Blackbird (LSE:BIRD) — Interim Results

0:01 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the BLACKBIRD PLC interim results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the q and a tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll. And if you'd give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from BLACKBIRD PLC. Ian, good morning, sir. Good morning, Jake. Thank you very much, and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to BLACKBIRD's interim results September 2024.

0:50 I'm just gonna take a moment just to introduce my team around me before we start.

0:54 Steven Streeter here, I'm sure you know very well, the founder of the company and r and d director. Sumit Rai on my left hand side, who is our chief product officer. Steven White, our chief financial officer and COO. And last but not least, Anna Kirkov, who is our new chair. Anne has has joined us in March this year and recently moved into the chair position. She's also chair of Eagle Eye plc, Pebble Group plc, and senior independent director on Evoke plc, who own Triple H and William Hill. Thank you, and I'm now gonna move on to the presentation. So before we start, just a little bit about who we are and what we do. BLACKBIRD PLC has two products, and it's based they're based around the same piece of technology.

1:40 And that is the ability for our our technology to access video, to playback video, and to manage to to edit video in an excellent professional way in a browser. So it's all done on very low resource kit, low very low resource technology and and bandwidth. Now the two products are hold on a second. I just lost my screen. The first the first product is a professional video editor in a browser that is used on the very pinnacle of sports and news around the world. Most recently, it was used on the Paris twenty twenty four Olympic Games and provided the backbone for the media center in Paris.

2:26 So anyone that was was was plugged into the Olympic broadcasting service, that really is anyone other than Warner Brothers or discover discovery content. We've been using BLACKBIRD's playback video playback clips and indeed fast turnaround highlights. Now our second product, elevate.io, is where the vast majority of our efforts being spent over the last eighteen months or so. This is a product for the creator economy and is online co creation platform. That means it is it is a collaborative platform that it that allows users to create, manage, and distribute content. The technology is multi award winning, and it also qualifies for the London Stock Exchange, Greener Comme Mark, thus more than 50% of our our revenue comes from a sustainable source. So 2024 to date, as I just mentioned, we were used on some of the most valuable sports and used content around the world.

3:18 The summer games twenty twenty four being the real pinnacle of that. But the vast effort has been put into this year has been put into elevate.io. And in March 2024, we have launched its general release, the very first iteration of elevate.io. Now it doesn't that each each and every iteration doesn't have a name or a or a number. There's continuous releases pretty much on a daily basis of improved enhancements and functionality and features to elevate. And a week ago, which is September 4, last Wednesday, we were so confident with with the product and where it got to that we decided to do our first marketing campaign. Now this is really a tactical marketing campaign where it's to try and learn about how the marketing works, but also how users will use the product and get some datasets that are kind of real.

4:06 When we started last week, we had around 800 users that were kind of a a demand from investors and Blackbird users that have been drifting into the product since we launched in March. But since last Wednesday, we've added another thousand users as of Monday morning this week, which just kinda shows the trajectory of where we're going. Now we've been continuing that that campaign right up until now, and we will continue to run it because it's really valuable information for us. This is this is not really part of our strategic marketing campaign, but really a learning process. I'd just like to say it's quite minimal spend. We've only spent around £1,500 so far to acquire those fifth those those 1,000 users. So just gives you a bit of an indication. Now one of the other key things that we've been working on this year is to make sure that our board is aligned with what we're doing in terms of Elevate.

4:54 And Anne is is just one of the the key board members that's joined this year. And Anne, how'd you like to tell us how you've built the rest of board? Absolutely. First of all, I was delighted to be appointed to chair at BLACKBIRD. I've been in video space for a long, long time. I was building very simple video games when Steven was building some of the most extraordinary technology in the games industry. And so for years, I've known the pain points of of video editing. It is the most complex medium to operate in and to edit and particularly to do it at speed and to do it in a cloud based solution. And so I was a believer of BLACKBIRD from the very beginning. And the fact that we have such impressive clients, the fact that we're running the summer games without any single glitch just shows you the power of the technology.

