at the moment? So, yeah, our cash burn's around the similar level to 2023. So the 2024 pre marketing, I think it'd be about 3.8 to 4,000,000. Yeah. So you've got maybe a year and a half, and that's without spending additional money on the sort of marketing that you're going to need.

1:42:08 So it is sort of a race to get everything I'm hide from this, Philip. Absolutely. We wanna make sure that we're out there and we're getting traction in the market, and and our and our valuation is gonna be a lot higher than it is today. But it it it but it's it it is what it is. We we, you know, we want to get this product out there, and we have what we have. We have we were very happy that we raised money in December 2021. It's allowed us to have this opportunity to build this to build this this product out. So we're, you know, we're we've I've got the I've got the jewel in my hand, if you like, in terms of what we've done in terms of problem solving the problems. What we're layering on now is is is slightly simpler in terms of problems that we're solving, and we believe that we'll be out there with the payment gateway and gaining traction early next year. But it is dependent on that. Is there a plan b if monetization is delayed beyond what you're hoping for?

1:43:00 I mean, there's always a plan b, but, yeah, none nothing nothing that we have not that we have intention on on on excuse me when but, yeah, we need to make sure that we we are careful with our cash and see if it's the most careful amount I've ever worked with. So, yeah, I think Yeah. Congratulations on your office. When you're a nonprofit banking company and you're a year away from Monetite, that office would come with extra expense. No. It's that's very high. A lot of cash compared to the the Wimbledon office. So, yeah, we've moved to a more flexible arrangement in terms of a really small office space with them in the areas. So, yeah, we're making, yeah, savings of over 60,000 a year moving to the new space. It's funny when you have a when you have a fixed office and you have to pay the rent and then you have to pay the service charge and you have to pay the rates and the electricity. It's it all adds up. So, yeah, there's a there's a there's a big thing. And and our Wimbledon office was for 40 people.

1:43:57 And now with working from home and, obviously, a cloud platform, we don't need such a big space. It's the environment as well. And if you bear in mind that the people that we're attracting into the company, people want to work in a place like that. It's just it's it's it's because there are so many other companies like us there, it breeds so much better feeling, environment, everything. Whereas we were sharing, you know, the the building tuition house with Parkside Hospital. I mean, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jessa. Can I just ask, at the beginning, you sort of outlined that you've got a bit of a head start with, obviously, what Steve was done and trying to emulate Canva and stigma? But could Sumit just say because you've also given the business a a huge head start with having sort of done this before, and maybe you haven't really touched on that, which I think is why you're able to slightly expedite things. Yeah. Yeah. So my my experience historically is much more in two parts of the puzzle, the other two that we're getting around to. Well, actually, great.

1:45:01 So the company that I ran was really a content management and distribution company, and that was mainly focused in financial services, pharmaceuticals. So I'm absolutely sure that everybody who was in that space historically, we all made a massive mistake. We all made everything way too complex. And that's completely the nature of the the the first companies that end up in a space often overcook it. You know? Deck and IBM didn't bring out the personal computer. They bought out rooms. And so I'm absolutely adamant that that that actually what people want it's a bit like content management. The content management for websites was dominated by vignettes and documenting and these really large expensive products, and it ended up in Squarespace and WordPress and things like that. So the good news is is that it's gonna be a lot easier to build because we're not going to go to the nth degree. And, obviously, technology has moved on so far. We've got good experience not only in Blackbird, but also some of the team that came along worked for me and my previous company as well. So they're with us. They've got extreme experience in hosting, you know, hundreds of thousands of files for, you know, absolute Forbes 500 Forbes 2,000 companies.

1:46:13 So we know how to do it, and we see a great opportunity there. Distribution, the same way around it. Obviously, a distribution company, and we're obviously gonna be doing it a slightly different way. We're not gonna go head on head with certainly not gonna fight with YouTube because that that would be silly. But we know that there are opportunities, market opportunities, and we want to go for those as much as possible. And then, of course, the main reason I came here was because my experience in running Vegas Pro, one of the largest video editors out there, it was just so obvious that this thing has to move into the cloud. And everybody you know, we're we're I had a great conversation yesterday with somebody who runs a consortium of of of of attached to all of the players in the industry. You know? We're all competitors, but we also talk. That's how the world works, and and we always, you know, know each other at the shows. And it's fascinating how many people are now beginning to realize the move towards online because it's happened in so many other places. It's not just Figma and Canva.

