Tech: Linius partners up with the NBL for its personalised video service

Fintech platform Linius (ASX:LNU) is taking its customised video service to the courts.

The company has signed a “commercial agreement” with Australia’s National Basketball League (NBL).

Linius will offer its Video Virtualization Engine (VVE) as part of the NBL’s video distribution platforms across streaming and TV.

Under the terms of the deal, Linius will receive a fixed monthly service fee. Additional advertising revenue on a per-video basis will be dependent on the takeup of the service.

Shares in LNU ticked higher in morning trade, up 5.7 per cent to 3.7c.

Scalable opportunity

Linius is optimistic that its deal with the NBL will provide a foot in the door to access a global basketball audience (which numbers more than 450 million people).

There are around 1 million basketball players in Australia, and Linius CEO Chris Richardson said sporting leagues and clubs were increasingly realising the value that video personalisation “can bring to their bottom line”.

The company’s cloud-based VVE software enables users to instantly search data within a video, assemble the results and create customised videos “on the fly”.

In addition to the fee structure of its NBL deal, Linius said the local basketball league would also be “strongly financially incentivised” to introduce the service to other leagues globally.

NBL owner Larry Kestelman said the Linius technology would enable the league to take user engagement “one step further” as it looked to leverage its reach and exposure through multiple content channels.

Shares in Linius have traded in a range of 3-5c for most of 2019. The company completed a $4.5m share placement to sophisticated investors in September.

In other ASX tech news today:

Security-tech company Dotz Nano (ASX:DTZ) returned to trade after a week-long trading halt, announcing it has raised $2m from Australian-Israeli venture capital fund SIBF, along with an additional $1m via a deferred share placement. Dotz said the funds would be used to “execute its commercialisation strategy, targeting end-customers in the anti-counterfeiting, oil and gas and product liability sectors”.

And communications company Elsight (ASX:ELS) said it released a “significantly improved” version of its Halo technology, a multi-channel data transmission platform. The company said it’s “now in the process of delivering the first 90 units equipped with Halo v1.1 to a select group of strategic customers”. Elsight has also opened a US office in Atlanta to help drive sales in that market. Shares in ELS were unchanged at 41c.