5:43 I am also fully aware that the broadcast world has gone through tremendous change, and the winners right now are the content creators, the creators that are building their own media empires and businesses based on the quality videos that they're producing. And they knew they need collaboration tools. They need powerful tools that have the same quality as broadcasters, but allow much faster editing and much faster collaboration. And so when I was looking at building the board, I really wanted to get experts from that field. And Yuri, was appointed a few weeks ago, is exactly that example. He was fundamental in launching YouTube across the NBA and Eastern Europe. He was one of the partnership directors there who helped build the networks that got influencers and content creators to embrace the platform and to monetize on the platform. He was there at the very creation of the content creation economy, but then he saw its evolution into what is professional sector.

6:45 He also worked at Jenny's Mac Jelly's Mac, which is one of the largest networks that precisely provides tools for those content creators. So he has lived and breathed the content creation economy for over fifteen years and has seen its evolution. And when we first sought new board members, we actually gave them the platform, and Yuri said, this is exactly the tool I've been looking for for years for my content creators. And Nick, who's literally just been appointed a few days ago,

7:12 is a fantastic chief marketing officer, very focused on data marketing, performance driven marketing, but also massive player in building communities. He was the chief marketing officer at Flow, and Flow built a global extraordinarily tight community. And that's what we need in the content creation economy. So I hope with this new board, we're really forward looking rather than backward looking. We're looking at the new broadcasting media landscape rather than the past, and we will be supportive of the executive team to try to help them in accelerating the go to market. Thanks, Anne. I have to say that the board are incredibly hands on as well. It's been a real pleasure to work with everybody so far. Everyone's on the front foot. Nick has already just joined us on Monday, but already plugged into our Google Analytics and helping us there. So really, really fantastic.

8:00 Steve? Thanks, Ian. So our BLACKBIRD platform, which is in the media entertainment space, has been suffering a little bit from the continual structural and cyclical changes within the industry that we've spoken to you before about. Coupled with the fact of the A and E loss last year, our H1 revenues were down 30% year on year. The outlook for the TV advertising over the next few years is still weak and it's forecast to contract. On the flip side, the creator economy is fast growing, is set to double over the same period and is a massive market. So this really sort of emphasizes that the the changing focus towards the creative economy at the back end of 2021 was the right strategic move for the company.

8:51 Our cash burn in the period, we kept flat for $1,900,000 despite the drop in revenues and increased investment in Elevate IO. And this has been brought about by very disciplined cost control. On the BLACKBIRD platform, you know, we get a lot of innovation from that, and the and the elevate.io platform benefits from that from that innovation. So we're targeting getting that platform to a breakeven position by the end of this year. I'm pleased to say that we've made a really strong start to H2 twenty twenty four. The summer games, where we took in 75 live feeds, went off seamlessly and, yeah, without a hitch, which is a fantastic testament to the technology.

9:39 We've also signed deal renewals with CBS Sports, US Department of State, and Televisa Univision. I'll now pass pass you back to Ian to talk a little bit more about elevate.io. Thanks, Steve. So this is a quick look at the elevate.io interface as we know today, and this is gonna be completely added to as we move through the next few months with text transitions, team structure, and eventually building as we go into quarter one next year. It's really about we've really designed this around the user journey and the user experience. This is a this is a platform with the philosophy of we got you. We want to make sure that this is a safe, secure, a stress free, and a fast process for for for creator creators to make content.

10:25 There is, first of all, the create area, which is the basic editing functions that we just literally just shown you right now, which allow you to to to work in parallel or sequentially just as Google Docs will allow you to work in a in a document sequentially or in parallel where you can you can actually create content together directly with somebody simultaneously, or you can pick someone else's document or video up and work on it sequentially. This means that there is no need for reupload or download of of content as you move through the process. If people are working in teams, right now, they would have to send vast amounts of videos to each other, which takes huge amounts of time and is very frustrating. We've estimated that around 50% of the of the creative process today is spent on non creative processes. And it's also negates that that the the concept of production hell.

