Blackbird (LSE:BIRD) — Interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2020

0:03 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the BLACKBIRD PLC Interim Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your text at the bottom and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. These will be available via your

0:34 Investor Meets company dashboard. I'd also like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand over to Ian MacDonough, CEO and Steve White, CFO of Blackbird. Good afternoon, guys. Good afternoon, Mark. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Nice to be here. Okay. So my name is Ian Macdonough. I'm the the CEO of BLACKBIRD PLC. I'm gonna be presenting today with Steven White, who's the COO and CFO of our company. We also have Steven Streeter on the line, who will be present during the the q and a. Right. So I'm gonna I'm gonna kick off. I'm gonna go to our third slide and just explain for those people that are not aware who who we are and what we do.

1:20 We are, of course, an AIM listed business with BLACKBIRD PLC. On the September 1, although I think things are moving around a bit on the market, we were valued at around £67,000,000 market cap. We are, at our very heart, an IP company, and by that, I mean that we hold our own patents for our own technology. We have two key parts of our technology that are under patent. One is one is our video codec, a codec standing for compression and decompression, which is how video is watched anywhere. Now now our our codec is is is unique in the sense that it's it is able to be, watched on the Internet, but also frame accurately edited on the Internet. The way that the the codec is designed and architected allows that, and that is unique. Nobody else nobody else has that.

2:09 The second part of our technology is our editing suites that are available in JavaScript, and JavaScript implies that it it's or it means that it is all available purely in a web browser. The fact that our our tool sets are completely available in JavaScript is really key to our scaling strategy. It allows, it allows our our product to be scaled very easily with no configuration, no installation, no download, merely merely providing users, end users with a with a username and a login for them to access the tool sets on the video within their within their normal computers. It's it's available in any any computer, any any laptop at a at a very low bandwidth. Now many of you will have heard a lot before. One one thing one item that we're adding to our messaging now going forward, especially given the current climate as we come out of out of the COVID crisis, was emerged slowly from the COVID crisis, is is why and how Blackbird was conceived in the very the very first place. And it was always conceived around offering end users the freedom to operate free of location, free of proprietary systems and technology and hardware, and free, in many cases, of much of the Earth's resource.

3:27 And that is attractive not just to the end user who is is now, as we come out of this crisis, looking for, a more flexible, approach to their to their to their working conditions and their lifestyle, but also to the companies that employ them who are looking for a resilience in case there should be, a a a another COVID crisis or another type of pandemic that arrives or indeed any other kind of crisis that arrives. They want to have that resilience within their companies. And so that's that's something that we're adding to the to the messaging that we find is really, hitting home. Now the board are comprised of seven people, myself, and Steve who are on the call today, and Steven who's gonna be there during q and a. We are all investors in in the business in various ways. My my family and I hold around 7.2% of the stock. I'm very happy holders.

4:15 Steven Streeter is is just over 18% of the stock, and everybody else invests when and where they can. John Honeycutt has not yet become an investor actually, but he's he's the newest member of our board. John joined us just a couple months ago. He has he is a a titan within the media technology side of our of our business. He is a he is the he was the CTO of Discovery Networks globally for fifteen years. And during his time at Discovery, he was responsible for taking Discovery's infrastructure into the cloud. And for that, that we mean the storage and and the play out particularly. John then left Discovery and and was and was joined was taken on by by Google Cloud, was was actually a real coup for Google Cloud to get to get John.

5:01 And John designed the go to market strategy for the Google Cloud media platform. And since then, he's he's, he's he's taking some time out of the traffic, taking a sabbatical, but I saw an opportunity to bring John on board because I know what a supporter he was, when he was at Google, and he was absolutely delighted to join the BLACKBIRD board. John is indeed a visionary in the industry. He he he knows. He sees where where this industry is going as far as cloud migration is concerned. And he believes too also that BLACKBIRD has seen the future and and and is and is providing, the infrastructure around that. So it's it would it's a real coup to have him on board. It it it doesn't harm at all that John is also a US citizen. He's based in Boston, and gives us some real credibility on that side of The Atlantic. So we are part of the the the video story. Video has been growing at a 32% CAGR since 2012 in terms of consumption on the Internet.

5:55 I'm not gonna go through all of these stats on the slide, but the the one on the final column there, about 82% of all Internet traffic is video. This is actually a forecast by Cisco for for 2022. When when when when indeed if this this this comes true in in 2022, that will be 15 times the size of the Internet traffic in in 2017. There is a huge amount and huge amount of growth going on around in around video consumption. What it means to us as a as a as an as an online video platform, editing platform, is that there is a plethora of new video creators in the market that do not have do not have decades of fixed fixed hardware in their back offices that they've got to sweat and amortize.

