YouView: You’re delayed – Sugar

The YouView set-top box won’t be on sale in time for the Olympics, according to a report. Baron Sugar of Clapton, aka Alan Sugar, the chairman of the consortium, doesn’t deem the technology ready for prime time...

from The Register

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See, the problem with putting all your eggs in the B2B basket is that if projects over which you have no control get delayed or change direction you're f**ked (see also: Miniweb, Woomi, Samsung...). Now if Blinx had been pursuing a hybrid B2B/B2C strategy, as I've been saying for years that they should...

Providence Gets Out of Hulu. What About Jason Kilar?

Five years after investing in Hulu, Providence Equity is getting its return and going home. The private equity group is striking a deal with the rest of Hulu’s owners — Comcast, Disney and News Corp. — that will let it cash out its 10 percent stake...

All Things Digital

You Really Can Blame the Web for Shrinking TV Ratings — But You Have to Credit It for Boosting TV, Too

Why are lots of TV networks’ ratings down? The most obvious answer is that people are watching stuff on the Web instead.
But people are still watching a whole lot of TV — perhaps as much as ever. So the more nuanced answer is that some people are swapping out the Web for TV, some of the time. And other times Web video consumption may end up leading to more TV-watching...

All Things Digital

Blinkx eyes YouView as better bet than Google TV and Microsoft

As it endeavours to address all of the elements of the video infrastructure required to make its imminent launch a success, YouView has received a boost from video search-engine technology provider Blinkx who has revealed a clear intention to be on the OTT platform...

from RapidTVNews

TalkTalk seeks agency for YouView task

TalkTalk is looking for an agency to support its involvement in the YouView IPTV service, which is scheduled to launch in the autumn...

from Campaign

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The Autumn? Thought this was launching in May? Guess it can't be, if they're just starting to put a tender out to agencies...

Can Yahoo Turn Itself Around?

Yahoo, which is hemorrhaging senior execs, just laid off 2,000 employees and underwent a massive restructuring under CEO Scott Thompson. Meanwhile, it’s embroiled in a questionable patent lawsuit/countersuit with Facebook. What is the one major thing you think it needs to do to turn itself around?

from All Things Digital

New Fronts: AOL to Create Video Destination for Ad Dollars

If the goal of Internet companies' “New Front” presentations is to convince advertisers that it’s easy to buy online video ads, AOL’s presentation aims to show that it’s creating an online complement to TV ads.

In a speech to hundreds of advertisers, CEO Tim Armstrong announced that AOL [AOL  24.61    -0.14  (-0.57%)   ] is launching the “AOL On Network” to bring all of AOL’s videos under one umbrella. It’s 14 content channels that reach nearly 57 million viewers on various brand sites. AOL is clearly chasing the $7 billion in online video spending expected in the U.S. by 2015, according to eMarketer..

from CNBC

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Presumably this is AOL equivalents of the content channel strategy allegedly being implemented on Burst.

On the face of it looks very promising -but hey, this is Blinkx we're talking about. If it can possibly be screwed up and defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, Chandratillake is just the man to do it...

Universal use Aurasma to augmented their DVD covers

Great technology and all that, but does anyone actually have any idea of how either AU or Blinkx make any money out of Aurasma?

Anyone?

Time might be right to focus on blinkx

When it comes to timing, few of us get it spot on. When to buy, when to sell, time to hold, or even adding to an existing position. Needless to say, it is never an easy call.
Such decision-making can become ever more complicated by the hype that surrounds particular stocks, especially when their share price appears to be on a one-way ticket northwards.
And what better example of this could we have than blinkx, which I like to think of as being a Cambridge company, having been spun out of Autonomy, and which has its head office here in the city, although strictly speaking is based across the pond in San Francisco...

from Cambridge News

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Blinxk can only get coverage in the Cambridge News: says it all really. I'll say it again - I've worked in IT for nearly 20 years now, and nobody I talk to has ever heard of Blinkx. The company should drop a few million on a TV campaign (like the current campaign for the Zeebox app - and why the hell aren't Blinkx creating products like this?) - it says it all when there is more publicity about Chandratillake being up for the 40 under 40 award than there is for the company itself...

Fidelity heading for the exit

Following the catastrophic decline in the share price after Chandratillake's piss-poor performance on the analyst's call last November, some of the (frankly delusional, in my opinion) Blinkx permabulls stated that there was nothing to worry about as the Institutional Investors weren't selling so still had faith in the company and its management team.

Well they're selling now...