1:47:13 They're, if anything, just the last lot that have gone. In fact, the very last lot that have gone are the sound industries moving that way, the audio industry. The design industry is gone. The can and CAD industry has moved already at the same time as the design. But long before that, an industry we don't really think about, but it's huge as accounting has all moved online for the obvious benefits. It's not just them. You look at communications. You look at how, you know, obviously, Google Analytics sorry, Google Docs and how that's working with the light. Almost every industry, just think about how we book taxis now and how we do things. Everything's moving towards that way. And as Ian mentioned, video has been the laggard, and it's been the laggard for good reasons because of the file sizes, because of the complexity of processing, all of which, luckily, we have had huge experience just in a very narrow field, m and e. And and so we do some amazing things with the the games this year and and almost every other major sporting event in the past. But as big as they are, unfortunately, the opportunity for us is only that big.

1:48:17 Whereas what we are more interested in doing is taking everything that we've built over that period of time that unfortunately, has been packaged to work for the media and entertainment industry and not for small organizations. People just want to buy. The buying time is just so much smaller now. People want to buy on a credit card. Even organizations, they want to sign up, and they want to be running. Nobody wants a ten week IT installation process or, you know, having to get a consultant in and a project plan. And people just wanna buy products and get on with them. And that's been the real success of the campus, Figma's, you know, the Google Analytics, and and a and a whole host of other tools. I mean, you just look at all the tools we use to build Elevate. Almost every single one of them is a cloud based SaaS product.

1:49:04 Linear, we used to do all of our, you know, our our our issue tracking and and development plans. You know, it it used to be another product Jira that was installed and ran on premise. And even though they run-in the cloud now, we move towards the the the the the newer, easier, friendly to use product where we just pay a license for each person, and we flex it up and flex it down as we go. That's pretty helpful. Thank you. Okay. Thanks for very interesting presentation, I think I think one of the things I was a bit surprised about looking forward to the launch of elevate.io was the editing system I use is Camtasia.

1:49:56 And, technically, I think it's deeply flawed. But as a user experience, the sorts of things I want to get access to on a regular basis is just there. And I was kind of expecting, given that BLACKBIRD already serves the threshold market, I was expecting a much richer series of features available. And, yeah, I can see that it launched technically very successfully with fewer features. And so I was expecting the features now to be layered in much faster than they turn out to be. And I don't know whether that's actually your expectation too or whether your expectation because I I I kind of feel that the shareholder that that was what we were led to expect. So there seems to be a bit of disconnect, I think, in the shareholders or my my expectations compared to what actually have transpired. Sure. But we're we're getting faster.

1:50:50 I I did address this in the in in sort of fairly recently in one of our communications that it's so crucial for us to get the infrastructure right. And the infrastructure is more than just our experience in in in in what we've done at M and E. There's so many parts of the puzzle. We're we're building our generators to work with third parties. Now we could just go, forget it. It. Let's just build it as quick as we can, rush it out there, and and get it out of the open. The problem is with video projects is that we have a duty of care to the people who create projects, not to make their projects unusable going forward. And you've seen companies do that where there's inoperability between releases, and that's not gonna be good for a cloud especially for a cloud product. You just wouldn't need to buy that. Like, actually, every time you upgrade Captasia, it has to reconfigure all the video files. So that's why it's deeply Yeah. Global for sure. Yeah. And and we we want to make sure that the the upgrade process, one, people don't even know it's happened. It just happens in the background.

1:51:51 It happens every day. There's pretty much a release every day. Most of it is performance enhancements, we don't shout about it. But, obviously, you would have seen the communication that we do when we have something we're seeing. All I can say is that internally, we're getting faster. More than me wants this to move faster. It's obvious. There's no there's absolutely no reason why we'd be wanting to hold anything back. We are just also incredibly cautious because we see the big opportunity, because we see and we know what getting this right means. It means getting it right. I mean, in order to reach the big opportunity, we just have to get it right. We can't make a full step. It's frustrating that time is the cost for that, and I will admit to that. However, I've seen and been party to missteps in the past that which have been made in haste, and the damage is far, far greater. And so for us and and whilst it is a concern, you there's no limited unlimited supply of time and money. We understand that.