6:40 What they're looking for is a state of the art SaaS based solution that they can spin up with a with minimal CapEx outlay and have it updated all the way through their subscription so they don't have to wait for another hardware purchase to to update their their release. This is the way that the the market is going in general, and we are very much part of the video story, but also the SaaS the SaaS story.

7:03 So COVID nineteen has had quite an impact on our business, both both positive and and negative. Negative in the sense that, well, our core market was was sport, live sports, and that, of course, ceased. But what we've seen in its place is the fact that over the last that last few months, Satya Nadella, who's the CEO of of Microsoft, has said that there's been two years of digital transformation happened within two months, and we absolutely absolutely believe that. There's been a huge inflection point in terms of the migration to the cloud. And so our results do reflect that in the sense that we've we've we've managed to grow results grow our top line significantly, even though that they are the core market fell apart, fell away. The other thing that we've seen is there's been a few phases of this of this COVID crisis. There was the initial shock phase that was followed pretty much by a a a desperation to keep the lights on as people were not allowed to travel or or or go to the office or or access their their their equipment, and we were brought in by a number of companies to really to really help with that.

8:03 But what we're seeing now is a is a phase that is much more about resilience going forward. It's much more about how do we make sure this this this doesn't happen to us again and put in and put in the the infrastructure to to prevent that, as well as also offering end users the low work life balance that they they are are craving and and giving them flexible flexible working and lifestyle conditions. So that is where that is where we are today in in the crisis, and most most of the the the conversations we have today are much more long for long term, and and and positive around that. Now when I joined the company three years ago, we we identified what the key USPs were of our platform. And these are the the the key USPs of of Blackbird in an editing environment. Now the first three the first three icons here, what we talked about for the for the first two or so years I was here up until about six months ago. We already talked about how fast we are with fast we are. We are the fastest video editor in the world.

9:01 And and I noticed around that is that the NRL, National Rugby League in Australia, asked us if we can get, content to market, so a try being scored in Sydney or Perth or Brisbane to market within a minute, and we've managed it within thirty seconds. No one else can do that. We have a very scalable proposition. When you add a new user to the to the Blackbird platform, you're just adding a laptop and and an Internet connection. That's all you're adding. When you add it to one of our competitors, let's say, a a traditional, on premise, provider that's got a got a very heavy infrastructure that's been moved to the cloud, what you'll have to add is is a a number of things. A very powerful computer with a GPU, you'd need to add a, a Teradici, subscription. That's another another piece of software that allows that computer to be connected to the cloud. It needs to add a 50 or or so megabit bandwidth connection to that computer.

9:56 It needs to have considerable storage on premise and and and locally and also considerable storage in the cloud. So it's a five times cost advantage to anyone that's scaling up within within a media company to use Blackbird. In terms of quality, we have a fully stacked tool set, all in the browser, as I've said, and we also have, the ability to publish directly from source. In four k into the into the platform, it is four k that's coming out. There's no degradation of the quality. But what everybody's wanted to talk about for the last six months has been remote editing and remote production. Now remote production, until six months ago really meant, well, I don't want to send a a plain load of people to Japan or to to to Brazil to cover a major event. I want to do it all from our home base here in The UK or in The US.

10:50 And so you would you would have a lot of people go into a central central office or or studio and and create content from there remotely. What it has meant since then is that not only is it just odd events that are being created, people are people are producing content on a constant basis remotely, and they're doing that from not from this their their home base. They're doing it from their living rooms or from their their their bedrooms or their studies. They're doing it from their homes. And they're not doing it just just a just, you know, a one off group. They're doing it across their entire editing base. So it's it changes the scale and it changes the the the the the hardware and the infrastructure demands completely, you know, fundamentally, which is where we play very, very well because we don't have any demands on hardware, and we have very little demands on on Internet infrastructure. So that's where BLACKBIRD really shines.

11:45 So we've joined this this this webinar before and we did it last time. You you might be familiar with this slide. It shows our strategic direction. And when I first joined the company three years ago, we used to have a different ball on here on the far left, which was around broadcast post. We've we've we've moved away from broadcast post as a production as a as a business model, but we've moved that into a different area of the of the business, which are we we've talked about before, the the partnership program. But if you move left to right across the slide here, what the infrastructure, deals are are those ones that are now basically in live content. They're generally in in annual or multiyear SaaS deals direct with customers. So think of those as the direct deals that we've got. The scale of those deals are something between 5 and 6 figures, depending on on the the execution, and we have quite a number that I'll show you on the next slide.