11:14 A lot of agencies at the moment will say you have three revisions and that's it because it takes too long to keep sending the content back and forth. Well, that really takes that whole concept away, which is great. We also have a managed a managed process. So behind the scenes, once you've uploaded your content, you don't need to worry about hard drives. Creators don't have to worry about hard drives, whether they get lost, whether they get filed properly, or whether they get corrupted, which is a highly stressful part part of the process for for creators. And then you can have seamlessly access that content to move that into current projects or indeed past projects, etcetera. And then as many of you all know, we have a unique player technology. This is part of the distribution platform, which will allow you to instantly preview and share content, whether it's a one minute piece or whether it's an eleven hour piece. You'll be able to instantly set share that with as many people as you want to for them to see the entire piece put together.

12:03 We'll also allow multi platform publishing in time, which means you can publish those direct to websites or to YouTube or to any any social media that you require. So it's really, as I say, it's really only the we got new experience that allows the the the stress and to come out of the process and speed to be put into it. Now we've seen with just this short marketing campaign over over five days or a week or so now that we're selling to a wall of demand, but we we knew this. And in terms of the numbers of people that want to be creating video stories, the stat that we pull out here is that almost 90% of young Americans want to be a social media influencer. Just remarkable. Between 2020 and 2022, there were a 165,000,000 new creators, and and Goldman Sachs have predicted that this market will grow from 250,000,000,000 to 500,000,000,000 by 2027.

12:52 So just it it it almost starts what we're selling into, but we've dipped down to a particular market where we feel, a, that we are suited to, appropriate for in terms of the positioning of the platform, but also to have a propensity to pay for the platform. This is the professional teams and monetized creators section. We estimate this market to be around $6,900,000,000 a year market, and this is 2022 numbers. We feel this has only grown probably quite considerably. Now we're we're a SaaS company. We're a SaaS company that is really focused on product led growth. And product led growth has four four phases to it. That is, first of all, we have to have really quality engineering to provide a top quality product for people to to to enjoy.

13:37 That product then becomes the main salesperson for the product, and then we push people through the the funnel. The next part of it is to acquire customers. The next part of it is to interact with those customers, and the next part of it is to transact with those customers and retain them. That's really kind of the the funnel that we're we're moving through with with with product growth. What if we achieve that and get that right just as some of the poster child companies here on on screeners have done, like Canva and Figma and Google Docs, of course, then we will experience lower CAC, lower customer acquisition costs, shorter sales cycles, accelerated growth, better user experience just by definition of having that that that that salesperson as the product itself, and, of course, higher customer retention. The keys to delivering on that promise, though, are to make sure that this this product feels like a native app. It's gonna be in a browser, but it's gonna have that responsiveness, stability, consistency.

14:33 The UX has to be beautiful. It has to feel pleasurable to use, and has to be completely intuitive. People have to have to know how to use this product when they first log in and and and use it for the first time. The collaboration side of it has to be immediate and visible. You have to be able to see what other people are doing and move what what they're moving around, and we have to say we have achieved that. Now everyone knows that's on this call. I'm sure that this is a very dynamic market, and there are lots of technologies being used all lots of technology coming on the market all the time. AI is pretty much the watchword of the last couple of years, but also the stock video libraries, special effects. And all

15:11 of these these pieces of technology will be in the marketplace that we'll be bringing on over time. This means that once you are an elevate.io customer, that you will not have to worry about whether there are a piece of technology that you're missing out on. We'll make that available for the customer, and it will be an additional revenue stream where appropriate for for our platform.

15:31 Now we've done quite a lot of work in trying and testing our competitive set. I've done two four quadrants here. One is a horizontal axis, which is the collaboration aspect of it. And we feel, as I just mentioned, that collaboration is really important because most creators now are creating in teams, whether it's it's it's a pair or whether it's a a larger team. And those teams are very rarely in the same place in the same room. But even if they were, look looking over someone's shoulder is really quite difficult. So this is about collaborating in a simultaneous and instant instantaneous way. There's really only a few a few platforms that really offer collaboration in any kind of meaningful sense as well as us. There's a as a brand there's a company called scenery a video, and there's also Ozone Pro. And then there's the the the vertical axis is on whether whether a platform can be a daily driver.