1:52:49 But we are aiming for the the the goal. And and in order to get there, we have to do things the right way. We have to. Yeah. I I applaud the sense of building it carefully rather than rushing it out and not being subject to external pressures. Would I be right in saying it is actually the commercialization is slower than the board had expected. Because I somewhere, there seems to be a disconnect, I think, between the expectations that the shareholders had about the speed at which it can be commercialized now. It's the first time I've heard 01/2025. So I don't know whether that is also a slight different expectation that the board had around the the speed at which this thing ultimately is moving.

1:53:41 Yeah. Cool. I said I said I said that in in mid twenty twenty three, I said that it would be I know I think we've taken we've taken a view as a company that wanna get the products and the features right and the engineering and the infrastructure right first. So So is it slower? I think it's gonna be slower, but done right is is what we're working. How many of you are working on this together? Of course. Sends to the company. How many developers? About 10. Yeah. 15 working on this. 15 on this. We are. Five days a week. Yes. Yep. Oh, my lot work my lot work seven days a week. But Summit, I've got a I've got a usual. I've got a question from the from online.

1:54:27 So we we've got a quite good reputation of answering every question, but a lot of the questions are repetitive. So I apologize for anyone who thinks thinks that question hasn't been answered, but I've answered a number of questions a couple of times. So, Summit, do you do potential plug in providers need a volume of users before they develop that plug in? But do potential users see the lack of see the lack of plug ins as an issue to the signing up? Are Are both sides wanting each other to make the first moves as it were? No. I think I think look. We're we're talking to companies at the moment. I think there is a chicken and egg, but you just gotta get going. You have to get out there. We're gonna start by seeding our own our own product, our own plugins to start with. And we'll obviously you know, we can't expect Dropbox and and and YouTube to come to us at this stage, but it's easy for us to build it for them.

1:55:14 And so we'll do a a lot of them to start with, but we've had a, great conversation yesterday with a industry leading content management system that we want to that they approached us. You know? We really wanna be part of your plans, and we're we're gonna be working with them as an example. Do Do they they need need to to reengineer that, or is it just the API that you need to ingest and do something with? Do they need to Do they need to reengineer their products in order to be usable, or is it an API? No. No. No. They have their API. We obviously have ours and our SDK and, obviously, our guidelines. And let's say someone has to build something in the middle. It doesn't happen by magic. There there are some, which there is just for example, we will accept what's called RTMP, how we're broadcasting this show to the best of needs. We we will just accept that. So anybody who produces encoding kit, then guess what? It'll all just work same as file formats.

1:56:05 But for the plug ins in general, no. It will have to be somebody will have to do the work in the middle to it's gotta work in our interface. It's gotta follow our guideline design guidelines and so on and so forth. So Can I ask you, are you going to use Dropbox? Dropbox? Dropbox? Or drop? Dropbox. That's it. Yes. Yeah. We would have that that will be one of the options along with Google Drive. Google Drive as well as OneDrive. They will just be options for people already have some of their content there. So it's just easy way to transfer Dropbox didn't work for me either or otherwise or Yeah. I think it's more and and people have had various different experiences. Funny enough, the video industry isn't a fan of Dropbox, but a lot of people use it in the industry. Remember, we're not only targeting videos since we're looking much broader. So we can't ignore that. We can't ignore Google Drive. We can't ignore that.

1:57:00 There's a couple of questions online about about the M E business. One is, are we expecting any income from M and E over the next twelve months? Absolutely. We have we have live contracts with with very prestigious broadcasters in the sports and news area, and that will continue. Will it be renewed? Yes. They will. And so that's that is a absolute resounding yes on both of those. Ian, if you haven't already done so, could you expand on the statement about EBITDA breakeven even in the enterprise division? Well, especially in the enterprise division, that's where we're at. We're we're targeting as bright breakeven there. And we're very close right now. What's the current difference there, Steve? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we we we loaded a little bit towards the second half of the year where we have the summer games and the the EVS minimum guarantee, which kicks in in December.

1:57:48 So we're just couple 100,000 down, I think. Yeah. And the EVS the EVS rollout is still is still happening. As as we know, the media and same sector doesn't move particularly quickly. They have rolled out to their first customer that we've we've, unfortunately, not allowed to publicly name, but is a big US gold standard broadcaster in the in in in sports space, and that's been rolled out. They're now looking at packaging the the the great product into into another platform that they're rolling out from from July. So that is absolutely happening. We want it to happen faster, it's not in our control because this is this is m and e, and it is done through a third party. And but it is absolutely still ongoing.

