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AI-MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES LTD (AIM) - From Captions to Cloud: AI-Media's Global Tech Revolution

• Andrew Musgrave

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Artificial intelligence is transforming how we communicate across languages and borders. In this fascinating conversation, Tony Abrahams, co-founder and CEO of AI-Media Technologies Limited, shares the remarkable journey of how a company that began by providing captions for Australian pay TV and has evolved into a global leader in AI-powered media solutions.

Tony reveals how a project to help deaf students access classroom education in real-time became the catalyst for AI-Media's growth. That initiative, launched in 2007, helped increase high school completion rates for deaf students from just 10% to an impressive 90% today. It's this foundation of purpose-driven innovation that has guided the company through partnerships with Facebook and their acquisition of US-based EEG in 2021—a move that helped transition their services from human-assisted to fully automated AI solutions.

The conversation dives deep into AI-Media's ambitious growth strategy targeting $60 million EBITDA by FY29. Central to this plan is their LEXI product family: LEXI Text for captioning, the newly launched LEXI Voice that provides real-time translation across 100+ languages, and LEXI AI that synthesizes organizational knowledge. Tony explains how their unique encoder technology functions as a "fly screen" to filter massive data streams down to essential components, enabling response times of just 33 milliseconds—creating a significant competitive advantage in live media applications where every second counts. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Welcome back to ASX Briefs, and today we're joined by Tony Abrahams, the co-founder and CEO of AI-Media Technologies Limited, a global leader in AI-powered captioning, transcription and translation solutions, which has made significant strides in transitioning from a services-based model to a tech-driven SaaS business. Tony, thanks for joining me today and welcome to the ASX Briefs podcast. 

Tony Abrahams Guest

It's great to be here. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Now, Tony, for listeners that may be unfamiliar with AI-Media, can you just provide a brief overview of the company? 

Tony Abrahams Guest

Yeah, I started AI-Media 22 years ago. I'm the co-founder and CEO. The very first thing that we did was introduce captions to the pay TV industry in Australia, and Foxtel are still a customer 22 years later. But the most important thing that we did was working with my co-founders, Alex Jones and Leonie Jackson, to introduce live captioning in the classrooms, so deaf kids had the benefit of accessing the information in real time in English in the same way as their hearing peers. 

This was a project that we pioneered in 2007. At the time, only 10% of deaf kids completed high school in a way that allowed them to go on to university and 50% dropped out entirely. Now, completion rates are 90% and 50% go on to further study, and that really was the genesis of AI- Media. Off the back of that success, we were the partners for Facebook in 2017 to launch live captions on Facebook globally. And in 2021, we acquired a US-based business which is where I'm joining from now in Brooklyn, New York, and that business was called EEG has really helped us to take what service we have been delivering with artificial intelligence for 22 years, but still needed a human in the loop, and we've now been able to take that human out of the loop since 2021 and acquiring the EEG business. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, now we'll touch on technology shortly, but let's look at the strategy and growth first of all. You've set an ambitious target of 60 million EBITDA by FY29. So, what are the key pillars underpinning AI-Media's growth strategy to get there? 

Tony Abrahams Guest

Yeah, great question. So, the strategy for getting to 60 million in EBITDA in FY29 requires us to continue the growth trajectory that we've had over the past five years, which is a 35% technology growth rate underpinned by more sales of LEXI, and LEXI is our automated AI product. Now we've got three families of LEXI Text, which is our traditional captioning business, which is currently 100% of the revenue, but we think that'll be about a third of the revenue when we get to FY29 and beyond. The second category is a really exciting one, and that's the product category that we launched at the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas just a few weeks ago, and that's LEXI Voice, and that is effectively taking this live captioning service and turning it into a live voice interpreting service so we can transmit any of our broadcasters' content from English into over 100 different languages in real time. And this is what we see as being quite a game changer, taking us away from being a captioning company to using the same infrastructure to actually deliver live voice interpreting. And this product we think will be probably bigger than the LEXI Text by FY29, FY30. 

And then the third product category that we're building out is our LEXI AI product category, the first product of which is LEXI Brew, which is looking to take the best functionality that you can get from ChatGPT but extend that within your organisation. 

So, ensure that within your organisation that might have 500 people in it, all the intellectual property that is collected from all 500 of those people is synthesised and shared in a coherent way and that you're getting the best out of the private data that is unique to the organization. 

You're getting the best out of the public data and the LLMs and the improvements that are consistently being made to those LLMs. And then down the track, what we'll be doing is we'll also be incorporating the live feeds, the live information that we're getting from TV and radio stations around the world, to update that with any further information and then trigger changes based on the LLM's understanding of what the individual customer requires. So, the market expansion strategy is product. We're going to go from just LEXI text going to have LEXI voice, I'm going to have LEXI AI, and then we're going to extend geographically from a dominant position in North America to try to replicate that position in Europe and that position in Asia as well. And then the third lever of growth is moving outside of just the broadcast industry into government and enterprise. So really, it's taking the success that we've had in North American broadcast in LEXI text, extending that to LEXI voice and LEXI AI, moving beyond North America to Europe and Asia and then moving into other industries like government and enterprise. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Now you touched on geography. You've also expanded it into 14 new markets in the first half of FY25 alone, particularly across Europe. So, what have been the biggest learnings from this international expansion? 

