New technology is on a mission to fight pirates by tracing video streams to viewers

[Len]

Imagine if you could tell Netflix to jump straight to the car chase in your favourite movie or cue up all the times Bruce Willis says “yippee kai-yay” in Die Hard.

What if the ads on TV were actually relevant to you — and only to you.

ASX-listed Linius makes technology that promises to introduce similar features — by converting video into intelligent streams allowing interactivity and personalisation.

The same technology can be used to trace video streams to individual viewers, reducing illegal distribution. It would also apparently stop hijacking of streams on social media or theft of downloaded files.

Earlier this month Linius (ASX:LNU) announced a partnership with investor Village Roadshow to use its anti-pirating technology in the upcoming six-part sequel to Romper Stomper — to be broadcast on Nine and Fairfax’s Stan service.

“When you press play on a video now, anyone can take the video,” Linius chief executive Chris Richardson told Stockhead.

“But what we do is send a copy of the video instead. We are able to trace who watches it and where so we know if someone is playing it that hasn’t paid for the privilege.”

Piracy accounts for 15 per cent of lost revenue for move studios — or about $62 billion at the US box office, according to Carnegie University.

Linius’s “Video Virtualisation Engine” (VVE) unlocks and indexes data within a legacy video file, programmatically extracts and manipulates the content while in transit to its destination and reassembles the new video file instantaneously at the device as a malleable ‘ghost file’.

In this way it can deliver smart information to the end-user and capture data for the broadcaster for use applications such as anti-piracy, personalised advertising, video search and security.

Mr Richardson compared the technology to super charging a car’s engine.

“It is like getting a V8 and putting it in a car, tractor or a boat – the technology still does the same thing across the three vehicles but it has a different application and can lead to different capabilities,” he said.

VVE transforms static video files into smaller, more agile files that can be easily manipulated.

The company demonstrated its scalability by indexing and virtualising the entire library of TED talks and 5 million Instagram videos earlier this year — all in less than a day.

Linius this week announced its technology had been integrated into the operating platform one US cable giant Comcast, giving it access to brands such as NBC, Disney and Turner.