12:40 Now where the core part of our focus is at the moment strategically is not doing direct deals, but working through partners in an OEM model. OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer, and it means that my scales my sales team can be multiplied many times over in terms of scale. We have the ability to be part of a technology stack, which is usually an end to end solution. That that simplifies the sales process for the for the company, buying us buying the the product, and it also speeds up the sales cycle because it means that we're part of we're contracted through a larger third party that already has a a a legal relationship with with, a contractor relationship with the end part an end customer. Now we've made a lot of progress on this in the last in the last period.

13:28 And over the last week or so, we've announced our relationship, our partnership with Tata Communications. I just wanna explain and and give some stats about Tata and and where they fit in terms of the ecosystem. Tata are one of the world's largest telcos. They're a $250,000,000,000 market cap company. They have presence in over 200 countries around the world. They, they service 300 of the Fortune 500 companies. And I think what's really most important, particularly in the media and entertainment sector, is they own 30% of the Internet. So no no exaggeration. They own 30% of the physical infrastructure of the Internet. That's the fiber particularly. So pretty much of the Internet of of the Internet volume that you see going through, you know, your your own home Internet has touched Tata technology at some point, vast majority.

14:25 Now if you come specifically then down to where what it means for BLACKBIRD, they have a a video product called Video Connect, which is a, basically a network product and processing product that has 400 customers around the world, 400 media and sports, customers, broadcasters around the world. Blackbird is their editor of choice. Blackbird has has been integrated into the Video Connect product. We have announced our first contract, our first deal with, with with Tucker, a multiyear deal. I'm not allowed to say who it is at this stage, but it's, but it it is it is a multiyear deal. This, I think, shows the the ambition and the potential of where we can go with the OEM strategy.

15:14 At the end of the day, we are a technology company. We're a software. Our software can be can be multiplied, duplicated a billion times over. It doesn't cost us you know, the marginal cost is is negligible. And that is where we we are positioning our business. We want to be part of of an OEM model where we have a third party sales force taking Blackbird out on the road, on the street, parts of their products seamlessly integrated, and and and and take that, you know, take take cloud editing globally to be the standard. So that's that's a little bit of news on on where we are with with with Tata and with OEM. Now looking forward twelve to eighteen months, we see there's a there's a a an another bunch of of of companies that are that are very aggressive in this in this sector, and they are the public cloud companies.

16:06 Where where we we see the them selling us is that they will they will become they will be investing in in being the end to end solution for for pretty much every every, media entertainment broadcaster around the world. That's the ambition. We just to for those companies to sell us seamlessly, frictionlessly, we need to be integrated, fully integrated natively into their public cloud infrastructure, and that that will involve, a a a a replication of our cloud into their clouds. What we've announced in our RNS on Monday is that we have now a public cloud prototype. And over the next twelve months, we're moving that into a product, so that there is a seamless a seamless, ability for the for the sales teams within the public cloud infrastructure to sell Blackbird as part of their suite.

16:55 The the end experience, by the way, to the to the to the user is not much different than it is today, but it does allow for for the for the business models to be more frictionless. Okay. So as you remember on the previous slide, the smallest ball here was the, with the infrastructure slide infrastructure ball. Well, this is this is a selection of the of the deals that we've closed in the last six months around infrastructure. I'm not gonna dwell too much on this. You know, this this this is really about, about making sure that we raise the profile and bring on some of the highest profile customers, you know, in in the business. As you can see, there's there's a a good a good selection of US customers here with A and E, Riot, Venn, NHL, a good selection of sports customers and and also a news customer as well.

17:42 Really, just to just to make the point that this is really in our sweet spot of of of where Blackbird is and, it is an end to end tool. It's a it's a tool that can can can take live streams in and put and publish, most importantly, streams out. So that's that's really key.

18:01 On this slide, though, this this slide is where we we expect the the vast majority of our scale to come from. So to forgive the the the golfing expression. It's it's the it's the direct deals for for show and the OEM deals for dough. This is this this is we've got some comparables here to show you in terms of where we we we see, you know, some businesses going. So TownNews, for instance. TownNews came to us in 2018. We started off with three local TV US state news stations with them. By twenty twenty, September, we have got 51 local US news stations. So it just gives an idea of of how how an OEM can scale very quickly. Zixie is a is a is a technology that we've we've integrated with.