Tony Abrahams Guest

The biggest learnings, Andrew, are that it took us a long time to get the second country actually accredited, because when we acquired EEG, they had built their entire product set just for the US and Canadian markets, not thinking that they would have to deliver to broadcast markets that were PAL rather than NTSC, and so it took us about three, three and a half years to really get the broad infrastructure to work across the world. And then each individual country in Europe has got slight nuances. They all speak different languages. Some of them have got different character sets. They've got an o with a strikethrough and a hat. How does it get presented on screen? How many characters can you fit in each row? Each of these are different and needs to be handled one country at a time. But the broad work to internationalize the product that we bought, that only worked in the US, that was completed about six months ago. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Now you touched on LEXI Voice and LEXI Brew and their capabilities, but, as we know, in the world of live media, latency and emotion are critical. So how has the company approached the challenges of delivering real-time multilingual voice translations via LEXI Voice? 

 

Tony Abrahams Guest

Great question, Andrew. And look, the short answer is we built on the infrastructure we use to deliver LEXI text. And this is the infrastructure that is built into the Encoder iCap and LEXI network that was built by my chief product officer, Bill McLaughlin, at EEG in 2006, 2007. And this entire infrastructure is really worth spending a little bit of time on. It starts with an encoder. That encoder is plugged into the firehose of media data that comes from the customer, and you think about what that encoder does. 

As you say, latency is really important. Effectively, that encoder acts as a fly screen. It stops most of the bandwidth and lets a very small amount of data through. Why is that important? Because if you point the entire fire hose at the biggest computer you could possibly imagine it will take eight seconds for it to even respond to a one terabyte file. If you're pointing that fire hose through a fly screen, we let through only a very small amount of audio. We don't send any of the video through and we just send the text that is associated with the metadata around what is being shown that particular frame and that particular second on that particular channel, based on the customer's own information that we've integrated the system with. Now, by having that fly screen approach, we get a response in 33 milliseconds rather than 8,000 milliseconds. 

This is the foundation of our competitive moat. It is the encoder network that it already sits behind the customers firewall that has access to the firehose of data coming from that customer and that is able to deliver a very fast response time because of our ability to strip out elements of the signal that we don't need and send the elements of the signal that we do need to a cloud instance of our LEXI service, where we update all of the AI engines every time they get updated. So, when someone comes up with a better translation engine, every LEXI customer who's got an encoder benefit from that immediately because it is available to them on their own LEXI cloud day of. And that really has demonstrated the ability for us to expand beyond text into voice, and that's what's allowing us to deliver back a real-time translation from English into Spanish, English into French, English into Portuguese, English, into Hindi and vice versa, with a latency now of eight and a half seconds, and that's down from 30 seconds 12 months ago. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

And you mentioned earlier plans to expand beyond broadcast into enterprise and government markets. So where do you see the biggest opportunities emerging in these sectors? 

Tony Abrahams Guest

We think all of the nine squares that we're chasing are roughly equal in terms of TAM. We will be guided by where the opportunity set arises, and the opportunity set will be guided by where we can have access to the firehose of data from the customers. So, we're looking to work with partners who have an equivalent setup of encoders in the government and enterprise sectors in the various markets globally that we're chasing. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

And the iCap network is a major asset. So how important is expanding encoder deployments in building recurring SaaS revenue across your customer base? 

Tony Abrahams Guest

It is essential. Without the encoder, you don't even have anything to sell. Think about it as a printer and ink. You can't sell the ink if you haven't got the printer. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and you've recently secured partnerships with big players like ITV and Central European Media Enterprise. So what factors are customers prioritizing most when choosing AI-powered media solutions? 

Tony Abrahams Guest

Look, this one's really important. The ITV was probably the biggest win, and this was the first European broadcaster to move across to iCap and keep in mind, iCap was previously North American only. Why was ITV so significant? Because the leadership at ITV are from the captioning industry. David Padmore, who runs the team over there, used to run our major competitor, Red Bee Media, for many years, and David understands the core technology in a way that he's able to be a thought leader for the rest of the European markets. And so the first six countries that we turned on, we turned on off the back of, effectively, that ITV, that ITV win, which gave people the confidence that, yes, we are going to move from this old human-based workflow to an AI-powered workflow, and the infrastructure that we're going to choose is the one that's proven successful in US broadcast. That was the key that happened in September last year. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Now, Tony, just to wrap things up with a strong cash balance and positive operating cash flow, what are some of the key messages you want to leave with investors and stakeholders about the future of AI-Media? 

Tony Abrahams Guest

I think we are at a very exciting inflection point where people will start to see that we are much more than a captioning company. We are the world's leader in orchestrating AI-powered services across live media, and that is a much bigger addressable market than the one most people have thought we are tackling, and LEXI Voice is the key proof point. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

All right, Tony. Well, it's been great to chat today. Obviously, plenty going on at the company, so thanks for your time and we look forward to further updates in the upcoming months
 
 Tony Abrahams Guest

Thanks, Andrew
 
 Andrew Musgrave Host

That concludes this episode of ASX Briefs. Don't forget to subscribe and we look forward to catching you on our next episode.