18 June 2024
Blackbird
plc
(the
"Company")
Chairman's Annual General
Meeting statement
Blackbird plc (AIM:BIRD), the
technology licensor, developer and seller of market-leading cloud
native video editing platform, Blackbird, and developer of the
multiplayer editor in a browser, elevate.io, is holding its 2024
Annual General Meeting (the "AGM") today at 10.30 a.m. at the
offices of Blake Morgan, 6 New Street Square, London, EC4A
3DJ.
Ahead of the formal business of the
AGM, Andrew Bentley, Chair of Blackbird plc, will make the
following statement:
"Before proceeding with the formal
part of the AGM, I would like to take the opportunity of commenting
on the Company's progress since we last met.
"The past year was one of
significant investment and transformation for the Company with the
Company's collaborative video content creation platform,
elevate.io, designed for the Creator SaaS and corporate AV markets,
launched into early access in November 2023 and subsequently into
general release at the end of March 2024.
"elevate.io is built using the
Company's core patented technology which leverages our key
technological advantages around smoothness of playback, navigation
and speed, on top of proven reliability. Additionally, as
elevate.io is built on the AWS public cloud, it can be easily
scaled and integrated with third party features and functionality
helping to build out the elevate.io marketplace.
"Early users have been positive
about the simple, easy to use interface and are buying into the
vision, recognising that this will solve many of their current
content creation issues. They can also see how collaboration will
reduce friction, increase speed and improve output whilst making
the production process more enjoyable.
"In advance of marketing, elevate.io
is in the planned general release phase and, although not yet at a
chargeable grade, we currently have early adopters in the high
hundreds. They are engaged in uploading, creating and publishing
video. As a new platform with different ways to create video,
our teams are gaining an enormous amount of insight from this early
adopter activity, especially around collaboration, supporting our
assumptions. I am also pleased to report that we have had
100% uptime since early access began.
"As is the expectation of today's
SaaS market, elevate.io is being continually enhanced using a rapid
deployment method and already multiple features have been added.
These include more editing controls, general performance
improvements and the addition of markers, with many more to
come. Functionality and features will continue to be added
and rolled out which will open up our user base and lead to a step
change in our marketing and partnership activity.
"There is a growing number of
companies who have successfully executed product led growth ("PLG")
in parallel SaaS markets, in particular Figma and Canva, who we
look to emulate. The growth curve they followed was an initial
period of investment, where the focus is high quality product
development, followed by a steep growth phase once the product
reaches an appropriate level of maturity and the users reach a
critical mass.
"Due to its complexity, the video
medium has been the last to convert to a collaborative web
platform. Our inherent technological advantage at Blackbird has
allowed us to finally solve the problems of collaborative web video
and launch a working multiplayer video creation experience on the
web, which is tremendously exciting.
"The Total Addressable Market
("TAM") for elevate.io is huge, growing fast and ripe for
disruption. Our initial Serviceable Addressable Market ("SAM"),
where we are targeting professional teams and content creators, is
calculated at $6.9 billion[1]. As we
have seen in parallel SaaS industries there are huge rewards for
companies who succeed.
"Our overarching goals for the
elevate.io platform are to be able to create, manage and distribute
content. As a first step on the latter, I am pleased to announce
that a prototype of our experimental player will be demonstrated
after the AGM today, ahead of its release as a publishing
destination from elevate.io. This will enable elevate.io users to
be able to share their content with other people quickly without
the need to render. Viewers of the content will then be able to
reshare this content with other people or clip and share
it.
"Long term followers of Blackbird
are aware that our award-winning technology is well recognised
within the professional broadcast market for media and
entertainment ("M&E"). It was used on the pinnacle of
content and within the sports sector on the majority of major
sporting events during 2023. This year, through an OEM partner, it
will be used at this year's summer games where the platform will be
used on up to 70 concurrent feeds granting access to our full suite
of tools to global broadcasters.
This M&E market has previously
been the main focus and drive of our go to market strategy.
However, each of our major accounts have often required bespoke
integrations which are both time consuming and costly. Combined
with the pressures that major broadcasters face with diminishing
audience share and reduced advertising or subscription revenues, it
has proved a challenging task to grow our share of the M&E
services market. This is reflected in the 2023 revenue which
decreased for the first time in five years to £1.94 million due to
a number of deal losses and some non-recurring revenues in 2022.
The Board recognised the challenges of the M&E market back in
2022 leading to a refocus of our investment and resources into the
creator space and elevate.io. We have taken decisive action against
our M&E cost base last year and this year and, as previously
stated, are targeting an EBITDA break even for the Blackbird
division in 2024.
"There have been a number of changes
to the Board over recent months with John Honeycutt and Dawn Airey
leaving and Anne de Kerckhove joining. As previously announced, I
will also be leaving the Company on 31 August 2024 and stepping
down from the Chair at the conclusion of this meeting. Anne
de Kerckhove will assume the role of Chair and the Company is
actively recruiting a further Non-Executive Director.
"The Board believes strongly that
our strategy is the right one. We have developed a platform in
elevate.io that has a potential market far in excess of that
available to us in traditional M&E and where we are early to
market, and currently with far fewer direct competitors. We, the
board and senior management, are shareholders in Blackbird and are
very mindful of the investment journey that each of us have
experienced. On behalf of the Board, I would simply like to thank
you for your belief and on-going support, particularly as we
transition the business in order to realise the full economic
potential of our technology."
Contacts:
Blackbird plc
Tel: +44 (0)20 8879 7245
Ian McDonough, Chief Executive
Officer
Stephen White, Chief Operating and
Financial Officer
Allenby Capital Limited (Nominated Adviser and
Broker)
Tel: +44 (0)20 3328 5656
Nick Naylor / Piers Shimwell
(Corporate Finance)
Amrit Nahal / Guy McDougall (Equity
Sales and Corporate Broking)
About Blackbird plc
Blackbird plc operates in the
fast-growing SaaS, Media and Entertainment and content creation
markets. Blackbird plc's patented technology allows for frame
accurate navigation, playback, viewing and editing in the cloud and
it has two products.
BlackbirdⓇ a market leading suite of
cloud-native computing applications, is used by rights holders,
broadcasters, sports and news video specialists, live events and
content owners, post production houses, other mass market digital
video channels and corporations.
elevate.io, currently in general
release, is the company's new collaborative content creation tool
in a web browser aimed at professional teams and the Creator
Economy.
Blackbird plc also licences its core
video technology under its 'Powered by Blackbird' licensing model.
Enabling video companies to accelerate their path to true cloud
business models, licensees benefit from power and carbon
reductions, cost and time savings, less hardware and bandwidth
requirements and easy scalability.
www.blackbird.video
www.linkedin.com/company/blackbird-cloud
www.twitter.com/blackbirdcloud
www.facebook.com/blackbirdplc
www.youtube.com/c/blackbirdcloud
www.elevate.io