Could Warners Bros — which owns Game of Thrones broadcaster HBO — be planning a video-on-demand service in Australia, using technology from ASX-listed Linius?

Linius Technologies (ASX:LNU) says it’s signed a deal with the behemoth to pilot in Australia its tech for a Transactional Video On Demand (or TVOD) streaming platform.

Linius shares were up 21 per cent per cent to 14.5c in Thursday morning trade.

TVOD services such as iTunes allow online rental of individual movies and TV shows for a limited time. By comparison, Netflix and Stan are Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) services where customers get an all-you-can-eat selection — usually with fewer “New Release” titles.

There is a move in Hollywood for big movie studios such as Disney to pull their content from Netflix and start their own online services — which is good news for companies like Linius.

Share in Linius surged when it mentioned the ‘b’ word in December – blockchain.

Warners just launched an online movie streaming service in the UK. (Though it’s worth noting Australian pay TV provider Foxtel has a multi-year deal with Warners, tying up HBO shows like Game of Thrones.)

There are also reports Warners has been looking into a streaming service that would give audiences early access to first-run movies from the privacy of their homes — at $50 a movie, as quickly as two weeks after a cinema release.

The pilot test, which is due to start this quarter, is to decide whether Linius’s “Video Virtualization Engine” (VVE) product can be commercialised for Warner Bros.

The VVE unlocks and indexes data within a legacy video file. The software extracts and manipulates the content while in transit and reassembles the new video file instantaneously at the destination as a ‘ghost file’.

In this way it can deliver information to the end-user, track who is using (and paying for) a video, and capture data for the broadcaster for use for applications such as anti-piracy, personalised advertising, video search and security.

Linius has also been trying to play the blockchain game, effectively promising an Ethereum-style crypto-contract to take place before a virtual video is sent to a viewer.

Stockhead has reached out to Linius for comment.

 

Stockhead is working on a new lunchtime email covering the day’s top ASX small cap news to 12pm AEDT — and we’d like you to let us know what you think.

Featured Companies

You might be interested in