In a surprising turn of events, it appears that Brutus and Julius Caesar are on good terms again as captioning company Ai-Media Technologies (ASX: AIM) and Australian broadcaster Seven Network sign a five-year renewal contract after a major breach of trust in January this year. An Ai-Media employee had leaked a video of a Seven news presenter Rebecca Maddern calling tennis player Novak Djokovic a “lying, sneaky a**hole”. The Ai-Media employee was fired and now, evidently, it’s all in the past.
Under the five-year renewal agreement, Ai-Media will deliver all captioning across the Seven network at lower costs. It will be driven by the rollout of the Company’s private iCap network through the iCap Encode products and the automated Lexi and Smart Lexi SaaS products. Seven will purchase hardware from Ai-Media and will pay a monthly captioning fee and a monthly equipment support fee.
On the renewal, Ai-Media Co-founder and CEO Tony Abrahams commented, “Since 2016 Ai-Media has been the exclusive provider of captioning services to Seven across all markets. This renewal includes a significant technology uplift delivering improvements in scalability and cost for Seven.”
He added that through the pioneering use of its SubSilo product, employees at Seven can use embedded captioning to search extended video archives with “search by caption” functionality available 24 hours after broadcast. Once Ai-Media transfers its suite of products entirely to the iCap network in Q3 FY23, Seven will have access to everything.
Seven will extend its use of Ai-Media’s offerings from traditional premium Services to technology products iCap Encode, Lexi and Smart Lexi, and an enhanced use of SubSilo. The network will become the first free-to-air Australian broadcaster to transition to Ai-Media’s iCap network, perhaps a peace-offering on Ai-Media’s part.
According to Abrahams, this five-year agreement will accelerate the Company’s growth through recurring revenue and will fasten the transition of its top clients to the iCap network, a result of the EEG acquisition last year. He said, “This will also deliver viewers much more choice of captioned content, helping to deliver further on our vision of making the world’s content accessible for everyone.”
An element of the Seven renewal was Seven’s organisation-wide implementation of SubSilo launched in Q1 FY22, which uses Ai-Media’s captioning to power automated search across Seven’s extensive media archive.
Seven Network Director of Broadcast Operations, Andrew Anderson shared, “We have partnered with Ai-Media since 2016 and have ensured that our captioning is the best possible quality for all of our viewers who rely on this important service. Our focus is on tight technical integration between our systems, Ai-Media and our playout operations.”
In FY22, the Company’s profit grew by over 60%, bolstered by the success of its acquisitions and contracts, such as the three-year agreement with Google. As a result of its EEG acquisition in 2021, Lexi/Smart Lexi is now used on over 30% of total iCap Network minutes. With an impressive portfolio of clients, from ESPN to the Parliament of NSW, it makes sense that Seven didn’t let go of Ai-Media after the embarrassing leak and let by-gones be by-gones. Will a second time be forgiven? We hope for Ai-Media’s sake that it won’t have to find out.
Alinda is a Business Reporter for The Sentiment
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