Change of holding RNS on investegate.co.uk

Online Video Turns Up Heat

Though television may be losing viewers to online video, it has been holding on to advertisers. But with online-video outlets this week making their most organized push yet for ad dollars, that may be starting to change...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304331204577356340949615260.html

This just about sums up how many shareholders feel

With the share price, as I write, back below the IPO price This from a very stale bull on ADVFN:

"jarvis4 - 10 Apr'12 - 10:53 - 44356 of 44852

Patience is one thing but what frustrates the hell out of me is that the damage inflicted on shareholders in Nov and now have both been self inflicted wounds and both by BLNX management.

I'm afraid SC's reputation is now in tatters and however he talks up the company he simply will not be believed by the market. For the first time he has failed to deliver at the FY end and, what is worse, failed to deliver on a target which he went on record as being comfortable with. He will now find it difficult to rebutt the charge that he is a techie and visionary but is struggling to fill the CEO's position. BLNX now, in my view, needs someone of market standing at the helm to drive this business with the sort of flair and panache befitting its market segment."

It's good to see previously perma-bulls starting to agree with me. Blinkx needs a grown-up in charge, and NOW...

Google Goes After TV Dollars by Pretending It’s TV

Google sells a lot of advertising — about $38 billion a year. But the TV guys sell even more — more than $190 billion a year.

Hence Google’s new pitch to advertisers: Think of us like TV! Buy us like TV!

from All Things Digital

Mobile Ads Are Growing Fast, Still Pretty Small

A new report from a digital ad trade group tells us that advertisers spent a lot on digital last year, which we already knew. But it’s always useful to see what kind of digital ads they’re buying....

from All Things Digital

Blinkx stock fails to meet high expectations for online video ads

When you look at Blinkx’s underlying product metrics, you see a bellwether for the growth of the online video sector.
But, when you check its share price, you see that growth in reverse…

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/gigaom/articles/2012_04_18_blinkx.html

________________

I notice that the comments from investors are taken from iii, rather than from the mad house over at ADVFN with its deluded rampers such as digitalis, who has been predicting a share price of 375p by the end of May (only possible IMO if a 4-way bid battle for Blinkx breaks out between Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google - and there's no chance of that - and Blinx discover gold and oil under their HQ)...

"But Blinkx shares on London’s AIM market are down 72 percent from their November high."

Down 72% - for a company supposedly growing fast in one of the hottest tech sectors on the planet. A shameful indictment of company management, in my opinion...

WPP announce their results in a week or so...

...So then we get to see whether what Chandratillake referred to as a "challenging economic climate" affects other online advertisers, or whether it's just Blinkx that's finding the online video advertising environment 'challenging'...

A no-win situation?

Being as objective as I can about the current Blinkx situation, it does seem very much as if mgmt has backed itself into a no-win situation as regards the market's anticipation of the FY figures due on May 19th.

As Blinkx-watchers will be aware, on 10th April Blinxk released a trading update/revenue warning that income for the FY would be $114m, less than the analyst's concensus of $121.5m and far below the figure of $124m that Chandratillake said he was 'comfortable' the company could achieve back on that fateful conference call last November 11th.

That figure of $114m is 'approximate' of course, according to the TU. So what are the possibilities for May 19th?

1/ The figure is less than $114m - another shitstorm hits Blinkx and its share price

2/ The figure is, near as dammit, $114m - well OK, it's what the company said it would be, but still pretty far below what the markets and shareholders were expecting 

3/ The figure is above $114m - slightly better than anticipated, might buy Chandratillake some breathing space (not as far as I'm concerned, of course: if I'd had my way he'd have been sacked several years ago - who knows where the company might be by now if he had been and a grown-up installed?)

None of these are exactly good outcomes - just various shades of bad and worse.

If (1) or (3) above come to pass, of course, it does rather beg the question: who's counting the numbers at Blinkx? Since the TU was released on April 10th - ie after financial year-end - one would expect the given figure of $114m to be pretty accurate.

While we're on the subject of that TU, one piece of mgmt psychobabble nonsense I want to nail right now: Chandratillake said in the TU "whilst it is disappointing to deliver revenues a little below expectations it is worth noting that in a challenging economic climate, blinkx outperformed the aggressive growth of the online video advertising industry by over 80%". Blinkx grew at 72% for the year - which is about the same rate (depends which figures you look at) as online video in general is growing. So Blink didn't 'outperform' the online video industry, it grew at the same rate as the online video industry.