1:58:38 One for Steven. Rental is playback for distribution is golden. When will it appear in Elevate? Well, when we get the the legal terms and conditions straight. I mean, it's already in Elevate for similar to me. Yeah. So Steven, I Sorry. He's moving around, by way, because she thinks that I'm yeah. It's when questions come in, they move up this. Yeah. Steven, I feel the shareholders and potential investors could benefit from video podcasts explaining more about the things you talk about, Spark integration of publishing, etcetera, which could also be references to return and relook at at that. Could you please do that, please? I could do them in Spark, actually, as soon as Spark's out, and Sumit can help me produce that and and jack that. You You can can be be a guest on my show. Oh, yeah. That'd be good. Excellent.

1:59:28 Okay. That one solves. I'll have guess. It does keep me jumping around. See. Right. Where are we? Will Spark, it looks awesome, by the way, work well on a mobile device. Yes. Android and iOS, we're supporting. It may work on other mobile devices. Android Android and iOS for the two bit testing. Have a question back to you? In fact, one of them was just answered. But what I was going to supplement your question is, will all these questions and answers be on the website somewhere on your site? Site? Through investor meetings. Yeah. Yeah. Not the ones in the room, but we'll do the ones that are on on On online. Yeah. Great. Excellent. Thank you. Having used Elevate extensively, one feature missing is the pain feature that is present in other editors well done. Which which one? The pain feature. So that is, like yeah. I think that's basically saying that's well they're basically well done. Yeah. It has zero pain features.

2:00:26 Anne, welcome as the new chair. Can I ask you to describe briefly what you hope to provide to the company, will you be continuing to hold positions in other companies? And if so, will they affect your commitment to Blackbird? No. I take my commitments very seriously, and and so I'm very careful about how much I take on. I come from a SaaS background. I have a mix of products and tech and commercial background. I'm gonna help the team direct their focus, direct their go to market. I've done a lot of go to market very successfully at scale globally. And just being there to support the execs. Board members are there to augment, enhance the skills of the exec team and of the whole company, really. And what you're supposed to do as a great board member is is just bring that to life and to help them in that journey. So that's what I hope to contribute.

2:01:18 Question says, Ian, why aren't you headhunting the numerous experts on the ADVFN chat? Good point. Would be the company would definitely be big tech by now, I think. Maybe yeah. I'll show up next time. I can meet you on person. Right. All good. We're on track to be billionaires. However, over the top the stock sorry. The stock is tanking, god, at three point eight p. Significant inside stock purchase will be sent a strong signal to the long term investor base of what you say is true. Any plans for this, please? We will we will we will support where we can. We've all put a lot of money in, but we'll support where we can.

2:02:08 Thank you for the comment. Will you offer annual subscriptions, I e twelve months for the price of 10 from the launch of paid versions in order to get cash in quickly? So I have a big question for you. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite customary in SaaS to offer the annual annualized payment and discount. And, yes, we would. In fact, it'd benefit to us, obviously, cash flow. So yes. When will you be able to upload directly into Elevate from our mobiles or cameras? Well, you you you can through some mobiles if you go through the browser, but we will be building a mobile application. And camera to cloud is something that we're looking at with various camera accessories, which which are forecast this. Yep. What looks like the final question online, do you have minimum cash requirements or covenants in any of your existing deals, e g, financial news organization? Question, Steve. Yeah. There's no minimum cash commitments or covenants in the in any deals.

2:03:08 So that concludes the questions online. Any more questions in the room before? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming today, and thank you for your patience. I appreciate it. Okay. We we do to protect you. One more question. So you have a 100 and so users. Which country are they in? Hundreds. Hundreds. It's hundreds in the majority of The US. Majority of US and Europe. US and Europe. And that's what you're going to aim for. So Europe US will almost inevitably be about 80% of our market initially.

2:04:00 What tends to happen is after three or four years, you tend to or Europe will then sort of be a percentage of that. And after three or four years in scale, then then especially if we add a globalization or localization for languages, then we would expect to get growth in Asia and stuff. Localization. So language translation in the product. Oh, I see. Interface. Yeah. So that that's obviously doesn't really stop Europe too much, but it does obviously So you use language translation, but you use something that you can translate? No. We would no plans yet. We we we not not sure. There's a thousand different ways you could have that done. Samit, if they're all or maybe in The US, does that mean they're doing all their editing using Apple Macs or is No. It's not. I mean, it's a variety.