18:47 Zixie gets us right to the very heart of the action for some of the largest broadcasters in in the world. It saves us going through all the explanations of what what Blackbird does and how Blackbird fits in. Zixie take us right to the people that actually need us. We don't have a deal to show for for our Zixie integration just yet, but watch this space. And and we were, we were selected by by LiveXL to execute that. Now the big hooner for us on this page, of course, is Tata and we we see Tata as being, you know, a a a very valuable partner for us going forward.

19:35 We are gonna be talking to, obviously, their existing partners, the the the existing customers, the 400 base I just mentioned, and, of course, anybody new that they're talking to. We are their editor of of choice. The deal size, though, within within the Tata relationship is gonna be something between the the the the 50 to $150,000 per year mark. That is a that is a deal size that, we can comfortably execute in terms of minimal, minimal professional services and and and support. Well, actually, support is actually done by Tata. They're doing all for first line support, but it's easily replicable. These these deals are very replicable. So we can sell many with with, with with as little, drain on resources as as possible, And that is why that's the the the key, the key size of the deal that we'll be aiming for.

20:24 Okay. I'm gonna pass over to Steve who's gonna take you through some of the numbers for the last few few months. Thank you, Ian. Good afternoon, everyone. So our strategic focus on direct infrastructure deals and OEM deals is really starting to bear fruit. So in the six month period to the end of June this year, revenue was up 49% year on year to 714,000. But this is really just the start of our journey. As Ian mentioned, you know, we've just brought onboard Tata, and we're in a number of exciting conversations with other OEM providers. North America has always been a key market for us because they are trailblazers in terms of migration to the cloud, and I'm pleased to say that in the period, we were up 243%, year on year in terms of revenue, showing the promise.

21:14 What we've seen from COVID, really, is a shortening of sales cycles, which is great news because as most of you are aware, technology sales have tended to be quite long. But on the flip side, we we've, we've after talking to a a few customers, you know, we have seen in a number of instances, some risk mitigation, because customers, you know, in these uncertain times don't want to commit to multiyear deals. Moving over to the right hand side of the page, that's a reflection of our future order book. So as at the end of June, this figure was 1,860,000,000, which is up 54% year on year. It was roughly in line with our year end figure at the end of two thousand and nineteen, mainly for the reasons that I gave you in terms of, you know, there are a few customers I would like to have seen, you know, doing multiyear deals have have just been risk managing, and so those deal lengths have been shorter.

22:09 I'm pleased to say that by the end of August, we'd grown that figure to £2,000,000 By the end of August as well, we'd also secured £1,500,000 of revenue for 2020. That was up 54% year on year, And, actually, that figure itself is up 35% compared to the 2019 revenues that we booked. And, obviously, we have a few months of this year to continue to grow that figure. Our strategy is very much to do multiyear deals, so we get to a high annual recurring revenue figure going forwards. And, again, I'm pleased to say that for 2021, we've already secured 750,000 of revenue, which is up 63% compared to the comparable figure last year.

22:59 Our cost base has been fairly static during the period. We've actually made some savings on not attending trade shows and the, the travel, associated with that, and Ian would talk to you a bit more, about the the great marketing activity that we've done at very cost effectively in the first six months of this year.

23:18 We have a very high gross margin. It's good to remind you of, you know, sort of you you can see that it it was 90% for the six month period to the end of June. So the the revenue growth that we've seen has fallen, to the bottom line. I would expect, you know, as we indicated at the year end and the time we're doing the placing, you know, we have brought onboard some additional staff members, to make sure that we are operationally resilient, going forward. So I'd expect the cost base to be slightly half higher in half two, but, you know, the overall trend, you know, is very much that, the cash burn is coming down down, which is great news. A reminder, we have a very strong balance sheet. We have no debt. As at the end of June, we had just under 7,200,000 of cash in the bank.

24:06 Again, just like to reiterate what we said, earlier in the year in that, you know, with our core,

24:12 strategy, we see those resources being enough to take us to a breakeven position. Thanks, Steve. Okay. So ladies and gentlemen, this this slide just really talk about the recognition and profile that's been built over the last few months. Just as a quick reminder before we start, this this brand is only about two years old. I know the company's been around for a while, but since I joined, I completely re rebranded everything and and and relaunched the strategy. And therefore, as far as the market is concerned at large, this this is a brand new a brand new brand. So this this last period, we've been nominated and won a hat full of awards, some of them listed here. Probably key to this slide though is that, as Steve said, we've we've not been able to travel to trade shows.

24:58 During any normal twelve month period, we would travel to a number of trade shows around the country and and and and the odd the odd one in The US and and and across Europe.