It seems even simple maths is beyond this utterly woeful mgmt team. They don't know the difference between tracking and outperforming sector growth - but then they add 55m (the number of uniques we were told Blinxk was receiving at the interims last November) and 88m (the number of Burst uniques from the same source) to get 100m - the number of uniques 'Blinkx' (not specified whether Blinkx+Burst) is getting, according to the RNS from March...

Time for a change of management - we need a grown-up in charge.

An image of failure

[click image for larger version]

Above is a graph of the BLNX share price over the past couple of years or so.

As you can see, it started from a low base, then climbed as excitement about the online video sector - and BLNX's place within it - grew. It reached admittedly heady heights (annotation 1 on the image above) - roughly a trailing PE of around 100, suggesting that  high growth was priced in. But hey, that's OK, right? This is BLNX, and they have competent management that have always delivered their figures, and they're in the online video sector, so they must be growing bonkers fast.

Right?

Then came November 2011. In a three-day period the company announced the sale of 7m shares at 134p each (we never did find out who to, but presumably Institutional Investors), a sale which only took a couple of hours and presumably was therefore well-received; the announcement of the interim figures; and that conference call with analysts (at time of writing you can still download a recording of the call on Blinkx's Investors page). Go and listen to it and make up your own mind, but my takeout from that call was as follows:

1/ Growth at the core BLNX video-search business appears to have slowed very significantly
2/ The company management (in the form of Chandratillake) cannot or will not identify how much of the earnings relate to the Burst network
3/ It is clear (to me at least) that Chandratillake had not prepped for questions about Burst - to these ears at least he sounded unrehearsed, hesitant, uncertain, defensive, shifty.

Not surprisingly the markets took fright. Over the next ten trading days  the company lost two-thirds - TWO-THIRDS!!!! - of its market cap, from a high of around 160p to a low of about 50p. Those who bought at 134p two days before the interims must have been much less than happy. Very much less.

However, the one things that investors held onto was that on that call Chandratillake said that he was 'comfortable' with the FY figure of $124m he had previously predicted. 

Fast-forward to April 2012, the day after Easter Monday. And BLNX release a Trading Update RNS (effectively an earnings warning - notation 2 on the image above) that revenues for FY will not, in fact, be $124. It won't even be the analyst's concensus of $121.5m. It will in fact be in the region of $114m.

So far from what investors hoped was the case - that the company would exceed the $124m to demonstrate that they really are growing like crazy - the exact opposite seems to be true: the wheels seem very much to have come off the BLNX business model - either that or the management team are incapable of delivering the growth they had themselves predicted. Chandratillake might say in that RNS that "We believe this is [figure of $114m] a significant achievement" but nobody seems to agree with him (certainly I don't), and the price falls further, to below the level at which it floated in May 2007.

Which brings us to where we are now. And it is very much my view that BLNX needs a change of senior management. I'll detail why I think that in a future post, so stay tuned...

Letter to Dr Mike Lynch of Autonomy

Dr Michael Lynch,

CEO, Autonomy Corporation,

Cambridge Business Park

Cowley Rd

Cambridge

CB4 0WZ

17th April 2012

Dear Dr. Lynch.

You may recall that I have written to you before expressing concerns about the way in which Blinkx is being managed, and about Chandratillake's abilities and qualities as a CEO. I feel that the events of the past 6 months have confirmed my doubts, and have brought matters - and Blinkx itself - to a crisis point.

I appreciate that you have mentored Chandratillake for many years, but you must surely recognise by now that he simply doesn't have what it takes to be an effective CEO. His inability to clearly convey exactly what Blinkx’s business model is (I’ve held shares in Blinkx for 5 years, and even I’m confused: video search engine or long-tail ad network; or both?); his inability to convincingly answer straight questions about Burst on the analyst's call last November - instead dodging two direct questions and only succeeding in sounding uncertain, shifty and evasive; the failure to deliver products or follow through on deals once hyped as The Next Big Thing (Transaction Hijacking, Cheep, Pinball, blinkxbrasil, Blinkx Music, Woomi, Miniweb, Samsung); and the endless paranoid secrecy which as time goes on seems to me more and more a cover to hide the level of Chandratillake's failure in managing this company.