16:22 And that really just talks to the previous slide. Is it instantaneously accessible? Is it is it does it have the responsiveness? Is it future proof? And there are a couple of platforms on the on the top left quadrant that really that really shut that off, which is which is the really big incumbents, the Adobe Premiere Pro, the Apple Final Cuts, and the DaVinci results, but they are not collaborative, and they are not online, and they're not able to be too easily flexible for for you. So we really are on our own. We feel in that quadrant currently, and that's why we're we're starting to really double down in terms of getting users on board. Our go to market that we've just talked about in in this experiment in last few days is not strategic. It's really quite tactical at the moment. But as we move forward into go to market, the the qualities and skills and experience that we brought onto the board are really gonna help us shape our strategy around these three pillars.

17:12 And that is to make sure that we have community, to make sure that our our our customers interact and transact and retain and we retain them, to have a data driven approach, just in terms of customer acquisition, but also into understanding what they're doing with the with the platform, how they're using it, which features are attractive, which features don't work so well, we need to improve, and indeed how they they distribute the content afterwards. We'll have a wealth of data that we'll be we'll be drilling into. And as we mentioned, Nicolaitia is gonna be a a key part part of accessing and analyzing that. And then finally, we want to accelerate the growth through partnership. And Yuri is a key part of that. Yuri's Yuri's experience in terms of the how the creative economy works, how the money how the money flows, who the players are, will really be really be a a greater addition to the team there.

18:01 So I just want to conclude with a couple of key points. First of all, we feel very confident that we've made the right product and that we're we're selling into a fast growing Blue Ocean market. And we've really tried to test the competitors to to to test that out. We've made excellent progress over the last six months in terms of the product led growth strategy, so much so that we've now started to market it into into into users. And because of the attractiveness, I think, of the team, the technology, and the opportunity, we've managed to attract the very best in class growth focused newborn who really gonna help us realize the vision and the opportunity for us out there with our tech. You very much. We are now very open to answer any questions that you have, ladies and gentlemen. So please bear Ian, that's great. And thank you all very much indeed for your presentation this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab that's situated on the top right hand corner of your screen. But just while the company take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I would just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can all be accessed via your investor dashboard.

19:07 Guys, as you can see, we have received a number of questions that were both presubmitted ahead of today's event as well as those that have made their way through during your presentation this morning as well. So firstly, thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. And, Ian, at this point, sir, if I may hand over to you just to chair the q and a with the team. And if I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you, Jake. Yeah. I we we do make every effort to try and answer every question, so we'll try to do that again today. Can you please let us know if there are any bonuses attached to the Olympics contract? If so, what would you like to inform us if they have met? Well, we had a complete 100% uptime on the through the through the games. I'd say that the the customers, whether they be the the OEM and the final customer, were very happy with BLACKBIRD, But there weren't any bonuses attached, and that's just the nature of how that contract was was made. This it's very un very unusual to get any kind of bonuses attached to that kind of that kind of project.

19:57 You just get unhappy people at the end if you don't succeed, which we did, unfortunately.

20:02 Is Elevate ahead of schedule for paid release? Elevate is on schedule for paid release at this stage. I think that's as far as we can we can talk about there. Have talks resumed with x?

20:15 I don't think we ever had any talks with X. We definitely met X a couple of times, but it it wasn't it wasn't our strategic talks. Okay. Next one. Oops. Excellent premise team never felt more confident of Stephen Streeter's technology being realized. When can we expect affiliation marketing so I can get with what promoting Elevate. Well, I think that we'll you know, we've we've we've given a lot of, well, indication of when we think that we will start to to to get some decent partnerships out there. But I think the the main thing we're gonna say right now is that Billy will come on board in in the in the first quarter next year. Yeah. That's as far as we can probably say on that one. Is the AdWords campaign of Elevate aimed at reaching potential users in specific geographies, locations, e. G, California, New York, Miami, London, etcetera? Well, as of now, we're we're one week in.

21:11 We are really just learning through the process. And perhaps over time, we will start to be more specific about what we're doing. But at this stage, dipping a toe in is is all I'd say right now. But watch this space. This is certainly a moving a moving piece.