25:07 That's quite a lot of expense, it has to be said. This year, it's all gone online. During a normal year, we'd probably meet 500 people at these trade shows in total. This year, we've we've presented directly to over 1,200 professionals in the industry, and that's been ourselves. We've done it directly, but we've also done it done it in conjunction with Amazon Web Services, with Microsoft Azure, with Zixie. Next month, we have one with with Google, and we'll also be presenting with Tata, and then we'll also present it with a whole host of other partners yet we have yet not yet announced.

25:41 And on that on that point particularly, our unique position in the market being able to offer high a high professional grade of of video editing at extremely low resources and extremely low bandwidth has made us very popular. And a lot of people want to partner with us, and it's up to us now to make sure that we pick the most strategic people. The the the criteria on which we judge those people and whether we want to be partners with them is really about how, a, easy it is to integrate with them, and obviously, we we pick the pick the the ones that are, you know, if they've to make sure they're quite easy to integrate with. Second, how how they got a great brand name? Are they are they indeed, you know, have they got a great customer base?

26:23 And and the the most important one for me is do they have a real incentive to sell BLACKBIRD alongside their product in the in the in the the fact that it actually it actually enhances their product a great deal. And that definitely is where Tata fall into it. And it, you know, the ability for for BLACKBIRD to to add editing while all content for Tata is within their infrastructure adds a huge amount of value for Tata's end customers. It saves Tata's end customers a lot of time, and it saves them a lot of money having to shift content out

26:53 of a system into another system to edit it and then back into that system. So, you know, we're adding a huge amount of value there, and that's where we that's what we look for in terms of, of partners going forward. We've also had some very strong reviews in in industry journals, and and that's very important to get that credibility. So whether it be sports journals or technology journals or media journals, you know, we've been covered a lot this year, and rightly so, very, very positively. And and with that, the the customers that we bring on board have also been able to speak to us speak about us very enthusiastically. I think the fact that the a lot of the customers are now American means that the enthusiasm is even higher. So BLACKBIRD is simply awesome and the only show in town, etcetera. So we we we would like to have have, you know, our new customers come aboard and be able to to really be great advocates for for us as a as a challenger brand in the market, and I think it's, you know, it it it it's really, really helpful for us.

27:50 What we have done as well over the past the past period is is flush out our our ESG credentials, the environment, social, and governance, part of our part of our our portfolio and that's and that's really because it's very important to a lot of our customers and a number of our investors that we have this this in our mind. We have shown this or a similar slide to this before where we talked about the environmental savings and and and positive impacts that we make, And that's because we obviously encourage a lot less travel because everything is remotely done remotely. Because of the way we are architected around the BLACKBIRD codec, it means that a huge amount of high high res, heavy duty content is not having to be moved around, so it saves a lot of energy. We're just moving the the the BLACKBIRD codec around and publishing only that content that needs to be be published. So it saves a lot of a lot of bandwidth, a lot of egress and ingress in and out of the cloud.

28:46 And, of course, because it can be used on any laptop, on low bandwidth, that means there's lot of hardware. No bespoke hardware needs to be manufactured to operate like that. In terms of social, well, we've really proven over the last few months that we've enabled operational resilience for our customers and really help them them push through these difficult times. And and and more positively, we've actually supported flexible working lifestyles for their for their for their staff and their end users. In terms of governance, we are we are SOC two type one accredited. This is a this is a very prestigious, security accreditation and ticks a lot of boxes for those big companies like Tata and the big US customers that we have, to give them peace of mind in terms of our our our the the diligence that we put into our own security. We've also adopted the QCA code, which gives gives us a a degree of comfort as well.

29:37 So final slide for me, in conclusion. We are, we are a well capitalized business. We have, enough money in the bank to to see ourselves due to breakeven. And through bringing on on Tata and others and more to come on the OEM side, we are already delivering on the OEM OEM strategy that we've talked about. Even through this crisis where our our core market actually almost disappeared, we've seen a sales acceleration, which is just the beginning. This is just the beginning of the inflection point for us. And on a macro level, where we've seen, resilience and flexible working becoming part of the part of the the norm, we are there we are there to power content creation freedom and and be lead on that story, not to be part of that story, but lead on the story. So thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That's where that's the end of our our presentation.