2:04:50 Penetration of Apple is bigger, I think, in The US than Yeah. Actually, you've got parts of Europe that's actually greater. You you can you can track that, can you? Yeah. We know exactly what we we know what every single Easter. We know exactly what that is. And and and brave enough just to use it on mobile Android device for that and Well, Chromebooks. Right? Yeah. Chromebook. That's the nearest thing I would argue to an Android like and computer gets something bigger than their effects. Okay. Let me just let me just I've got a question for the other Steven. Yes. We spoke earlier a little bit about EIS and and PCT headroom, and I think I think they've used 3,000,000 so far. Yes. Yes. So there's Are we considered knowledge intensive?

2:05:36 Could could we go up? We are considered knowledge intensive. Yes. So we could raise another 17,000,000? Yeah. Up to 17,000,000. Yes. As long as we continue to be, you know, obey the rules going forward, so whatever the outcome. Okay. I would should you need more funds, I would urge you to do that because you've got to a stage now where you're sort of about to take off in terms of revenue, and you'd be very, very attractive for certain PCTs like Foresight and Foresight Enterprise, for example. Agreed. Mhmm. Yeah. And and EIS funds. People wishing to avoid inheritance tax, which is likely to become more punitive sometime later this year, like July. Yeah. Possibly July 4. Yeah. But the polls stick for themselves.

2:06:24 Just one question, which probably has nothing direct to do with enterprise. It wants to do with security. We're well aware of certain states who and if things take off, you're gonna be quite prominent. What secure what security measures have you got to protect yourselves from hackers? And are you in touch with relevant government departments, especially security guards? They did have an advertisement a few years ago to help protect businesses. So what what measures are you in touch with relevant government partners to put in place relevant measures? We we do have pen testing on our platform. Yeah. So we have we we do work with external security companies who provide the audit for us. Right.

2:07:09 That's obviously just generalized technology. We're actually very lucky in the the nature of the of Blackbird 10 and the way that it works has an extra accidental layer of security, which is something that we look to explore. We're looking we're look to exploit actually ourselves with working a lot of the people who are in our space don't have anything like the level of security, whereas for us, the assets are so secure that we see that as a selling point. It's not something we're leading with, but it's absolutely something that when we get around to industry and, you know, other industries will will be using as a selling point. Yeah. And there's also in terms of what products that people are holding on online. The last thing you want to do is for something to hack it and damage it. It's not not going going to to do do that that. Presentation.

2:07:56 It's there's something else I'll just touch on. We don't publish this outside the industry, but we have a thing called SOC two, which is a big American for, obviously, our big clients, big American structure for for it's it's a a process thing for security. It covers lots of things, but security is one of the big areas. And we have an audit for that every year, and they update the requirements for the audit every year. And this is one that actually one of the things that but I helped get it started. And as we get bigger and bigger clients, that will cover Elevate. But the whole company has has a very good structure. Yeah. I mean, on top of being a public company and having our auditors auditors checking our controls, we have a whole extra layer for client specific things. I think I think it's worth just reemphasizing that, you know, we work with the real premium video in the world of sports and news, and we work with the US state department. So we've always had to have the the most well, open to us forensic look at how how secure our our platform is, and it's one of the real benefits of having the media entertainment platform, BLACKBIRD, work alongside Elevate is that that learning is is carried across. I'm aware of, you know, US with advertising.

2:09:07 But it's built on its own. Yeah. But it gives a lot of reassurance. Right? So Yes. It helps. So so which coding language do you you use? Use? Use a lot of coding. Yeah. It's a real mix. For security reasons, JavaScript. There there's a real mix. I mean, JavaScript's a lot of content, but c plus plus for a little bit. And c plus plus for a lot of our a lot a lot of our video infrastructure go in places for the server side stuff. So this is I mean, there's almost Python in places. There's Python three. There's everything. Yeah. There's there's just a whole bunch of stuff, which is completely in line with what you expect from the. I must go, but you got. So Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for your time.

2:09:56 Good. There's one more question from the from the online. So is it gonna be multilingual at launch? I I think we covered that off. It's gonna be multilingual over time. But Yeah. Yeah. Not not a launch, but we we we definitely have left the provision script to become. Any more questions from the floor? Well, thank you for attending today, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes the meeting for today. Fantastic. Thank you very much, indeed. I'd like to thank the board for updating attendees today. Now please ask attendees not to close the session. Should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the team can better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the Board of BLACKBIRD PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's Annual General Meeting proceedings, and good afternoon to you all.