Linius Technologies (ASX:LNU) owned a patent for digital video virtualization—a promising and highly specialized intellectual property. However, the company lacked the internal technical capacity and engineering expertise needed to convert this innovation into a marketable software product.
A substantial portion of the initial funding was spent on a development effort that ultimately failed. The company was left without a working product and with limited options for realizing the commercial value of its patented technology.
The original codebase was both non-functional and non-scalable. It could not support further development, nor could it demonstrate the core capabilities required to validate the patent’s commercial potential.
As a result, Linius was unable to bring a viable product to market, and the company risked losing its competitive edge without a functioning technological foundation.
DistCoTech designed and built the Linius Video Services platform from scratch as a fully functional SaaS solution enabling digital video virtualization.
The virtualization process is codec-agnostic but container-specific, supporting video files encoded in any codec as long as they are wrapped in MP4 or HLS containers.
The process consists of two key steps:
- Step 1: Discovery of the original content and creation of an index database containing references to all frames of interest. This index enables dynamic reconstruction of video segments.
- Step 2: Generation of «virtual videos»—extremely lightweight representations that reference portions of the original content “by reference” rather than copying it “by value.” This allows for rapid, flexible playback and composition.
Virtual videos can be delivered either as adaptive HLS streams or regular MP4 files.
We implemented a full charging and billing system based on Chargify and Braintree. To support advanced content indexing and enrichment, we integrated Microsoft Video Indexer (MSVI) for AI-powered metadata extraction. The resulting metadata, along with data from third-party enrichment providers, is stored in ElasticSearch for fast retrieval and search functionality.
The resulting platform offers:
- Significantly smaller virtual video files compared to traditional formats
- HLS delivery with adaptive bitrate streaming
- A scalable architecture, optimized for varying network conditions and traffic loads
Today, the solution is used in production by clients in news (e.g. Newstag), sports (e.g. Oklahoma State University), and entertainment (e.g. racing.com), providing customized video experiences with built-in search and AI-driven enrichment.
Java 8, Jenkins 2, Ansible, Terraform, AWS, Azure, CI with zero-downtime deployments, Distributed MongoDB replica clusters, ELK cluster, Grafana