21:26 With being used for such events such as the Olympics, it would seem like having annual revenue around 2,000,000,000 is very low. Do you see the opportunity to implement price increases as you have a very good track record and have these high value events?

21:40 So it's a great question, and we we don't really want to dwell too much on the the business of Blackbird. What we've done with with Blackbird, the the the legacy product, is really through some bespoke development. We've got some really loyal customers that we learn from, and we we treat we treat Blackbaud very much like a Formula One team. It's incredibly important for us to to learn from these very demanding customers how to how to innovate. A lot of the engineers are are taking their learnings and putting that that that that learning into into Elevate. But in terms of growing that business, we've we've recognized back in 2021 that actually that's gonna be very hard yards. It's I wouldn't say it's a thankless task, but it's a very difficult task to kind of build a big company from. And so we've seen a much more dynamic, fast growing market with less demands in the greater economy space, and that's where the vast amount of the emphasis has gone over the last few years.

22:36 Are the new board members shareholders? What's the We will be very shortly. And, again, we have to publicly announce that information, so look out for any RNSs. Could you talk us any sort of how could talk any further about how often users are using elevating the profile of a user? Sam, do you wanna take that? Yeah. So, obviously, we've gone out to quite a broad market. And what you find is, naturally, some people will log on, poke around, and we'll never see them again. Others, we can see repeat use. We can see repeat uploading, repeat exporting. And at the moment, it's a bit too hard for us to say what they're using it for because we don't have a lot of profiling. But as we begin to continue the experiment, every time that we run an AdWords campaign or even whether it's through referrals, everything's tracked with UTM codes. So we know

23:30 exactly where people come from. And with time, we'll begin to build build up a picture of, okay, what users that we targeted either through AdWords campaigns or that we targeted through instant campaigns or, obviously, exhibitions. We're gonna be presenting an IBC to a niche group of AV professionals actually tomorrow in Amsterdam. And, obviously, when we share our information with them, we'll be tagging that so we'll know how well they do. So I suppose in about the next six months, we'll be able to give more insight into actually who those users are. And, again, numbers are great, but, obviously, what we really want to do is translate people to paying customers. And therefore, the value of the customer is we're obviously gonna emphasize or target customers that are valuable to us in the long run.

24:18 So that information is gonna be crucial. It's got a question from JL. During the Olympics where your service was used, did you receive Scripps credits on screen? No. We did not. We worked through an OEM partner, and it was all any credits would have been gone directly to OBS, which is the lending broadcasting service. You raised 1,050,000 in February and have circled 500,000,000 in cash and short term investments. Steve, I think this is gonna be your question. Do you believe this is sufficient to sustain the company's growth strategy, particularly for elevate.io? And what are your expectations regarding future capital raises?

24:51 We've always said that we, you know, we've got enough cash to get Elevate. To market and see if we gain traction. Obviously, with the ambitions that we've got as a board, you know, over time, you know, once we achieve success and everything, we want to market this property and fuel growth further. Yeah. Think it's really about building something that's gonna be attractive for investors to get behind, and that's that that's not gonna happen until we we can show traction of the of the proposition. Steven, would you like to talk further about the testing of the player? Yes. So the player is progressing nicely. It's showcased for our technology and also development environment for the technology. I demonstrated at the AGM what it looks looking like then. And we've opened it up to staff, and now we've opened it up to friends and family.

25:40 And the big difference for the player compared with, say, Elevate. Elevate is a very high end professional product, but the player has got to be able to be used by anyone on any device and any browser. So the sort of uses in Elevate will be for review and approval and just sharing. Because of its instant publishing, it's a really nice way to just get content out to people. So the current stage we've just started is friends and family. The idea is to get maybe a hundred, two hundred people playing with it, which will give us all the feedback we need for making really robust technology

