Village Roadshow backs anti-piracy tech

Village Roadshow and its co-executive chairman have jointly invested $1.5 million in Linius Technologies, noting the firm's video streaming technology has uses in combatting content piracy.

Village Roadshow has invested $1 million and Mr Kirby $500,000 through a placement by Linius of 30 million shares at five cents each.

Robert Kirby, the co-executive chairman of Village Roadshow, says the film distributor is particularly interested in anti-piracy solutions that Linius is developing.

"We can see many applications for the technology across the video industry," Mr Kirby said in a statement on Monday.

"We are particularly interested in the anti-piracy solutions that Linius is developing and are actively working together with Linius to introduce its technology to industry leaders in the hope of reducing global piracy."

Linius expects to use the new funds to accelerate the commercialisation of its patented product, the Linius Video Virtualisation Engine.

Linius's technology can manipulate the data contained in video while it is travelling between its source and destination.

Whereas video is conventionally streamed to a device as a contained, complete package of data, the Linius technology breaks up the package and re-assembles the video file at its destination.

The content of the video can be indexed, tagged, extracted, spliced, manipulated and controlled while it is in transit to the end-user.

Linius says this enables broadcasters to deliver "hyper-personalised" content to the end user.

Linius shares closed 0.25 cents lower at 5.15 cents on Monday while Village Roadshow shares gained four cents to $4.00.