30:25 Thank you very much, Ian. Thank you, Steve, very much indeed. Ladies and gentlemen, please continue to submit your questions using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of the screen. But just while the company take a few minutes just to review investor questions submitted today and before we launch into the presubmitted questions, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A, can be accessed via your Investor Meet company dashboard. And lastly, before we hand back to the BLACKBIRD team, I'd like to remind you that your feedback is very important to the company. And immediately after the presentation has ended, you'll be redirected for the opportunity to provide feedback in order that the company can understand your views and expectations, and we would very much encourage that. I guess before Ian and Steve, before we look at the questions that are coming in currently, investors had the opportunity to pre submit questions, and you had a great number of those submitted.

31:21 So I guess what we'll look to do is perhaps theme some of those and then present them to you. But just to reassure all investors that the company review all questions and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so.

31:35 So perhaps I could start with this question. Within issues of security around TikTok, has there been any interest from the likes of Microsoft in licensing our technology behind EVA, your video social network app? So so so consumer consumer proposition is not part of our core strategy. And, you know, although we have some technology, we believe that the the real value of of TikTok is in the fact it has millions of users rather than rather than any technology that that's that's prevalent within. So not part of our core strategy at this stage, and no. We haven't been approached by Microsoft or anybody else about it. Thank you. I guess you've answered this, but just just for clarity, have we got a new revised timetable for the OEM deal?

32:19 Well, I think this question might have been submitted to some we have got a revised Yeah. I think we talked about it a lot in this presentation. Perfect. Have any clients decided not to renew contracts with black with Blackbird and for what reasons? Well, we have a very high retention rate. We have a retention rate above 90%. And the other there there are sometimes those those where where we don't currently, you know, fit into the to the to the ecosystem for whatever reason. But I would think that a a 90% retention rates as we go annual onto annual SaaS contracts is is pretty good. Yeah. Just to add to that, really, we've we've probably seen a low five figure loss in revenue in h t twenty twenty compared to h one twenty nineteen as we shift away from project focused onto our direct infrastructure and OEM strategy. So it's not been a material amount.

33:13 Thank you very much. The next one, what do you estimate to be the addressable market size for the BLACKBIRD product suite? So the it's it's it's I'm gonna give you a big number here. So it it we video editing purely video editing is around $11,000,000,000 a market. Going to $1,000,000,000 per year market. Video distribution is around $17,000,000,000 per year market. So we have we have a foot in both of those camps. We we allow our our customers to edit and publish from our platform. And so somewhere between 1,000,000,000 and 17,000,000,000.

33:46 Yeah. It was reiterating on that as well on the editing side. There's only really two big players. So, you know, there is there is scope for another big player there. So huge opportunity. Thank you. What are BLACKBIRD's major threats?

34:02 Well, we we never rest on our laurels. We always make sure that we're pushing our our our our tool sets, our our infrastructure, and our codec forward. There are no major threats on the horizon at this stage, but that's not to say that we don't we don't push our entire platform forward at all times to make sure that we maintain our competitive advantage. Thank you very much. There are a number of questions around sales. So so perhaps if I just concise them into this question here. Despite some notable recent wins, for which congratulations,

34:34 sales seem to be running at a bit of a trickle. Can you give a little bit more clarity around that?

34:40 Yeah. And I I I hope I covered that a little bit on the slides we talked about directs and OEMs. You know, the big names that this person's referring to are indeed our direct deals, where where we where we imagine the majority or where we're planning for the majority of revenues come from is from the OEM deals, which probably not so much household names. But they they will indeed contract with those end end parties over the next, you know, year or so. That's really the focus. Okay. Thank you very much. Question here around product development and r and d. What are your major product development stroke r and d milestones over the next twelve to twenty four months?

35:18 Well, maybe I should take this is Steven Streeter here. I might take this one. The the I mean, it's a big question, so I won't go into much detail. Product road map, we are adding a new product, which we have a variation of, but this will be a much more focused version called Ascent, which is a new editor for a wider audience. And obviously, we're continuously upgrading our existing high end sophisticated editor. In r and d, the first focus, because of the number of sales, the increase in the sales and revenue that you've seen, expect that to continue, is to provide the infrastructure to scale the volume of users so that we can support these bigger clients. And that is another continuous process. We've done quite a big increase already this year.

36:05 On the technology side, the code that we use, BLACKBIRD nine, which has served its job very well. Serves its job very well. But we're doing an upgrade for the codec and the new version will be BLACKBIRD 10. And that's aimed at ten eighty p as the standard resolution, which will open up the uses and give lots more flexibility for our OEMs and how they sell our products. And then that brings me to the the real meat of where the revenue is gonna come from is OEM integrations. These OEMs are just orders of magnitude bigger than BLACKBIRD can be as a as a small UK company. And so mostly we have what they need, which is why they're signing up. But there are things we can do always in development to make their job easier as resellers.