26:18 to hand over to Summit as we start looking at both distribution, which is a fairly old side, but also helping the create side. Thanks, Steven. Some of the things will be here. Do you think you made it totally clear to those trying to elevate right now that this is an early stage product, which will have very significant additional features over the next few months. We continue to update the fact that this week, we'll be sending out another mailer to the existing users where we make it clear that the whole process is an ongoing process. What's important to understand, and I think we mentioned this at the AGM, all of our the the targeting of where we are, explaining where we are in this process is very relevant to investors, but it's not relevant to users. And what you don't want to do is make users feel too much that they are part of an early stage product because a lot of users can be put off by that. So it's there, and it's understandable to those who tune into the webcast. Obviously, those who may follow us from an investor perspective, but we really don't want to make a big song and dance about

27:20 where we are in the process. We want users to come on board, try the product, and just keep seeing that it is getting better and better. We certainly don't want to stick, you know, huge beta labels across everything, which was very much the trend maybe fifteen years ago with Google, but it's definitely not something that we want to look at. We want to just bring them on the journey. And, Summit, isn't it fair to say that right now, it's actually every company that's product led drops new features and functionality Correct. Every week, and that's what users expect. And we will continue to do that even after the paid platform is live. We will continue to enrich the platform, and that's what users in this space really expect. So they're they're expecting those drops, regular drops, and that's what gets them excited is to just anticipate the next drop almost. I think so. And people historically have bought into products because of a wider philosophy.

28:07 Today, people buy into products because they're a productivity tool. Yeah. I think it's very different. If we were doing this fifteen years ago, we'd make we we we we we give it more of an identity. We give it a bit more life. I just don't think the users care. Well, I don't think it's just very true that the average day to day user, because we're going to be a daily driver, doesn't care for that. They just care about how effective the tool is. So it's more important that we just give most people this steady stream of upgrades, and we give them a steady stream of improvement. And they just keep they just believe that every day the product gets better, that it's there for them when they need it. And that's a happy customer, and we're very happy to have those customers. For those who want to engage more, that's what the podcast is for. That's what the blogs are for. That's what coming to see us at events is is all about. And

28:55 it's interesting because what actually creates, as you said, that identity of the product is the product itself is that intuitive UI, which is critical. And what I've seen throughout every time we participate in the tech releases and and shows us the consistency of UI. So as a user, I come back and actually there's new features, but I don't need to guess how they work. They're so consistent with the other features and the same approach that I just know and adapt that new feature almost instantaneously. Definitely. And, you know, we've got some releases coming out this week. The mail will go out by the end of the week in line for for our our our presentations at at IBC. So for those who are interested in following it, please look out for the and if you're not signed up, please do sign up at elevate.io. Excellent. Thank you.

29:41 Steven, can the player be embedded into any web page? Yes. Social to answer. Question. I feel the Elevate website has not changed much since launch. Despite the added features, can you not update it to encourage more dive in? I think that's that's that's a very eloquent made point. We would agree. In fact, that's, you know, part of the the mandate of our a new director that just started will be we work in that as well. So we we we do want to make sure that's improved, and and we can talk better about new features.

30:15 Howard, if a new feature is are being added continuously, why aren't monetized earlier? The perfect of the is the only good. Yes. We we would we agree that we want to monetize at some point. It's what gave the balance right. We we are working on that on that front. I think by, you know, the dates we've given, we will be in the right space. If we can get it done any sooner, then we will. I think it's important to mention that we require the team structure because that's the billing entity. And if we were to monetize earlier than that, we then have a process of conversion, which would be extremely costly from a technology point of view. So we've obviously spent the foot the the the initial phase building out the editor. That will continue to evolve, But don't underestimate how much work has gone on behind the scenes around team structures that may not be even visible because that's sort of slowly rolling out behind the scenes, and you won't notice it.

31:10 But it's a really important part because it is the billing entity is Teams. I will also say, Howard, that what we see from other, you know, post child companies that want to emulate is there is a process to go through. A quality engineering is the is really to make sure that we get that that that product right. And then it's about getting users to to play with the system, to to bring those to acquire those users before we start transacting with them. We will transact with them as soon as we can, but we want to get them to to try us out, interact with us, and then we transact. Good. Okay. Long one. In your recent project interview, Ian mentioned getting the product above the waterline. There are a few remaining basic editing features whose release was imminent tax and team structure. Will the waterline be reached by the end of the year? At that point, will marketing be pretty great? Simon, over to you.