Chandratillake has screwed up twice in the past six months: once on that analyst's call, when he dodged what I thought were very simple and obvious questions about Burst which he should have been expecting and have been prepared for but clearly neither were true - and the share price collapsed by two-thirds in the subsequent ten trading days; and again with the RNS the day after Easter Bank Holiday Monday, when Chandratillake demonstrated that he was unable to deliver the FY figure of $124m with which he had said he was 'comfortable' on that November call. As I write the share price is now back below the level at which it floated nearly 5 years ago - a damning indictment of Chandratillake's mismanagement of this company and his squandering of the business opportunity of a generation. He has screwed up twice: as a shareholder (which he is not) I don't want to see him given an opportunity to do it a third time. In the eyes of many shareholders - myself not least - Chandratillake had precious little credibility left after his piss-poor performance on the call in November and the resulting share price drop - what credibility he had left was, for me, utterly blown away with last Tuesday's RNS. The man needs to be removed, now.

In my opinion Chandratillake is a total disgrace. Someone who talks the talk but cannot walk the walk, and does not - I believe I am correct in saying - own a single share in the company of which he is CEO. He has had 5 years to manage the company his way and look where we are - a share price below what it floated at 5 years ago, a core video search business that appears to have stopped growing completely, a long -tail network that is either failing to deliver what was hoped for it and/or is taking longer - and costing more - to integrate than was anticipated, and failure to hit his own targets, which he blames on general market conditions (funny that Apple – which just hit the $600bn market cap milestone - Amazon, Facebook and Google don't seem to be suffering from weak markets - but then they truly are world-class companies with management to match. Nor do I notice WPP identifying any general weakness in online advertising). To my mind that sounds like finding excuses for his own failure, in my opinion another sign of his immaturity. The plan seems to have been to buy growth (in the form of Burst) and he can't even manage that. How can the core Blinkx video search business NOT be growing organically when video is exploding across every channel? Blinkx is in the sweet spot of one of the hottest business sectors on the planet and Chandratillake is - if you'll forgive my language - fucking it up, BIG TIME!!!

I'm afraid I am not prepared to stand by any longer and watch someone I consider a rank incompetent destroy what is left of the value of my holding in Blinkx. I intend to obtain the Blinkx shareholder's register and to start writing to shareholders, starting with the largest and working down, asking them if they are happy with Chandratillake's performance , and if they are not - and I suspect that most of them are not - to vote against his re-election at the first opportunity, or alternatively to call an EGM to remove him.

It's time for a grown-up to run Blinkx. I hear Carol Bartz and Eric Schmidt are looking for new roles: the company needs someone of that stature to take it forward to where it should be - not the failure currently in charge.

Yours sincerely,

Email to Suranga Chandratillake, 2012-04-04

Mr Chandratillake
I note with interest the recent RNS from Blinkx that it has surpassed 100 million monthly unique visitors.

I note also that the RNS further stated that 'Over 58 Million US Visitors Consume blinkx Video Content Each Month'.

I'm trying to reconcile this latest RNS with the statement in the interims last November that:

"Combination of blinkx's 55m monthly unique users with Burst's total 89m monthly unique users significantly increases overall scale and reach (comScore September 2011)"

One doesn't have to be a genius to trawl through the RNSs to last November to read the above statement. However, it takes a very special kind of person to add 55 to 89 and get 100.

* Does that figure of 100m relate just to Blinkx? If it does - an increase from 55m to 100m would surely merit more fanfare than the latest RNS would suggest?

* Does that figure relate just to Burst (growth of just over 10%)? If it does, is it evidence that the core Blinkx video business has declined further from the perception of stalled growth conveyed at the interims?

* Is that figure of 100m a combination of Blinkx _and_ Burst - in which case you seem to have lost 44m uniques since November, nearly 1/3rd of the total?

* If Blinkx has increased to 58m, does that mean that Burst has dropped to 42m, a decline of more than 50%?

* If Blinkx _US_ has 58m uniques, what does that mean for global Blinkx/Burst uniques?

In any case, however that figure is derived, I think the questions that really interest shareholders are:

* 100m unique visitors: so what are the average page views per visitor (to give a total number of page views)?

* Of those total page views, what percentage is being monetised?

* What is the blended CPM across those monetised pages?

* If you are using a hybrid CPM/PPC revenue model, what percentage of pages are being monetised through PPC as opposed to CPM, what is the percentage of click-throughs per 1000 page impressions, and what is the blended PPC rate?

Just saying "100m unique visitors a month" is meaningless without context - and sounds rather desperate, if I may say so.

This last RNS was yet another incompetent piece of comms from Blinkx - hard on the heels of taking 2 days to RNS the AOL deal.

Why is Blinkx completely unable to release a clear message to provide the markets and shareholders with meaningful information on which to value the company and base an investment decision? If you have a story to tell then tell it - if you can't or won't it reinforces the impression of a company with a failing business model and failed management.

xxxxx xxxxxxx