36:53 The biggest one recently was to move to JavaScript, which means that they can sell to big broadcasters and big clients a product that you can just run out of the box. Just works. It just works. That's the how

37:07 it it feels now to these clients because they can run it in any browser on any computer anywhere in the world. And so that move, well, it looks similar to the user when they're using it. From the point of view of actually commercializing it, there's a big difference. And we're moving towards replicable and standardized products for the OEMs so that they can instead of having as we used to a few years ago, have bespoke changes to every client, which you bring a client, but then you have to do the work for every client. We're moving much more towards completely standardized products which can scale indefinitely with a big sales team. And I think it was touched on in the slides. The the next stage after the OEM integrations is to move into public clouds, to integration to public cloud. We already have working prototypes for GCP, Google Cloud, and AWS versions. So all our infrastructure for the cloud, we can spin up public cloud versions of those. And as we move forward, that will allow essentially unlimited scale for the sort of deals that the OEMs could be doing in the future.

38:14 Thank you. And I guess the final question, of course, any ones that were pre submitted, as I said earlier, the company will also review. But the final question here is is I I went to BLACKBIRD VIDEO hoping to remind myself of who our major customers, but there was little information there aimed at shareholders. Is this information available? I'm glad you have that, Mark. So on on this slide, there's a there's a host of of logos that you can see. We also have quite a number of case studies on the on the on the on the site. And in well, in the latest news, you'll find a lot of the the the the more recent deals that we brought on. There's also, I mean, a refreshed IR page with with broker notes, videos of myself, presentations, etcetera, on on there as well. So I'm I'm very interested to know from from the investors whether there's anything there that they feel would like like more of, but, please do check it out. There's there's there's there's quite a lot of information on the blackbird.video site, and and we'll definitely take hints as to to what else to add. But some of the key things that this person's looking for might well be under the case studies and and and latest news. Thank you very much.

39:20 Well, as I say, that concludes the pre submitted questions. Of course, investors have the ability to type questions throughout your presentation. Perhaps there might be an overlap of some of those and some of the pre submitted. But if I could hand back to you guys, we've got a bit of time. And then obviously, I know you want feedback from investors. But if I could ask you to perhaps read out the questions and then perhaps give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. Sure. I'll start, Ian. The first question was really, which month are you planning for the monthly cash burn to cease? We're not actually giving out, you know, cash flow or revenue forecast at this stage. You know, it's quite unpredictable, you know, as we bring OEMs on board and, you know, we get an idea of their run rates, then, obviously, we'll have a much better idea of in terms of when we'd be able to hit cash breakeven.

40:13 As I just to reiterate, as I mentioned in the presentation, we we're very confident we're gonna hit cash breakeven with our existing resources. And similar question really on the on the revenue side. You know, someone's asking for the revenue projections for 2020 and 2021. We don't give out forecasts. I've given you an idea in terms of the 2020 revenue. It's gonna be at least 1,450,000, which is up 35% year on year, but we have several months in which to grow that further. And we secured 750,000 of revenue for 2021 already. Thanks, Steve. There's a there's a question from, Nathan, who's asked about, the OEM position and and how does that look in relation to some of our competitors.

41:01 Well, we don't really know how it looks in terms of our competitors because that we we don't look at their they're more a product company and we're gonna be more a technology company. How it looks for us is that we envisage probably a 75%, share of our revenue will come from OEM, and may maybe even north of that. So that just gives you an idea. How it relates to Avid or Adobe is not not particularly relevant to us at this stage. That's how we're gonna progress. There's a question from, from Colin. Is your creation of a public cloud prototype in response to a direct request from and in collaboration with one or more of the three public cloud operators, or is it speculative? Now we have a very close relationship with with with with these guys.

41:47 As I mentioned, we've already done joint presentations and webinars together with Azure and AWS this year. You know, John has come across from from Google Cloud into in onto our board, so we have a very close link into there as well. This is absolutely done, with with in discussions with with the three of them. Yes. You had a question here from Hugo, who asked, actually, what was the total cost of trade show attendance in 2019? So with travel and the cost of exhibiting and everything, it would probably be low 6 figure figure. Okay. How quickly can you rent up revenue from here, and what sort of revenue base do you think is possible to go after? Well, we've given given you an idea of the size of the market. Obviously, it's it's you. You know, there's not many play players in it. So, you know, a 20% of of our own market would be a considerably hundreds of billions of type type scenario.