31:56 Yeah. So we've made, obviously, great progress on the two of the main four components. Text and team structures is obviously still to come. As I mentioned, team structures has

32:08 a lot of work has already been done and implemented. I'm very confident that we will have all of those achieved by the end of the year. And along with it, there are obviously just general improvements that will be happening to the product in general. And those of you who use the product, you you may not even notice some of the subtle changes, but literally every day, a release goes out that has some impact on the end users. And if you think about how that works for other consumer products, people don't realize if you use Uber for being able to to to to hail taxis, you won't notice how many times that Uber has improved in the last, you know, ten years that I've been using it. If you were to use a version of it three years ago, you'd actually be a bit shocked when you saw it. Because what we want is not to have big major react changes to the product. That actually makes it very hard for users.

32:56 And by having these lots of slow incremental upgrades, it's going to obviously make it easier for them to adopt the product.

33:04 The big changes and text is obviously part of a much bigger project as well. So text, whilst it's a very important mandatory feature for a video editor, it's also been the driver of the underpinning technology called generators, which allows us to do a lot more in the way of graphics, third party data sources, things like that. So we could have rushed out an early version of text that would have satisfied just text, but it's going to be more important for us to get the foundations right going forward. But I think it's important to highlight that the team I mean, end of year is is just in a few months, and the team is incredibly focused on speed and quality, and that's the balance that they're reaching. So we're doing things right. We're architecturing things right, but we're going at speed.

33:49 And those two aren't contradictory. They're actually going together. And the releases are every time you have something new, you release it whilst continuing to work on the architecture. That's a good point. And I mentioned also in the meet of the the interview on Monday that our dev team really are really starting to perform. We hired this dev team late in 2022,

34:08 and we're now kind of eighteen months into their their tenure here. And they've gone from, you know, forming a norming, and now they're really starting to perform. So that's that that's coming through really quickly. I think another another point on the iterative development is that with some of might do soon, but I drive a Tesla right now. And it's amazing how often that that that product is updated and how how things move forward. We also have the same kind of philosophy whereby you will not notice the thing the things have changed. But if you don't get good from a test or get back into a normal car, that it's just dramatically different. And I think that's that's where we we wanna get to with with elevators that will just be so remarkably different from any other tool out there that people just will stick with us. So it's fair to say that every time I come into the office and I I see the developers, they're really passionate about this product. They truly want to bring something that's best in class, that's super intuitive.

35:01 And so it's it's exciting as a board member and as a chair to feel the passion of the developers. It does. If you bear in mind that we've had a lot of the core staff who worked on the core products with Stephen, many of which for a long time. There's always been that passion in the company. Obviously, some of the people that have joined, including myself and that have obviously come from the industry, and we care a lot about this. But, again, when you're building a new team and some of the developers have come from no background in video, and it understandably takes some time to really

35:32 understand because you don't understand video editing unless you edit a video. There's just no you can't explain it to anybody. You know, it it would be like describing, you know, bowling before you've actually ever bowled a ball. I don't know. My word that analogy came from me is but we can all imagine it would be you could have opinions about but you really don't have any understanding at all of the feeling of it. Let's let's go with skiing instead of bulking. Because, you know, everyone can imagine skiing. If you've never ski in your life, you have you really have no idea. And so what's really good for for our developers is that as they're beginning to use the product, obviously, we run lots of internal content creation sort of events or competitions and things like that, And you can see people beginning to do it. And the reason we know they're beginning to because they're beginning to question why we've designed something a certain way, or you begin to hear, well, wouldn't it be better for the user if we did this? So that will just continue. And as we add more to the members of the team and, obviously, as we broaden the team outside of development into marketing, even more feedback will come from there. But

36:34 above anything, the feedback really does come from the users, and that we're beginning to really begin to understand. And Mhmm. I think it was mentioned earlier. There was a phrase that was one of the best phrases that we sort of got back from someone in the industry was I really know how to use this tool. There was an immediate understanding of how it works, and that's really important. Yeah. I would just mention just because can say I mean, Sumit is a brilliant brilliant mind, brilliant product guy. Some of you are realizing this already. But one of the key things is we're not just doing a checkbox product where we tick off features. Each product itself is extremely brilliantly designed, and it's being developed in-depth. So you wouldn't necessarily notice this from a list of features. But when you come back, you will see how much better we are at those features than some of the people we've tried who are quite shocking. I I think it's worth touching on that. When you look at the list of quadrant that Ian presented and some of the competitors that are in the cloud space, these tools are very they're they're they're they're very skin deep. You you may be able to produce a video, and it may be actually quite quick to do it. And we definitely are further behind on the marketing and presentation and, as pointed out earlier, things like website.

37:46 However, our product is a product that users will be able to use in the long run. They'll be able to they won't run out of steam after using it for three days. There's so much more scope for them. And a very good test for, obviously, everybody here can can can sign up to Elevate. Try making a video longer than ten minutes in any other product other than ours. When you've got hundreds of cuts, you've got dozens of clips of media, you'll see how well Elevate performs. And if you try and do the same thing on any other web platform, you will get very frustrated very, very quickly. And a lot of that is down to the core technology because it has that desktop speed and smoothness. It actually makes the experience very pleasurable. So I do you know, the best way rather than hearing from us, the best way to evaluate ourselves how we compare against the other cloud providers is try them and try us. I think that plays valuable into the development of greater economy because that's where it's going.

38:44 These the the creators that we're talking about in the kind of in a conceptual way, they're little mini media companies themselves, and they're creating quality content now, and they need to have the tools to to do that. I've got two questions that are similar. One is when do you visit using plug ins? Have you had interest for anyone wishing to do that? And when do you expect to bring on third party architecture? So maybe you want to pause Yeah. So, I mean, we I think we asked a little bit about the plug in one when we're talking about text. Text is built on plug ins. Plug ins are essentially the core technology, which is being used. So we've we've we've developed text. We're developing other ones which will be released soon as well. They're all built on our plug in architecture. We'll be the author of those for the immediate future. But, of course, we are, in fact, in Amsterdam, we have meetings lined up with industry leading plug in providers for traditional video editing suites.

39:38 Obviously, they're not gonna translate completely, but we are starting a conversation with others. And that's just with the, you know, the high interest of video editors. The scope for plug ins is far, far greater than exists for video at the moment. There are no plug ins built for the traditional video editors that bring live data in or or or graph things or or or even the AI inputs are sort of only early days. So we know that plug ins is gonna be very important for us. We don't have the monopoly in ideas. We certainly can't. We don't have all of the engineers in the world. It's gonna be far better for us to go down that marketplace route. It's gonna make a lot more sense. Bring on both third party architecture apps like. I think you just answered. Yeah. I think it's part of the same one. It's part of the same. Yeah. Yeah. Can we buy an Elevate My Own T shirt yet?

40:26 Not yet, but what's the space? I'm like, okay. From launch March 2025, are there any plans to regulate for the market and use accounts, all this to part of the six month trading update? TBD, we'll look at that. We certainly want to make sure the market's more informed of where we're going in terms of the the numbers. We'll do it where appropriate. Obviously, we don't want to get competitive data out to to, you know, fierce competitor too much, but we definitely wanna keep you guys informed of where we're headed That is all the questions we currently have, I think. Absolutely, Ian. That's great. And thank you very much indeed all of you for being so generous of your time then addressing all of those questions that came in for investors. But, Ian, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.

41:21 You very much. Yeah. Well, I wanna say thank you very much to everybody on the call for for your time this morning, for your support, for some of you over many years. And I really do hope that you can see the the real optimism in this room right now because the stars really are aligning. We've got the product. We've got the technology. We've got the board and team, and we're really now pushing into that opportunity, which is which is which is very, very imminent. Thank you very much. I see one more question coming. So if we could just go there quickly. The answer is yes. Okay. We'll keep it. We already have a concept of keeping it out. So it's a feature that exists already in big blackbirds, and it will definitely, obviously, be implemented that way. Thanks again for your time, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Much appreciated. Perfect. Thank you, guys, and thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations.

42:19 This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of management team of BLACKBIRD PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.