42:40 Probably won't get too much detail there. There's there's, you know, you're looking between $1,000,000,000 and $17,000,000,000 of the entire market. It's it's it's a it's it's a big number. There's a question here in terms of are there any constraints on BLACKBIRD's partnering with competing OEMs? The answer to that is no. You know, we do deals at the moment, and it would have to be a very, very attractive deal for us to do exclusivity. But, you know, we are in an enviable position in that, you know, a lot of people are wanting to talk to us at the moment. So, you know, we do a full analysis before we, bring onboard any of these partners in terms of the size of the opportunity, the ease of integration, and, you know, how incentivized, as Ian mentioned earlier, they are to sell BLACKBIRD. Okay. Good. A question about the impact of revenues on the destination of live sports.

43:29 What was it? Well, it's it's difficult to say. We're we're in we're in growth you know, we're in in business development mode and and on a on a sharp upward trajectory. So it's difficult to say how many new customers we wouldn't we didn't win because of live streaming of ceasing. But, you know, it's it's it's a I think it's great that we we grew by 49% even with that that happening and that we're a real part of of of getting back to play with people like the NHL and others. So I take this one as a little bit tongue in cheek, actually, but I'll read it out. BIRD has made great progress in the last twenty years. Do you foresee that twenty years from now BIRD would be profitable on an annual basis? As I said to you, you know, with our existing resources, not core strategy, we we think we're in a position to we're very confident that we're in a position to break even. Great. Thanks.

44:18 Okay. So we'll look at some of the other deals. We'll be there for you, Steven, if you're Yep. Just unmute my mic. Well, there's quite a few things. I mean, development has R and D has a an impact on quite a few of these. Maybe I'll just start with this one at the end. Is your public cloud prototype type an entry into the b to b to c markets? And so the thing about b to b to c is the cost of acquiring the consumers. So if we were to exploit our technology in that area, we would want a customer who already has those consumers. So I think anyone with that many consumers will have very large scale and would need the the public cloud infrastructure.

45:04 So I think that is really from a development point of view, it opens up this possibility and that's what the job of our ideas. And we have had some interest generally in having a much bigger audience, But we'll do one step at a time. Public cloud allows us to scale. And before we get to the b to b to c market, it allows us to scale indefinitely in the OEM market as well. And there was a question about is there a limit to how many sales the OEMs can make? And the answer is with public cloud, we can scale as much as we want. There's a question saying, are Vimond IO credible competition? I mean, we respect them and think of all our competition as being credible, make sure we don't rest on our laurels. We do know that one of our our our new customers actually road tested Weimand and and Blackbird side by side and and became our customer.

45:57 I think that it's important to note that nobody has what we have in terms of the Blackbird codec. And so if you're an end user and you're using the two side by side, you're just not gonna get the same responsiveness and frame accurate level of responsiveness that you would do with with Blackbird. Do you envisage more OEM deals in this calendar year? Yes. Yes. We do. I think that's that's key. I think over the next twelve months, you'll see quite a number of new OEM deals. It's really the focus of our attention. Do you see any more there that we should They're all of similar themes. Yeah. I think I think you have probably taken most of those as you say that there are a number similar in nature. So perhaps we can review those post the meeting. And if we have missed any, of course, we'll put responses if it's appropriate.

46:50 Ian, perhaps I could just hand back to you just very briefly, maybe just to wrap up, and then I will redirect investors to provide you feedback. Sure. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks, Mark. Well, just to just to, you know, just to wrap up, actually. I mean, it's been a it's been a very unusual period for everybody. I I I know that. And, you know, through the fact that, you know, most of our to our new market, our new customers, we're not able to operate within this time was unsettling, but we managed to to come through it. We managed to grow the business considerably. And bringing a company like Tata Communications on as a as a new customer where we're seamlessly integrated into the tool that or is already linked into 400 customers globally. When you join that up with the with with with what Steven said about the fact we're at we're at 95% gross margin business, it is really a very exciting time. And Tata Communications is not the end of the story. It is really just the beginning of the story.

47:46 And so, yeah, just let leave it at that, and, thank you very much for coming today. I think it's gonna be an exciting rest of the year. Thank you very much indeed. And thank you to Steve and Steven also, for updating investors today as part of your investor roadshow. Could I ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback to the company? If you access this meeting from our website, the feedback page will appear automatically. And if you accessed it from the link sent to you by email, you'll be asked to log in to submit your feedback. That will take a couple of minutes or so just to pop up. On behalf of BLACKBIRD PLC, I'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Thank you once again.

48:31 Good afternoon.